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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; liberalism</title>
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		<title>The Dilemma of the Jewish Leftist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-dilemma-of-the-jewish-leftist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-dilemma-of-the-jewish-leftist</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 04:38:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[beheading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic state]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[judaism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Steven Sotloff]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lessons from the murder of journalist Steven Sotloff. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Steven-Sotloff-Thumbnail-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240354" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Steven-Sotloff-Thumbnail-1-450x285.jpg" alt="Steven-Sotloff-Thumbnail-1" width="289" height="183" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-The-dilemma-of-the-Jewish-leftist-374500">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">During his yearlong captivity at the hands of the barbarians from Islamic State, Steven Sotloff’s colleagues in Israeli media organs purged all of his articles from their websites to erase his connections to Israel and hide the fact that he was an Israeli citizen. So, too, every effort was made to hide the fact that he was Jewish.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The reason was clear. Given the genocidal Jew-hatred endemic in jihadist doctrine, it was obvious that if Sotloff’s Judaism was exposed, he would have been singled out for torture and execution.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Much has been written since Islamic State released the video of its British executioner chopping off James Foley’s head last month. We have been told by leaders and commentators alike that with this singular crime, Islamic State awakened the sleeping lion of the West. That act of barbarism, we have been assured, will now force the US to lead a global coalition against this Islamic army of butchers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Clearly Islamic State is not convinced. With the release of the Sotloff beheading video this week, it appears that Islamic State thinks its cinematographers will move the West in another direction – apathy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Foley’s execution video ended with the preview of coming attractions for the Sotloff execution video.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And the Sotloff execution video ended with the preview of a British hostage’s execution video.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By releasing the films gradually, Islamic State is apparently trying to routinize beheadings. Its leaders are probably betting that by the seventh or eighth beheading video, we will greet the violence with a shrug of our shoulders.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In this, Islamic State is channeling Iran, the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No, it isn’t that all these terror-supporting regimes and terror groups have engaged in beheading. It is simply that when they began engaging in terrorism, their actions shocked the civilized world until their actions didn’t shock the civilized world anymore.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Once the shock wore off, these terror states and enterprises began enjoying the stature of legitimate parties to a political dispute. As Islamic State sees it, it is only a matter of time before it too is accepted as a legitimate force in world affairs.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To understand why its gamble may well pay off, it is worth considering a seemingly unrelated matter.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At the beginning of the week, the ultra-Orthodox Lev Tahor group was expelled from a Mayan village in Guatemala. Earlier this year Lev Tahor members had fled to Guatemala from Canada.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They left Canada to evade a child abuse probe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The group set up shop in Canada after fleeing Israel, due to similar charges.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lev Tahor is a fanatical cult that numbers a few hundred members. Its women and girls are clad in all-black robes and covered from head to toe. The only thing they are allowed to expose is their faces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to Canadian child services authorities, Lev Tahor married off girls as young as 12. Its members routinely engage in polygamy. Child abuse, including forced medication with unprescribed psychiatric drugs and starvation, is allegedly rampant.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, according to Canadian officials, the cult denies its children access to education.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lev Tahor’s alleged behavioral norms are an affront to the rule of law and human rights. Although the cult was apparently expelled from the village in Guatemala due to anti-Semitism, its members fled both the Canadian and the Israeli authorities to evade prosecution.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And yet for all of its alleged moral depravity and criminal behavior, that fact is that Lev Tahor’s treatment of its girls is certainly no worse, and in many respects better, than the treatment that Islamic societies mete out on their girls and women. And the sad truth is that for hundreds of thousands of Muslim women and girls in the West, their residency in human rights-protecting societies has failed to protect them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consider female genital mutilation, which Lev Tahor is not accused of engaging in.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In late July, Islamic State forces in Mosul, Iraq, decreed that all girls and women between the ages of 12 and 42 must have their genitals mutilated.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The order was an act of pure evil. Yet it was not particularly controversial within the Islamist context Islamic State operates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Soeren Kern wrote for the Gatestone Institute last July, throughout the world, some 140 million women and girls, the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslims, have been subjected to the barbaric practice. Three million girls under the age of 15 are forced to undergo clitoridectomies each year.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In Europe, at least 180,000 Muslim females have undergone this defilement. According to British authorities, in England alone, at least 20,000 girls are at risk of “being cut” each year.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, despite the cruelty and degradation inherent to female genital mutilation, and despite the fact that under British law, anyone found guilty of carrying out this practice is supposed to face criminal charges and up to 14 years in prison, so far no one has been convicted and only a five or six offenders have even been charged for the crime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are two principal causes for British authorities’ failure to protect Muslim girls residing in England. First, neither the children themselves, who live in a permanent state of terror and abuse, nor their communities, which turn a blind eye, and so condone the practice, are willing to come forward and finger those responsible for this endemic abuse and violence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And second, non-Islamic British authorities, including welfare workers and teachers, who are in a position to protect the children, are unwilling to stick their necks out. This unwillingness has two causes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, they fear for their lives. The murder of Theo van Gogh and the repeated attempts by Muslim fanatics to execute the Danish cartoonists who drew the caricatures of Muhammad are central components of the cost-benefit analysis most Westerners carry out when considering whether or not to get involved with human rights abuses carried out by Muslims.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Second, they fear excommunication from and defamation at the hands of the Left. Over the past 15 years, the international Left has consistently expanded its political alliance with Islamists in the West.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Among other things, this alliance has required the Left to turn a blind eye to barbaric Islamic practices like female genital mutilation and rape and to defame those who dare to openly oppose these reactionary, obscene behaviors as Islamophobic racists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And so we have a situation where, both at home and abroad, the West has become habituated to Islamic barbarism and passive in the face of its expanding threat to their lives and their way of life both abroad and at home. Observing this behavior, clearly Islamic State’s terror masters are betting that once habituated to the beheading of Westerners, the West will yawn and go to sleep as Islamic State expands its conquests to additional countries.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It isn’t that the Westerners, led by the leftist elite, lack the ability to feel or express moral outrage. It is just that they refuse to direct it against Islamic jihadists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to their political alliance with the Islamists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only meaningful commonality between Islamist and leftist dogma is hatred for Jews with power, first and foremost for Israel. And the singular creation of this alliance is the sides’ joint determination that it isn’t racist to hate the Jewish state, or Jews who refuse to condemn it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In this state of affairs, the only outlet that leftists have for their moral outrage is Israel. Because while they fear being called racist, they know that being anti-Semitic will not expose them to charges of racism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And they know Jews won’t assault them for attacking Israel and its supporters. So they project all the crimes perpetrated by Islamic fanatics on Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For instance, this week Megan Marzec, the president of Ohio University’s Student Senate, posted a video of herself dousing herself in a bucket of “blood.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Marzec explained, “This bucket of blood symbolizes the thousands of displaced and murdered Palestinians – atrocities which OU is directly complacent in [sic] through cultural and economic ties with the Israeli state.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, she accused Israel of the crimes Hamas seeks to inflict on Israel, and of the crimes that Islamist forces, such as al-Qaida, Islamic State and Boko Haram, are currently carrying out in their areas of operations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The growing prevalence of anti-Semitism in leftist circles has placed Jewish leftists in a vulnerable position.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Their ideological movement is denying Jews the right to self-defense and self-determination and siding with Islamists who seek to annihilate them. For a growing number of leftist Jews, their new status as members of a hated group has made them feel it necessary to publicly side with Israel’s enemies against it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consider the recent New York Times op-ed by Antony Lerman which ran under the title “The End of Liberal Zionism.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lerman insisted that there is no way to square Zionism with liberal values.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to this disaffected Jewish leftist, “The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But of course, outside the fringes of Israeli society, no such movement exists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather, Lerman is describing Islamic supremacism and, like his fellow leftists, projecting its pathologies on Israel, which Islamic supremacists seek to destroy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lerman quoted an article published a few weeks before his in The New York Review of Books by Jonathan Freedland titled “Liberal Zionism After Gaza.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Freedland argued that as the two-state solution becomes more and more remote, liberal Zionists “will have to decide which of their political identities matters more, whether they are first a liberal or first a Zionist.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But this is of course absurd. The only way a person can uphold liberal values is by being a Zionist. Israel is the only country in the region that is a human rights-respecting liberal democracy that is governed by the rule of law.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">What is becoming more and more difficult is being a Zionist while being a leftist. As the Left becomes more and more tied to Islamic fanatics, anti-Semitism is going to become more and more of a staple of leftist dogma. And that anti-Semitism will express itself first and foremost as a virulent rejection of Israel and of Jews who refuse to disavow and condemn the Jewish state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Sotloff reportedly maintained faith with his Judaism in secret while in captivity. He refused food on Yom Kippur and secretly prayed toward Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In so doing, he showed that the evil that controlled him physically, could not penetrate his soul. For this he died a Jewish hero.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Leftist Jews must take a lesson from Sotloff, who was reportedly a product of a Jewish-leftist worldview.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They should understand that the decision they are being required to make is not a choice between liberalism and Zionism, but between liberalism and a reactionary dogma that sits comfortably with genocidal Jew-haters and misogynist oppressors. It shouldn’t be a particularly difficult choice.</span></p>
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		<title>What Google Evil and Liberal Evil Have in Common</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/what-google-evil-and-liberal-evil-have-in-common/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-google-evil-and-liberal-evil-have-in-common</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/what-google-evil-and-liberal-evil-have-in-common/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2014 19:21:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Google]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207632</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is important because it applies to liberalism as well.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Google-Data-590-LI-2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-207636" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Google-Data-590-LI-2-450x321.jpg" alt="Google-Data-590-LI-2" width="450" height="321" /></a></p>
<p>Google has famously brandished its motto of &#8220;Don&#8217;t be evil&#8221; when it came to accusations of wrongdoing. But <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-is-evil-to-google/280573/">here&#8217;s an interesting little essay</a> on what evil might mean to Google.</p>
<blockquote><p>The slogan&#8217;s significance has likely changed over time, but today it seems clear that we&#8217;re misunderstanding what &#8220;evil&#8221; means to the company. For today&#8217;s Google, evil isn&#8217;t tied to malevolence or moral corruption, the customary senses of the term. Rather, it&#8217;s better to understand Google&#8217;s sense of evil as the disruption of its brand of (computational) progress.</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>Companies like Google actually embody a particular notion of progress rather than populism, one that involves advancing their technology solutions as universal ones. Evil is vicious because it inhibits this progress. If Google has made a contribution to moral philosophy, it amounts to a devout faith in its own ability to preside over virtue and vice through engineering. The unwitting result: We&#8217;ve not only outsourced our email hosting and office suite provisioning to Google, but also our information ethics. Practically speaking, isn&#8217;t it just easier to let Google manage right and wrong?</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>Rather, our discomfort is an expression of the dissonance between ours and Google&#8217;s understandings of evil. Google has managed to pass off the pragmatic pursuit of its own ends as if it were the general avoidance of wickedness. It has invested those ends with virtue, and it has publicized the fact that anything good for Google is also good for society.</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>The dissonance arises from our failure to understand &#8220;evil&#8221; as a colloquialism rather than a moral harm. An evil is just a thing that will cause you trouble later on—an engineering impediment. These practical evils are also private ones. Google doesn&#8217;t make immoral choices because moral choices are just choices made by Google. This conclusion is already anticipated in the 2004 IPO document, which glosses evil as the failure to do &#8220;good things.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That last line is important because it applies equally well to a lot of liberalism as well. Once you define evil as a lack of progress then progressives can never be evil because they are always striving to do good things.</p>
<p>The means not only justify the ends, but become a seamless part of the ends since anything done in a progressive cause must be progress.</p>
<p>Gulags? Who cares? Bill de Blasio worked with Communist terrorists? But his ends were progressive.</p>
<blockquote><p>Google&#8217;s acts are by their very nature righteous, a consequence of Google having done them. The company doesn&#8217;t need to exercise any moral judgement other than whatever it will have done. The biggest risk—<strong>the greatest evil—lies in failing to engineer an effective implementation of its own vision</strong>. Don&#8217;t be evil is the Silicon Valley version of Be true to yourself. It is both tautology and narcissism.</p></blockquote>
<p>And likewise the only thing truly wrong with Communism is that it failed to achieve its goals&#8230; which means it must be repeated.</p>
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		<title>What of America&#8217;s Future?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/what-of-americas-future/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-of-americas-future</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/what-of-americas-future/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:45:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[future]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223001</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Distinguished authors discuss the coming collapse of Big Government and how conservatives should respond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of the panel <em>What of America&#8217;s Future?</em> at the Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat, held at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California from March 21-23, 2014:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/90698156" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So we have a very, two very distinguished authors today, and we have a continuing conversation, which is essentially about what is the future of America, and so I thought we would start by having a few opening remarks from both Michael and Charles and then we&#8217;ll do a little bit of discussion here and then we&#8217;ll open up to the floor with questions.  So Michael how &#8217;bout we start with you and you give your thoughts.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sure the book is called &#8220;America 3.0&#8243; and of course there must be a 1.0 and a 2.0, right?  We, my coauthor and I have been for many, many years conservatives, libertarians, and tryin&#8217; to figure out what&#8217;s going to happen.  Is this current, very serious situation we&#8217;re in sort of the beginning of the end of the United States, or is some period we are going to survive and get through and reach new broad sunlit uplands?  And we decided that the second scenario is more likely; that there are fundamental strengths to the United States that are underappreciated and my coauthor is an anthropologist by training, and so we bring in a somewhat unusual set of analysis to this.  There is a French anthropologist – and I&#8217;ll say that speaking to a room full of conservatives in a sentence that begins there is a French anthropologist isn&#8217;t likely to have a happy ending, but this does. </span></p>
<p>There is a gentleman named Emanuel Todd, and Todd has an extraordinarily interesting analysis showing that the political frameworks that exist and the political ideas that exist in societies are highly correlated with the type of family life they live, and we are all speaking English.  Who in here is descended exclusively from people from England?  No one.  Okay.  The English-speaking culture is very powerful, and one of the things that makes it so powerful and enduring is it is what&#8217;s called the absolute nuclear family.  It&#8217;s the most individualist type of family.  People pick their own spouses.  They&#8217;re expected to leave the family home and start their own homes.  They don&#8217;t rely on extended family networks.  They rely on free association and civil society.  I could say more about this, but that&#8217;s the gist of it.  That&#8217;s made the United States and the other English-speaking countries very resilient, also very resistant to totalitarian-type ideologies.  You need to be very sneaky to get a totalitarian-type ideology past the English-speaking people and that&#8217;s what political correctness is and the modern progressivism.  It&#8217;s in the guise and wrapped in the flag of real American values and tryin&#8217; to sneak things in in a clandestine kind of way.</p>
<p>So why is it that things seem so bad right now?  Well what&#8217;s happening is the 20th century legacy economy, the industrial era economy of the United States, that&#8217;s America 2.0.  America 1.0 is the era of the founding, muscle power, animal power, small face-to-face government, the world of the founders.  The second version is falling apart, and the institutional arrangements that were made to accommodate it are also failing, and what happens when a system starts to fail is the people who are incumbents and benefit from it double down and try to be more coercive and to keep it going in that way, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re seeing now.</p>
<p>So the question isn&#8217;t whether or not the 20th century legacy state is going to disintegrate.  It&#8217;s a question of how and when and on what terms, and what we wanted to do is start putting on the table proposals for what the next stage is going to look like, and a key feature of this is the technology we have today, and that&#8217;s coming and is improving all the time, plays to the strengths of the individualistic network-type free-associating American character and American mindset.  What did we hear over this weekend?  It&#8217;s just simply amazing.  We hear black conservatives didn&#8217;t know there were any other black conservatives.  They found each other through the net, right?  We heard about counterattacking against attacks on people like ourselves who have our values using social media, right?  So these new tools, both politically and of course on the business side.<br />
I heard a talk the other day from a gentleman who was talking about business back-office functions moving to the cloud, and he was focusing on how programmers are gonna lose their jobs, which people always do, right? But what it means is the sophisticated possible back office computer technology that only big businesses can have now, the person with a one-person business is gonna be able to get virtually for free.  Okay.  So we&#8217;re gonna see fantastic improvements in what&#8217;s available to us to be productive, and so we need to move toward a government model that&#8217;s gonna facilitate that and make individual and startup-type businesses more possible, and I think I probably overstayed my introduction.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Oh, you&#8217;re okay. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Charles?</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is this a question about the future?</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well, I have written about, a book about liberalism, American liberalism and unlike David Horowitz&#8217;s many books, the library really of books, very excellent books that he has written, David&#8217;s entrée in the subject really came from radicals, from radicalism, and what I am focusing on is mainstream liberalism, the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Obama.  And I think it&#8217;s the first book to try to put Obama in the context of his own Democratic Party and his own sort of liberal milieu as a leading Democratic spokesman, and my argument is that he aspires to be the fourth face on the liberal Mount Rushmore beside Wilson and FDR and  –</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which is the cover of the book.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right and LBJ, and that if ObamaCare &#8212; and today is the fourth anniversary of the passage of the Obama Care Bill &#8211; </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">if Obama Care sticks, he&#8217;ll make it.  I mean that will be his sovereign contribution.  That will be a thing he&#8217;s remembered for.  The one sentence that every president gets would be he passed national healthcare, and in his own view that is the only triumph he is going to get I think.  He knows that the House of Representatives is unlikely to switch from the GOP.  The Senate might become Republican in this election year, and so that&#8217;s it, and he&#8217;s got to defend that to the last because his whole legacy is invested in that achievement, and it is from the liberal point of view a great achievement.  It&#8217;s something that liberals have been questing for for 100 years and no one was able to achieve before him, not FDR, not even LBJ.  I mean liberals got healthcare for the poor in Medicaid, healthcare for the aged in Medicare but not cradle-to-grave, as we used to say.  That only came really with ObamaCare.  That&#8217;s really his achievement.  </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the problem is, he, as you may have noticed, his administration has run into some trouble, and the source of that trouble is that if you look at Europe today, you can see that the standard model of the welfare state is not working. </span>And the same problems are coming to America.  They haven&#8217;t quite hit us with force that they&#8217;re beginning to hit in Europe, but they&#8217;re coming to America.</p>
<p>And so I think liberalism really does face a crisis. In some ways it&#8217;s at its peak right now – I mean Obama persuaded us that liberalism could live again; that you could believe in progress again; that you could have breathtaking across-the-board rapid political change like the New Deal, like the Great Society.  That&#8217;s what he tried to do and in part did deliver in his first two years in office.  Now it&#8217;s all on the defense of trying to preserve those achievements.  But unfortunately, there seems to me two causes of I think what will be a kind of crisis for liberalism in the next few years.  One is fiscal – as in Mrs. Thatcher&#8217;s immortal words, the problem with socialism is you quickly run out of other people&#8217;s money, and we can&#8217;t pay for today&#8217;s welfare state much less tomorrow&#8217;s – welfare state, and the second crisis is philosophical because if you live on the campus of a modern university as I do, you see this a lot.  Liberals don&#8217;t really believe, avant-garde liberals, academic liberals don&#8217;t believe in right and wrong, justice and injustice anymore.  They&#8217;re thoroughgoing relativists or nihilists – so they can&#8217;t believe in liberalism.</p>
<p>They can&#8217;t believe that liberalism is really right in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and so it&#8217;s left as a kind of a hollowing phenomenon that gets more and more hollow every year, and all that&#8217;s left really is self-interest.  Liberals like liberalism because it gives power to liberals, and that fact I think is becoming more and more transparent, and so it seems to me that something has to give in the next few years, and we hope of course it&#8217;ll be in a conservative direction, but my analysis doesn&#8217;t make that inevitable.  I mean I think you could also move in a truly left-wing, much more openly socialist direction as well.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And that&#8217;s a good place to pause for a second, but we go to a lot of these conferences and we hear bad news and we live under President Obama and Harry Reid, and that&#8217;s bad enough news, but what is the breaking point?  Maybe Michael, I&#8217;ll throw this question to you and then Charles?  But what is the breaking point?  A lot of people have said we&#8217;ve already hit the breaking point –and you don&#8217;t believe that from your book –</span></p>
<p><strong>Mike Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Not yet.  No –I live in Illinois.  It&#8217;s much worse in Illinois and we still haven&#8217;t hit the breaking point yet.  So Mrs. Thatcher said you run out of other people&#8217;s money and Herb Stein said if something can&#8217;t go on, it won&#8217;t.  You&#8217;re absolutely right that the intellectual vision of liberalism is a non-realistic, areal vision and it can&#8217;t ultimately succeed.  They&#8217;ll always spend a lot more money than they can have and they do things &#8217;til they break.  Okay.  And we see that right now.  We see the deficits going up and the debt going up so fast that it&#8217;s ultimately going to break.  $130 trillion, whatever it is.  So the question isn&#8217;t when, it isn&#8217;t if there will be a massive, painful default to hundreds of millions of people who have been relying on this and who have basically done nothing wrong, expected to have Medicare, Social Security and other things and whatever Obama Care purports to give them, and they&#8217;re not going to get it.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So the question is starting to put proposals in place to wind this up, basically have a national bankruptcy, and have an open process rather than one that&#8217;s done behind the table and done in a sort of crony capitalist fashion.  And I think it&#8217;s important to start proposing big and radical changes because you are going to get vilified and attacked, full-scale nuclear attack, no matter what you do.  One of the things we talk about in the book is breaking up the larger states that are going bankrupt.  They&#8217;re ungovernable.  Okay.  All the scholarships shows that thriving economies attend to be small, a few million people.  The genius of the founders was creating a federal system that allowed lots of local activity with a fairly minimal overlay to create a free-trade zone and a single unitary defense policy and let everybody play their own game, and we have to move back toward that.</span><br />
So the stress and ultimate giving way of this 20th century legacy state is an opportunity for us, even though it&#8217;s gonna be a difficult transition and it&#8217;s gonna be difficult to persuade people this is happening until very bad things are happening like welfare checks bouncing and things like that.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah, I mean I think we live in a period when big thinking by conservatives is more necessary. </span>I mean Mark Levin&#8217;s book on possible constitutional amendments.  Michael&#8217;s book is very much worth reading for the picture he paints of what America could look like after we successfully negotiate this coming time of troubles. And knowing there is a possible future – this is really the nice thing about your book – knowing there&#8217;s a possible future encourages you, empowers you to think more radically –about what&#8217;s possible.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus:</strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  Right.  And it ties into your book too &#8217;cause your book is really the story of the 20th century liberalism which is always motivated by a vision.  They always have a vision, and how often are we just reacting?  Reacting tactically, reacting to their initiatives.  What are we caught up in?  Stopping ObamaCare.  Right?  We want to be initiating action.  One thing we need to do to do that, and my coauthor and my&#8217;s vision is to think through what the future would look like if we got our way.  One of the things that happens – try this with your friends.  You ask a conservative, and you say all right, things go our way; two, four, six, eight-year election cycles.  We elect great people.  We&#8217;ve got 42 governors.  We&#8217;ve got two terms of a great president.  We&#8217;ve got eight Supreme Court justices.  We get everything we want.  What does America look like?  What is the America where your grandchildren are starting school look like?  And they almost never have any picture.  They tend to say we gotta go back to something, or they&#8217;ll just start talkin&#8217; about Barak Obama again, and one of the things we did in our book that&#8217;s conscience is at the beginning of the book we say we go back 1,500 years to our cultural roots and we go forward to the Year 2040 to try to imagine one generation down the road. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So in that span of time any one president is gonna be relatively modestly consequential.  So this is the only sentence in this book that will contain the name Barak Obama, and that required some self-discipline, but we all need to think that like that.  This guy has been elected twice.  We&#8217;re stuck with him.  Reagan said we aren&#8217;t going to defeat communism.  We&#8217;re gonna transcend communism.  We&#8217;re gonna transcend Barak Obama.</span></p>
<p>And by the same token, one of the very interesting paradoxes of this weekend is we hear two things; one big message and one more muted, and I think we should turn the volume up on the more muted one.  The big one is the menace of progressivism and what a threat it is to us and how destructive it is and how powerful it is and how it dominates this and that sector of American life, but the subtext is it doesn&#8217;t work.  It never works.  It doesn&#8217;t make people happy.  It doesn&#8217;t put food on the table.  It&#8217;s ruinous, and we know what happened.  The Soviet Union fell apart, and I was old enough to think when Reagan started talkin&#8217; to Gorbachev, he&#8217;s being duped.  The Russians, they&#8217;re the communists.  They&#8217;ve got thousands of ballistic missiles.  They&#8217;ve got the tanks.  They&#8217;ll never go away.  We&#8217;re just gonna have to be on guard forever and they went whoof.  This thing we&#8217;re up against is – Americans are smarter.  American progressives are smarter than Soviet communists.  What they&#8217;ve built is a little stronger.  Okay.  But the epic failure of that website, that&#8217;s a sign that these guys are taking on things so far beyond what they can dream of accomplishing that they&#8217;re gonna fail.  So we don&#8217;t wanna be standing there without a game plan when they fail.  We wanna be ready.  Just like Milton Friedman said, they don&#8217;t wanna turn to us &#8217;cause they know it&#8217;s gonna hurt.  We&#8217;re gonna have to get the inflation out of the system.  We&#8217;re gonna have to change the way we&#8217;ve done things.  They will turn to us when everything else has failed.  So we wanna be ready with the alternatives &#8217;cause everything is going to fail.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So let me turn to you for a second Charles.  So let&#8217;s assume – you said a couple minutes ago that it could go either way with the crisis of liberalism.  Sure they could fail and then we have this conservative resurgence in our country, but what&#8217;s the alternative and what&#8217;s the catalyst for that alternative where maybe things fail, and I mean for example, I mean Sally&#8217;s work on ObamaCare.  Say ObamaCare fails. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I mean and the two options are single payer or going back to a more market-based system.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Charles Kesler: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well I think on that narrow question, I think the left is already preparing the post-ObamaCare  debate.  I mean there is a lot of chatter on the left now, hearings in the Senate about single payer again because I think we&#8217;re set up now for a failure of ObamaCare. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">They may not wish it but I think it&#8217;s dawning on them that it&#8217;s likely, and so how do they react to that, and their reaction will of course be to blame it on the insurance companies, blame it on the surviving private part of the healthcare economy and say, well, we tried it.  We tried capitalism.  We tried free-market economics.</span></p>
<p>And now we have to go to, the only alternative is full socialist nationalized healthcare, the single payer plan, but I think in the larger question, where do they go?  The only way to pay for modern liberalism is with massive tax increases on the middle class. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That&#8217;s where the money is.  And so that&#8217;s the plausible alternative to turning towards a more conservative or free-market model of America, and a value-added tax, a wealth tax, there are disincentives to simply raising the income tax enormously or adding brackets, though they would be happy to do that I think. But to get the amount of money they would need you really have to socialize the economy. And in order to do that, that means more than 50 percent of the economy has to be run through the government. And the only way to do that is probably a massive new tax, a new kind of tax – On top of all the existing ones.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which will provoke outrage and resistance and hopefully successful resistance, and if the resistance fails when they do it, socialism will fail in America at a lower level, and we&#8217;ll be more damaged and need to recover from a lower level, but it ultimately cannot work, and it especially can&#8217;t work in a country like ours.  You can get away with a little bit of socialism in Denmark where you&#8217;ve got a couple of million people who all eat the same food and they&#8217;re all cousins and they all get along and they all trust each other.  This is a county of hustlers.  This is a country of people who are individualists, and they cooperate by voluntary agreement, and when you tell them do it or else, and they don&#8217;t see what&#8217;s in it for them, they gonna resist it. </span></p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll just mention – we seem to be having a dramatic technical effect to my left here.  Whenever things get really bad and we start to see a major institutional failure in American life, mass political movements arise.  The progressive movement just didn&#8217;t come out of the blue.  It didn&#8217;t come off of flying saucers.  It came around because the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy was incredibly disruptive, and millions of people wanted something different to happen.  They wanted the government to protect them when there were downturns because they couldn&#8217;t go back to the farm &#8217;cause there was no farm to go back to.  By the same token we&#8217;re gonna have change on that scale.<br />
It&#8217;s funny we saw the Tea Party start with the TARP bailouts, and I thought this is right on schedule.  Right?  In all mass political movements, just like the anti-war movement that ultimately at least got the draft repealed, right, and probably caused us to lose the Vietnam War, but mass political movements start out with enthusiastic amateurs who look like kooks, who then mature into more effective and more productive politicians and then they take over one of the major political schedules.  I think we&#8217;re more or less on schedule.  But yeah, it&#8217;s certainly the case we could get to a much more damaged level in America before we begin to turn it around.  I hope that doesn&#8217;t happen.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I think the NSA didn&#8217;t like what you were saying Charles, because they turned off your mike but we got you a hand mike.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Putin?  President Putin? Who knows who&#8217;s listening?</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  Who knows?  Let me play devil&#8217;s advocate for a second here.  Newt Gingrich in private conversations we have had when he comes into town and public conversations probably in front of this group on many occasions had said that California is the harbinger of things to come for the rest of the country.</span><br />
So let me channel the assertion, or challenge the assertion of both of you about the appetite for taxes.  I mean Californians in large numbers, I mean a large majority passed income tax increase and sales tax increases that affected not only the wealthy, but will also impact, or already are impacting, the middle class.<br />
So is there a new generation of Americans who have bought into this idea that we need to pay more in taxes because government should be bigger and doing more?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well I don&#8217;t know why he thinks – California is a one-party state the way Illinois is and Massachusetts is.  There is no organized resistance to it.  So you&#8217;re punching into a vacuum here.  But another thing is this, if we had a federal government that had a less-heavy hand, different communities in this country are gonna want different levels of a welfare state, and people in Minnesota are gonna have more progressivism and more of a benevolent state than people in Texas, and we should have that diversity.  We have 320 million people.  We should have a wide variety of ways to do this, and if the Californians think we wanna not have offshore drilling in our seacoast.  I&#8217;ve never been to this part of California before.  It&#8217;s just so beautiful.  Why would anyone wanna leave, right? And I have to go back to Chicago.  It&#8217;s 30 degrees colder.  Say we just won&#8217;t drill &#8217;cause God forbid something should happen, right?  Well let them.  It&#8217;s their state, right?  So I don&#8217;t know if everyone is suddenly gonna buy into the idea that we&#8217;re gonna have to have more taxes across the nation.  I just don&#8217;t see that happening.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  California is increasingly atypical I think.  But you also have the strangely unacknowledged fact that at the lower levels of political office in cities and in counties within California half of the elected officials are Republicans. I mean so the party which does seem dead as a statewide party, there are no statewide officeholders in California who are Republican. But there is a lot of local and county officeholders who are Republican, so at the grassroots there are still signs of life, and indeed real strength in the Republican Party.  So even in California it&#8217;s not impossible that if things get worse before they get better that you could see a kind of recrudescence of the Republican Party and even of some version at least of conservatism.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Let&#8217;s open it up to questions from the audience.  Michael?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Audience Member:</strong> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As a physician, there are other alternatives to the way that single payer can work.  I&#8217;m against them all, but the way it can work is not just by taxing people, but reducing services.  Reducing the opportunity of individuals to get their hips replaced or their knees done, cutting off expensive equipment for MS, cutting off chemotherapy if you&#8217;re over 60, and look at Medi-Cal in this state.  I mean as a physician we can&#8217;t afford to take care of these people.  They get absolutely horrible quality care, but they do have insurance, so that&#8217;s a way that single payer can work.  It&#8217;s devastating.  It&#8217;s not a system that anybody would really, any of us would want to be a part of. But it&#8217;s another alternative.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No, that&#8217;s quite true, and my wife, Sally Pipes, knows much more about the subject than I do, but her cousin who is a cataract surgeon in Canada was just told by a regional regulatory agency that he&#8217;s doing his surgeries too quickly, too many patients.  He is seeing too many patients, and so instead of an average wait time of five weeks, seven weeks, now there&#8217;s a, what is the? Five months. Five months a patient must wait for the cataract operation, and that&#8217;s to save money. Because the government doesn&#8217;t want to spend more. But there are plenty of patients who want them. But it&#8217;s an entirely amoral or immoral top-down bureaucratic nightmare.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  The only way that we&#8217;re gonna improve delivery of healthcare is if we give people a voucher-like sum of money to then have it provided competitively.  That&#8217;s the only way anything is ever improved.  It&#8217;s the only way you ever drive cost down to drive innovation, and unless Republicans start perhaps at the state level proposing these types of alternatives and pushing them and proving them in the field so that people will believe in them then we&#8217;re not gonna get anywhere.  We&#8217;re just saying we&#8217;ll give it to you but not funded as much, you just look like a scrooge.  There is a guy who was running for the Senate in Illinois who lost to one of the old guys, a guy named Doug Truax, who I think we&#8217;ll hear from again.  Doug&#8217;s an insurance broker and he did some arithmetic and said for a fraction of what we pay for the – the overwhelming majority of people who are uninsured are in something like 30 locations.  They&#8217;re basically inner-city-type locations.  You could set up health clinics where you have young people come out of medical school.  You forgive their loans, and you have older doctors who are retired or close to it supervise them so you got the people with the brand new skills but who aren&#8217;t experienced, and the guys who are highly experienced and they&#8217;ll work.  It&#8217;s not gonna be that expensive and you can treat all these people.  You think this is creative thinking.  This will cost something like a tenth of what it would cost to do it through the ObamaCare-type approach.  We need to have 50 laboratories of democracies at least with these types of innovations coming, and we need to be thinking and proposing this stuff, &#8217;cause if we try to oppose ObamaCare with just, &#8220;please, stop!&#8221; It&#8217;s awful.  Stand in front of the train, we&#8217;re gonna get run over.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael&#8217;s book calls for what, 71 states?</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well it&#8217;s so funny, we wrote this thing and the stuff we mentioned supposedly happening 2040, we tried to be ultra-conservative, all this stuff started coming along.  California is ungovernable.  California should probably be multiple states, right? So we say three, and then a fairly realistic and well-supported effort to turn it into six starts makin&#8217; it into the newspapers.</span><br />
So it&#8217;s not like we&#8217;re just delusional.  These ideas are afloat out there in the world.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  Art Laffer in his book, his most recent book on California, suggests that California should be cut into multiple states, and then the gentleman you&#8217;re referring to, Tim Draper, the venture capitalist from  the Bay Area is going around the state.  I met with him last week and he&#8217;s hell bent.  This will and eventually has to happen.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One curious historical fact, when Texas came into the union the treaty provided that it could divide itself into five states without having to get permission from the federal government.  So if the Texans ever want to divide themselves up and gerrymander themselves, we&#8217;ll probably have two dark blue senators and four red senators, I mean eight senators all the Texas&#8217;s.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I&#8217;m afraid if we divide California into six states we&#8217;ll have 12 dark blue senators –It was a little bit of a commentary on what&#8217;s going on in Canada and the healthcare system there.  There are 60,000 or so I think he said refugees that would be coming to the United States would not be able to and a critique on how we need to be using those resources and the data coming out of the Canada system to help fight ObamaCare in the U.S.  I think that&#8217;s a fair.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That&#8217;s a fair summary.  Yeah.  I mean it&#8217;s interesting too that we have Canadians fleeing to the USA.  We also have medical tourism, right? Where people are flying to India and all kinds of other places.  One of the things that happens to is you build up a bureaucratic monster and market forces start to eat at the edges.  As it gets worse and worse, people are paying their property taxes, but then they&#8217;re doing other things to educate their kids outside the public school system, right?  Or people are looking for tutoring and after a while you gotta hope they&#8217;re gonna say wait a second, why am I paying twice?  Right.  And that can be a point of entry to revolt against the system we have now.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I mean, Norm go ahead.</span></p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What you&#8217;re talking about, Michael, is sort of what Walter Russell Mead is talking about in his death of the blue state model. I see two difficulties in the transition from where we are now, 2.0, to 3.0.  The first is a huge debt overhang that&#8217;s already there and encased in law. The second is the sclerotic, purposefully sclerotic nature of our government. </span>And it&#8217;s very difficult, and then the founders set it up that way to get from where we are now to somewhere else.</p>
<p>And there are so many people with vested interest in the status quo. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s gonna be a huge revolution anyway, but hopefully a peaceful one, hopefully a political, strictly political one.  I think you&#8217;re gonna see – and thank you for mentioning Walter Russell Mead.  He&#8217;s great and we&#8217;re influenced by him, and it&#8217;s, we seem to be thinking along very similar lines.  You&#8217;re right.  The debt overhang is unbelievable, and so what&#8217;s gonna happen?  We say it&#8217;s gonna get repudiated.  It&#8217;s not gonna be paid.  So the only question is how is that gonna be worked out, and what&#8217;s gonna happen is we&#8217;re gonna see people losing their medical care and nickels and dimes and they&#8217;re gonna try to save money on the margins and your taxes are gonna go up and the quality of what you get is gonna come down, and we&#8217;re gonna basically be surfs and not get anything for our money.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now I don&#8217;t know about you, but the American I live in is composed of people who tend to get irritated if their hamburger doesn&#8217;t have a tomato on it when they ask for it, and if their app on their phone doesn&#8217;t work exactly right they raise hell.  I&#8217;m hoping that if the basic things we need to live are being taken away from us we can get ourselves organized.  This event shows that people are getting themselves organized.  So hopefully they&#8217;ll be resistance to that throughout and we&#8217;ll be able to stop that kinda doubling down.  The rest, all the people who are incumbents who benefit from – that&#8217;s what happens every time there&#8217;s a major change, right? </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We fought a Civil War against a huge community of people who had a vested interest in something that was completely embedded in our society.  The first slaves were sold a few years after the first Europeans settled here, right?  That was part of America.  Then it went away.  We don&#8217;t wanna do it with armed conflict, but we&#8217;re gonna have to make a lot of that go away, and what you might do is the public sector workforce you tell &#8216;em look the money is not there.  The taxpayers aren&#8217;t gonna pay it.  The technology is letting people hide their money.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">You know bitcoin is like the ModelT of what&#8217;s coming.  Bitcoin is like this like thing that&#8217;s like what is it, but it&#8217;s gonna be harder and harder for the government to find the tax money from people who are determined not to let the government see it.  Okay.  We have the creepy state that spies on us all the time.  But some of those tools are gonna be available to us, and the government&#8217;s gonna have to get things by agreement.  So we&#8217;re gonna have to tell &#8216;em look, you&#8217;re gonna get so many number of pennies on the dollar of what you are promised, and they aren&#8217;t gonna like it and they&#8217;re gonna fight politically, and I see no other way it works out.  So we should be ready for them.  We should be ready with our proposals.  Here is what you guys are gonna get.</span></p>
<p>Well that ties back into the whole business of kind of losing the cultural battle &#8217;cause we haven&#8217;t fought it.  Really.  Charles&#8217; book shows that.  All the smart people, the novelists and the creative people all are on the left.  I never understood why that is, but we need to try to keep that from always being the case, and you&#8217;re right.  People are being energetic and creative about trying to solve problems who might say, well, of course I&#8217;m a liberal &#8217;cause I care about poor people.  That&#8217;s just &#8217;cause they don&#8217;t know who we are or understand what we are.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And your point about the world decentralizing, that&#8217;s absolutely right, and one of the things we say in the book is our constitution is futuristic.  Woodrow Wilson thought it was outdated.  He might have been a tough fit for an industrial era hierarchical society, but we&#8217;re moving completely away from that.  What the founders actually lived with is kind of like the future we&#8217;re heading towards except we&#8217;re gonna be massively more productive.  Our work and our homes are gonna be located in the same place much more as they lived in.  The idea of a job, that&#8217;s like everyone gets a job where someone else owns the capital in a building away from where you live and you go there and come back and they write you a check, that&#8217;s gonna disintegrate.  I don&#8217;t know about you, but I&#8217;m not psychologically prepared for that new world yet.  I don&#8217;t know quite what it&#8217;s gonna be like, and our government certainly isn&#8217;t built to accommodate it.  So it&#8217;s gonna be big changes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But on the other hand, I mean the danger of excessive personalization, decentralization is that you retreat into a series of private communities and you lose the sense of a public good that you have in common. And so there are many scenarios where increasing decentralization goes with increasing centralization in government because people retreat into their private world of their friends and their work peers. And pay no attention to politics.  They lose any sense.  They are alienated from politics. And one of the differences with the founding period and today is that I think that&#8217;s much more prevalent today than it was then, that we&#8217;ve given up on that.  The market is much superior, and it&#8217;s so superior it can satisfy all of our needs for the playlists that we want, the kind of food that we want, the kind of television or movies that we&#8217;d like to see. So what do we need government for? And it maybe it&#8217;s easier to just turn your back on it than it is to overthrow it. And so one of the problems is it may be that in today&#8217;s hyper decentralized economy you lose the sort of critical mass you need to make a political revolution to make a political difference.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And I detect a fourth person on the stage.  Alexis de Tocqueville is the ghost speaking there a little bit.  But I quibble with this still.  I think that the network technology and the social media, which is gonna get better and better and better, doesn&#8217;t create a mirage of companionship and friendship and new association.  It&#8217;s real.  My coauthor and I did not meet in person once when we wrote the book, and we probably only had four or five hours of telephone communication over a year.  It was all email, and our friends who would look at things, it was all – there are people who I talk to every day who are very close to me, who are very dear to me who I never see in person, and those are real friendships, right?  And the black conservatives who found each other, this is fantastic, right?  These are real connections.  Okay.  And the means to do that are gonna get better and better.  So the prospect of the kinda Tocquevillian retreat into your personal world and shunning the outer world is certainly always possible, and there is always gonna be some of that, but I hope that that&#8217;s not going to be a general trend, and I don&#8217;t think the technology necessarily pushes us in that direction.</span></p>
<p><strong> Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I was in a conversation about this in the Bay Area this week with another venture capitalist who is actually starting a ballot initiative that would do not exactly what you&#8217;re proposing, not by congressional district, but by percentage of votes statewide.  So Democrats get 65 percent of the vote, they get 65 percent of the Electoral College that&#8217;s for that presidential nominee.  Likewise, Republicans get 35 percent, they would get 35 percent.  I&#8217;m not sure I would be ready to pass judgment as to whether or not it&#8217;s a good or bad idea just yet, but I would say we must look at this holistically, which is that if we do it in California where that might be beneficial to a particular party, what if they do it in Texas that way? Or what if they do it in Arizona that way?  And so I think you have to look at the consequences as a whole, but on face it&#8217;s more representative so it might be a good idea, but there are some proposals for that already floating.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hmm.  Yeah.  I mean one of the downsides is it potentially opens you up for recounts in every district, whereas now you have a statewide recount which involves every district, but still it&#8217;s the aggregate total that you&#8217;re fighting over. The amount of chicanery possible. If every district has a delegate and the popular vote decides it, it would be enormously multiplied.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  There is also a positive to the winner-take-all version because if you had it that it&#8217;s divided pro rata or divided by district in somewhere, you&#8217;re gonna be able to run national campaigns focused on national-type issues and not have to go to each state and seek to make local-type deals and the smaller states are gonna get left out entirely.  They&#8217;re not gonna be considered.  You can win the whole election from California, New York, Illinois, a couple of other places, and I think the system we have now forces you to pay attention to at least the medium-size states and try to get a few of those into your column.  So the Electoral College is something people always seem to not like, but I think it&#8217;s very much a not broke and don&#8217;t fix it part of the U.S. Constitution and I&#8217;m not super, super inclined to see it changed.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And on that note we are going to end.  Thanks very much to our two panelists.</span></p>
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		<title>Liberals Don&#8217;t Understand Reality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/liberals-dont-understand-reality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=liberals-dont-understand-reality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/liberals-dont-understand-reality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 14:12:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208792</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Liberals seem to have a pretty poor grasp of the difference between the real and the ideal.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/reality-check1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208858" alt="reality-check[1]" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/reality-check1-318x350.jpg" width="318" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Others have<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-missing-the-point-on-binge-drinking/2013/10/24/56c8a70a-3ce0-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html"> dissected the various crazy responses </a>to Emily Yoffe&#8217;s piece warning women against binge drinking. The strange one that keeps coming up is &#8220;teaching men not to rape&#8221;.</p>
<p>We don&#8217;t talk about teaching murderers not to kill. Or teaching muggers not to mug.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s generally understood that there is a criminal ecology out there that will do nasty things to you, whose members can be locked up, but who probably won&#8217;t be reformed. Even the sorts of liberals who write essays like this don&#8217;t tend to urge teaching men not to kill.</p>
<p>That would be&#8230; well&#8230; stupid. <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/10/slate-forgot-one-common-factor-rapes-are-rapists/70603/">But stupid is ubiquitous.</a></p>
<blockquote><p>So, is telling women to stop being so drunk really the best advice you can give people to prevent rape? It&#8217;s like telling people not to drive late at night because they might die at the hands of a drunk driver — these people aren&#8217;t breaking the law, yet they&#8217;re the ones being targeted and asked to compromise their lives. What about teaching men not to rape?</p></blockquote>
<p>Teaching people not to drive through the ghetto at night is actually pretty good advice for avoiding carjackings.</p>
<p>Liberals seem to have a pretty poor grasp of the difference between the real and the ideal. In terms of strict ideology, we should not accept a world where anyone has to restrict their freedom to avoid being carjacked. And maybe that&#8217;s a courageous position&#8230; if anyone wants to take it. In the real world, you&#8217;ll end up carjacked.</p>
<p>Giving potential victims advice is actually good advice.</p>
<p>&#8220;If rapists would stop raping people, campus alcohol culture wouldn&#8217;t lead to sexual violence,&#8221; another person added.</p>
<p>And if murderers and muggers and criminals in general would stop doing bad things, we could all leave our doors unlocked at night. But that&#8217;s the ideal, not the real.</p>
<p>Alexander Abad-Santos, the writer of this piece, is a man. I assume he doesn&#8217;t rape. Was that because he took a college course Not Raping 101?</p>
<p>Liberals don&#8217;t like the idea that there&#8217;s a basic difference in values between criminals and non-criminals. They look for social explanations. They babble about rape culture and the patriarchy. But crime is simply the result of fraying values and in part, broken families.</p>
<p>Some<a href="http://www1.csbsju.edu/uspp/crimpsych/CPSG-5.htm"> studies show that a majority of </a>rapists came from single parent households. But that explanation would go over even worse than the binge drinking. And yet it has some truth to it.</p>
<p>We had rape before the collapse of the family, but our crime waves are largely the result of social instability, of broken families and of multicultural cities and towns filled with roaming strangers who feel little kinship for one another.</p>
<p>To the extent that rape culture is an issue, it&#8217;s the product of the very counterculture that liberalism championed and champions.</p>
<p>But all that is the real, not the ideal, and liberalism doesn&#8217;t accept the real. Instead it would like to teach the world to sing and rapists not to rape.</p>
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		<title>When Fighting Liberal Messiahs, Hit Hard or Go Home</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/when-fighting-liberal-messiahs-hit-hard-or-go-home/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-fighting-liberal-messiahs-hit-hard-or-go-home</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/when-fighting-liberal-messiahs-hit-hard-or-go-home/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 13:22:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media Bias]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208869</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Milquetoasts do not win elections]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/deblasio-time2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208870" alt="deblasio time2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/deblasio-time2-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>If anyone expected Joe Lhota to be able to play Giuliani, they were disappointed. Like so many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, Lhota, despite being down over 40 points, was too afraid to hit a man whom the media decided was &#8220;likable&#8221;.</p>
<p>And so Lhota is going to lose. Unless the welfare class and the unions licking their lips at being able to eat the city whole and spit out the crumbs on what&#8217;s left of Detroit somehow decide to stay home on election day, New York City will have a radical left-wing mayor.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s Lhota&#8217;s fault.</p>
<p>Obviously Lhota is running against the media. A lot of Republicans are these days. And when you&#8217;re running against the media, you better either have an outsized personality that can shine through, which he doesn&#8217;t, or serious attack dog skills.</p>
<p>Lhota has a reputation for the latter, but it&#8217;s not obvious. The man who shows up at the debates is too afraid of being seen as a mean guy. Giuliani once upon a time had that worry. Then he got over it. And he won.</p>
<p>Milquetoasts do not win elections. Not unless the media spends all its time manufacturing a fake brand for them. Or unless their opponent forgets to take his medication and says something so unpardonable that even the media can&#8217;t cover up. And the media can cover up a lot.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio was a political activist for a murderous Communist regime that burned churches and synagogues. And the media will make a federal case out of a Lhota sneeze.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s what Lhota is up against and he is only slowly coming to that realization, which, like too many Republicans, has only made him more timid.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re going to take on a liberal messiah, then you either hit hard or go home. Hitting hard won&#8217;t always win the day. The media will hit even harder. That&#8217;s why this isn&#8217;t a game for the weak. You have to bring it 24/7. You have to make sure the nasty gibes don&#8217;t take you down or characterize you as a loser by fighting non-stop.</p>
<p>Too many Republicans still imagine that they can play by Lindsay rules as long as they share his liberal politics. They can, occasionally, until they go into an election that really matters. And then the media stops caring that you&#8217;re for gay rights, abortion and everything but budget cuts. And it dismisses you if it can or eats you alive, if it can&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Despite being down 40 points, Lhota was not prepared to fight hard enough. And it&#8217;s not just his loss. It&#8217;s New York&#8217;s loss. His boss pulled back the city from the brink. Bill de Blasio will toss it into the hole.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s War on Neoliberalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Aug 2013 04:15:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neoliberalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The most acute intellectual disease of the 21st century. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/occupy-london-460x2881.jpg"><img class="wp-image-201682 alignleft" alt="occupy-london-460x2881" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/occupy-london-460x2881.jpg" width="212" height="171" /></a>We all know how contorted the use of the term &#8220;liberalism&#8221; has been for decades.  Liberalism once upon a time (before 1970) meant free competition and meritocracy without discrimination.  But ever since then liberalism has meant affirmation action quotas and dumbed-down standards to achieve radical homogeneity in &#8220;representativeness.&#8221;  Liberalism once favored eliminating the use of gender, racial and ethnic group membership as a criterion for advancement, whereas these days liberals almost unanimously endorse subordination of all advancement to such things.  Liberalism once meant removing obstacles to competition and elimination of measures that simply protect special interests.  These days liberals favor retaining as many such obstacles as possible. Liberals once favored reining in government and preventing subordination of markets to bureaucratic whims and political allegiances.  Today the very essence of liberalism is to favor such things.</p>
<p>Nineteenth century liberalism was essentially the belief in free-market economics in most markets.  This means that a nineteenth century liberal differs little from a 21st century conservative.</p>
<p>All this is highly confusing.  When someone calls himself a liberal these days, we always need to clarify if he means that he believes in the 19th century&#8217;s classical liberalism, that of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, or the 21st century liberalism of Rev Al, Obamacare, and MSNBC, or perhaps even the hardcore Stalinism &#8220;in the name of liberalism&#8221; of people like Noam Chomsky and the writers at &#8220;Counterpunch.&#8221;</p>
<p>As if the uses of &#8220;liberalism&#8221; had not muddied the waters sufficiently, along comes the even worse rhetorical invention of &#8220;neoliberalism.&#8221;   Whatever it may have meant in the past, these days &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; is the nonsense word of choice used by Marxists to refer to anyone who rejects communism.  A more honest pejorative by such people should have been &#8220;anti-communist,&#8221; but that word has lost its ability to shock and trigger goosestepping and line-toeing by wannabe fellow travelers.</p>
<p>The simple fact of the matter is that <a href="http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=180332">anyone using the word &#8220;neoliberal&#8221; these days</a> is a Marxist or at least someone who thinks that markets should never be allowed to operate freely.  Anti-neoliberals favor nationalization and state controls.</p>
<p>The term &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; was originally coined in the 1930s to refer to the general favoring of free international trade.  We need to distinguish between the original neoliberalism and the contemporary 21st century misuse of the term.  The current trendiness originated in the 1980s.  While some centrist liberals at the time used the word to describe themselves, it increasingly turned into a term of disparagement and mocking by radicals.  Ironically, radicals these days seem to be using the word as a substitution for the earlier terms of disparagement: &#8220;neoconservatives&#8221; and &#8220;paleoconservatives.&#8221; Those derisions are a bit stale.</p>
<p>The &#8220;neoliberal&#8221; word was long used by the Left and especially by Marxists to dismiss the saner writers and columnists from Left of Center, particularly those associated with the New Republic and Washington Monthly.  David Brooks <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=1&amp;">used it in his NY Times</a> essay &#8220;The Vanishing Neoliberal.&#8221;  Google and Yahoo list thousands of pages in which the Stalinist web magazine &#8220;Counterpunch&#8221; <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/03/13/is-this-really-the-end-of-neoliberalism/">has used the term</a><a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/undone-neoliberalism#axzz2chfUbLQc">.  &#8220;The Nation&#8221;</a> is <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/undone-neoliberalism">not far</a> behind.</p>
<p><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberalism-and-higher-education/">Writing in the NY Times a few years back</a>, Stanley Fish describes the emergence of the term:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term “neoliberalism” and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition.</p>
<p>I was asking because I had been reading essays in which the adjective neoliberal was routinely invoked as an accusation, and I had only a sketchy notion of what was intended by it….</p>
<p>What I’ve learned (and what some readers of this column no doubt already knew) is that neoliberalism is a pejorative way of referring to a set of economic/political policies based on a strong faith in the beneficent effects of free markets.</p></blockquote>
<p>As an example of neoliberalism, he provides this:</p>
<blockquote><p>In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions — questions of negligence law —  are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don’t you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory’s operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/to-boycott-or-not-to-boycott-that-is-the-question/">Stanley Fish later cites one of his critics as saying that neoliberalism</a>, like neoconservatism, is “an opaque catchphrase coined by wannabe pundits” that does not “refer to anything.”</p>
<p>These days the main function of the word &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; is to reveal that the person using it is a Marxist.  The Marxist jihadists against neoliberalism, along with quasi-marxists who kvetch against it, are using the word to dismiss anyone who thinks that markets sometimes work better than People&#8217;s Kommissars.  &#8220;Neoliberals&#8221; according to the Left are people who oppose all forms of regulation of markets and all measures that boost equality.  But in most cases, those neoliberal offenders being dismissed are not libertarian absolutists at all, just mainstream people who understand that regulation is one, but not necessarily the automatic first instrument for legitimate economic policy.  If you reject the idea that every market must be nationalized and controlled by the vanguard party representing the interests of the &#8220;people,&#8221; then you just may be a neoliberal.  The vanguard party, by the way, knows just what the &#8220;people&#8221; (or sometimes the working class) need, based on their having read Marx and not by means of asking the people (or workers) what they want.</p>
<p>Anti-neoliberals have an enraged bee in their bonnet when it comes to international trade.  This is ironic because if there is one idea that enjoys universal support across the entire spectrum of economic thought and ideologies, it is that international trade always benefits people.  It benefits small countries more than large countries.  It benefits poor and undeveloped countries more than developed countries.  But international trade smacks of &#8220;globalization&#8221; in the minds of anti-neoliberals, and so must be fought, although none of them can say just why.  Globalization benefits the US and so it must be evil, and never mind if it also benefits sub-Saharan Africa.  The anti-neoliberals are little different from the violent anti-globalization rioters and the &#8220;Occupy Wall Street&#8221; hordes.  Their dream is for the world to adopt the autarky-to-the-death policies of North Korea, where countries should seek &#8220;independence&#8221; by means of disruption of international trade and impoverishment of their populations.</p>
<p>The Left&#8217;s reversion to the snooty dismissal of liberals, neo or otherwise, is itself enlightening.  While conservatives long mocked them by saying that socialists are merely liberals in a hurry, there was an underlying revulsion towards liberals among real radicals.  Liberals tended to be too touchy-feely, non-violent, defending the need for freedom of speech, appreciative of middle class standards of living and wealth, and too anxious to get their kids into good colleges.  Radicals wanted violence and class warfare, and were more than willing to forego bourgeois niceties like freedom of speech and the rule of law in order to seize power.  While willing to play along with their assigned theater roles as &#8220;liberals in a hurry,&#8221; especially when this allowed them to manipulate &#8220;popular front&#8221; broad coalitions, the radicals felt nothing but disdain toward the non-Marxists.  That pretense has now been dropped.</p>
<p>A gentler and kinder person these days would conclude from hearing anyone toss out the term &#8220;neoliberal&#8221; that the speaker is an idiot who has nothing of value to say about anything at all.  Someone less kind will understand that the speaker is a communist.</p>
<p>Anti-neoliberalism is emerging as the most acute intellectual disease of the 21st century.   I think only Jeff Foxworth could do the term justice.  If he is listening, here are a few modest suggestions for a new Foxworthy shtick:</p>
<p>*   If you believe that the same government that cannot deliver the mail must serve as the single health care provider, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>*  If you believe that true communism has never yet been tested or tried, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>*  If you believe that the rioters who trashed Seattle in the anti-globalization protests really care about people, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>*  If you believe that the &#8220;Occupy Wall Street&#8221; urchins really represent 99% of the public, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>* If you believe that the US was attacked by al-Qaeda on 9-11 because America is such a racist, selfish place, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</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>Chicago Represents the Failure of Liberalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/chicago-represents-the-failure-of-liberalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=chicago-represents-the-failure-of-liberalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/chicago-represents-the-failure-of-liberalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:29:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chicago]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172142</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The inner city represents the failure of a century of liberalism to reform and uplift. And once we get past the usual nods to racism, there's nothing more to say about the reality of life there. Or at least nothing that the ideology responsible for the failures would like to discuss.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/?attachment_id=172145" rel="attachment wp-att-172145"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-172145" title="img_3588618" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/img_3588618.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="240" /></a></p>
<p>The New York Times is a liberal narrative engine. Its articles may seem meandering, but they know exactly what they want to do and where they want to go. But that&#8217;s not the case<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/us/a-soaring-homicide-rate-a-divide-in-chicago.html?src=me&amp;ref=general&amp;_r=0"> with its &#8220;Two Chicagos&#8221; article</a>.</p>
<p>The title &#8220;In a Soaring Homicide Rate, a Divide in Chicago&#8221; is traditional New York Times. The amount of titles the Times has done that focus on a divide is nearly endless. But there&#8217;s a sense of confusion and helplessness that fills the article.</p>
<p>The premise seems simple enough. Chicago&#8217;s murder rate is high, but it&#8217;s primarily confined to minority areas. And then what? The Times has no answer. When poverty or bad housing or high milk prices are confined to minority areas, racism is an easy answer. But how do you address black on black violence? The New York Times can&#8217;t do it.</p>
<blockquote><p>The shooting, on Nov. 26, was one more jarring reminder of just how common killings seem to have grown on the streets of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, where 506 homicides were reported in 2012, a 16 percent increase over the year before, even as the number of killings remained relatively steady or dropped in some cities, including New York.</p>
<p>But the overall rise in killings here blurs another truth: the homicides, most of which the authorities described as gang-against-gang shootings, have not been spread evenly across this city. Instead, they have mostly taken place in neighborhoods west and south of Chicago’s gleaming downtown towers.</p>
<p>More than 80 percent of the city’s homicides took place last year in only about half of Chicago’s 23 police districts, largely on the city’s South and West Sides. The police district that includes parts of the business district downtown reported no killings at all.</p></blockquote>
<p>And? Having gotten to this point in the traditional disadvantaged narrative, the story can go no further. What does one say about internal violence within a community?</p>
<blockquote><p>“It’s two different Chicagos,” said the Rev. Corey B. Brooks Sr., the pastor of New Beginnings Church on the South Side, who had led the funeral service for Mr. Holman the day shots rang out, then found himself leading Mr. Miller’s funeral service a week later. The authorities here have described both shootings as gang related. “If something like that had happened at the big cathedral in downtown Chicago or up north at a predominantly white church, it would still be on the news right now, it would be such a major thing going on.”</p></blockquote>
<p>No doubt, but that&#8217;s because shootings are much less likely to happen in white churches, not because of some endemic racism. When violence happens in a dangerous white area, no one pays much attention to it, instead the area eventually becomes a running gag. Habitual violence is ignored regardless of the population.</p>
<p>But surely gun control is the solution.</p>
<blockquote><p>At Mr. Miller’s funeral in December, a large contingent of Chicago police officers waited outside.</p>
<p>“It’s gotten to the point, unfortunately, where something as significant as a funeral is subject to gang violence, and I can’t even believe that we’re having this conversation,” Garry McCarthy, the police superintendent here, said in an interview. “I’m not willing to gamble that maybe they’re not going to bring their guns this time.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The Chicago cops can&#8217;t keep guns out of a funeral. How much use is trying to keep them out of a city, a state or a country?</p>
<blockquote><p>In a corner of the church, a friend of Mr. Miller revealed text messages he had sent to her during Mr. Holman’s funeral, minutes before he was shot: “dis preacher like he talkin straight to me,” one of the messages read. “He talkin bout hurts and pain. I cant run from the pain cause its gone hurt me worse if I’m by myself because I gotta think about everything.” In tears, she recalled how she had replied to the texts with questions, but Mr. Miller never responded.</p></blockquote>
<p>And the New York Times has no answers to its own questions either. The inner city represents the failure of a century of liberalism to reform and uplift. And once we get past the usual nods to racism, there&#8217;s nothing more to say about the reality of life there. Or at least nothing that the ideology responsible for the failures would like to discuss.</p>
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		<title>Liberalism Versus Blacks</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/liberalism-versus-blacks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=liberalism-versus-blacks</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/liberalism-versus-blacks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2013 04:15:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173518</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[50 years of failed ideology. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/liberalism-versus-blacks/nyt2009071619585280c/" rel="attachment wp-att-173530"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173530" title="NYT2009071619585280C" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/17naacp_600.jpg" alt="" width="255" height="200" /></a>There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?</p>
<p>San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city&#8217;s total population has grown.</p>
<p>Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.</p>
<p>Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.</p>
<p>The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals&#8217; expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.</p>
<p>Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.</p>
<p>The two most recent books that show this with hard facts are &#8220;Mismatch&#8221; by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and &#8220;Wounds That Will Not Heal&#8221; by Russell K. Nieli. My own book &#8220;Affirmative Action Around the World&#8221; shows the same thing with different evidence.</p>
<p>In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good — and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.</p>
<p>The current liberal crusade for more so-called &#8220;gun control&#8221; laws is more of the same.</p>
<p>Factual studies over the years, both in the United States and in other countries, repeatedly show that &#8220;gun control&#8221; laws do not in fact reduce crimes committed with guns.</p>
<p>Cities with some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation have murder rates far above the national average. In the middle of the 20th century, New York had far more restrictive gun control laws than London, but London had far less gun crime. Yet gun crimes in London skyrocketed after severe gun control laws were imposed over the next several decades.</p>
<p>Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals&#8217; devotion to their ideology greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.</p>
<p>One of the most polarizing and counterproductive liberal crusades of the 20th century has been the decades-long busing crusade to send black children to predominantly white schools. The idea behind this goes back to the pronouncement by Chief Justice Earl Warren that &#8220;separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet within walking distance of the Supreme Court where this pronouncement was made was an all-black high school that had scored higher than two-thirds of the city&#8217;s white high schools taking the same test — way back in 1899! But who cares about facts, when you are on a liberal crusade that makes you feel morally superior?</p>
<p>To challenge government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination is one thing. But to claim that blacks get a better education if they sit next to whites in school is something very different. And it is something that goes counter to the facts.</p>
<p>Many liberal ideas about race sound plausible, and it is understandable that these ideas might have been attractive 50 years ago. What is not understandable is how so many liberals can blindly ignore 50 years of evidence to the contrary since then.</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>Presidential Debate Makes Election Alternatives Clear</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/presidential-debate-makes-election-alternatives-clear/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=presidential-debate-makes-election-alternatives-clear</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:55:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[presidential debate]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146785</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The philosophical face-off America needs. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/20121003__3Presidential-Debate.gif"><img class="size-full wp-image-146787 alignleft" title="20121003__3Presidential-Debate" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/20121003__3Presidential-Debate.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night’s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses the limited government, individual rights and freedom, free market economic policies, and personal self-reliance and autonomy that the Constitution was created to protect. On the other hand, we heard a candidate who endorses big government, group rights, redistributionist economic policies, and the progressive ideal that limits freedom and empowers elites to run people’s lives. In this first debate, Romney and the Constitution clearly won, as the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth emanating from the mainstream media prove.</p>
<p>First, many Americans were seeing the real Romney for the first time. Contrary to the fatcat caricature the Obama campaign and its media enablers have been peddling for months, Romney was warm and jocular, and sensitive to the plight of real people who have suffered under Obama’s policies. He easily had the best laugh lines: “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts.” When Obama lied about lowering taxes for the rich, Romney answered, “I have five boys, and I’m used to people saying things over and over, thinking if they repeat it enough it will be true.” He slyly reminded everybody of Joe Biden’s gaffe that the “middle class has been buried the last four years” when he said, “Middle income Americans have been buried.” Romney responded to Obama’s complaint about $3 billion tax breaks for oil companies by contrasting it to the $90 billion for green energy, landing another punch with, “You don’t pick winners and losers, you just pick the losers.” When Romney was asked about spending cuts, he said he’d eliminate programs that are not “important enough to borrow money from China” to pay for them, like PBS, with an apology to moderator Jim Lehrer. And his early jab, “trickle down government,” should enter the political lexicon.</p>
<p>Second, Romney was obviously much more confident, prepared, and knowledgeable than Obama. He had a greater command of the facts, and often turned them against Obama’s claims. When Obama crowed about the federal government’s support for job training, Romney snapped back that it was spread over 47 training programs and 8 agencies. Obama’s accusation that Romney would cut funding for teachers was met with a devastating riposte: that $90 billion that went for “clean energy,” much of it, Romney reminded us, going to Obama’s supporters and friends, could have paid for 2 million more teachers. Romney’s reminder that 4 million seniors would lose their Advantage Medicare supplemental insurance demolished the President’s spin that his $716 billion in Medicare cuts was achieved by reducing “overpayments” to providers. Obama’s call for raising taxes on the “rich” was met with Romney’s reminder that Obama himself said you don’t raise taxes in a slow economy––and the economy is growing more slowly now than it was when Obama said it back in 2010. As for Obama, he just repeated campaign slogans that a few minutes of scrutiny could explode, like touting “investing” in more people going to college at a time when millions of college students can’t find work, or repeating the Tax Policy Institute claim that Romney would raise taxes on the middle class, an analysis the ITP no longer stands behind, or taking credit for increased oil and natural gas production, when that in fact occurred in spite of, not because of his policies, as Romney pointed out when he reminded us that permits for oil development on federal lands have been reduced by half under Obama.</p>
<p>Third, the demeanor of the two men was starkly different. Obama looked sour most of the time, scowling and smirking, and refusing to look at Romney when he spoke, and often looking down when Romney was talking, like a child who is being chastised. Romney was confident, eager, obviously charged up by the debate. Obama looked like he was in the dentist’s chair. The split-screen shots were particularly devastating, Obama looking old and tired, Romney actually looking much younger and more vigorous. Obama simply couldn’t handle his first formidable adversary, which should have been obvious from the start of his political career. His whole life he’s just had to show up and take a bow. The mainstream media, which have been his shills for four years, have worsened this arrogance. Obama is like a football team that is unbeaten during the exhibition season, but having grown flabby and complacent, is wiped out when the regular season starts. That’s why, as Charles Krauthammer said, Romney won by two touchdowns. Obama’s sorry performance should explode the media’s fairytale about Obama’s oratorical skills, intelligence, and likability, none of which was evident during the debate.</p>
<p>Finally, the difference between the political philosophies of the two candidates was made crystal clear in the question regarding the role of government. Romney asserted a limited role for the federal government, which exists to protect the inalienable rights with which we have been endowed by our creator, and which are codified in the Constitution. But power resides with the people that government is supposed to serve, and whose freedom to pursue happiness the government is supposed to protect. Obama believes, as Romney said, “government can do a better job than people pursuing their dreams.” Technocratic elites and bureaucracies should have the power to “solve problems” and achieve dubious “social welfare” goals such as income redistribution or egalitarianism. This is the progressive ideology, which is very different from the ideals that created our government.</p>
<p>Romney won this debate not because of optics, or even a greater command of the facts. He won because he has the better argument: free individuals and their work, initiative, and creativity are better than government at managing their lives, pursuing their happiness, and creating prosperity.</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 Stupid Party</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-stupid-party/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-stupid-party</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-stupid-party/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2012 04:25:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elitism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Occupy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=131991</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A hundred years of leftist intellectual bankruptcy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Picture-8.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-131992" title="Picture-8" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Picture-8.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>The presidency of Barack Obama has established once and for all that modern liberalism is now the stupid party. Very little of liberal thought these days represents anything fresh or new, but rather comprises what Lionel Trilling once reduced conservatism to: “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Now it is liberal ideas that young in the 19<sup>th</sup> century today stumble around like zombies in the liberal mind, mindlessly repeating hoary clichés of the sort Jonah Goldberg documents in his new book.</p>
<p>Obama’s presidency and reelection campaign have already produced an abundance of examples. Take the looming fiscal crisis of unfunded social welfare entitlements, run-away federal spending, and accelerating debt and deficits. Even with the monitory example of a rapidly disintegrating Europe before our eyes, the Democrats still can’t do the math. The “Buffett rule” taxes on the “rich” that the president has been touting amount to the equivalent of couch-cushion change compared to our debt and unfunded liabilities. Indeed, confiscating outright all the wealth of the richest 400 Americans would barely cover one year of Obama deficits.  The economic history of the past half-century backs up the math: only by reducing spending can we get our fiscal house in order, and raising taxes on the productive stifles economic growth and reduces tax revenues, thus hastening the downward spiral. The fundamental wisdom known by every village explainer––spend more than you earn and you’ll go broke, give people something for nothing and they will expect something for nothing forever, there is no free lunch, if something can’t go on forever it won’t––doesn’t seem to penetrate the minds of the self-styled “genius” party.</p>
<p>Yet despite this crisis, all the liberals can do is recycle old class-warfare bromides. Repeating the juvenile slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Democrats decry the “1%”  and the President shrieks about the rich “paying their fair share.” The fact that among advanced economies the U.S. already has the most progressive income taxes and the highest corporate taxes––even as nearly half of taxpayers pay nothing while an equal number receive some sort of government largesse––can’t penetrate the fog of clichés befuddling the liberal brain. No, stale Hollywood scripts about “Wall Street” pirates and evil oil corporations are recycled into government policy, and jeremiads against “greed” and “materialism” abound. The President even invokes Jesus Christ in support of his redistributionist schemes, his liberal supporters conveniently forgoing their usual hysteria about the theocratic camel’s nose poking into the political tent.</p>
<p>Nothing in any of this has anything to do with the reality of our economic sickness or its cures. Worse yet, we’ve heard it all before over a century ago. In the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, increasing immigration from Russia, Poland, southern Italy, and other non-Teutonic countries, along with the growing wealth, social mobility, and economic opportunity created by industrial capitalism, agitated the well-born and well-educated elites worried about racial “degeneration” and the weakening of the American order. Impressed by Karl Marx, they saw industrial capitalism and corporations, and the increasing materialism, amoral greed, civic corruption, and crass competition these fostered, as the force that would destroy the American moral order and empower the lesser breeds who thought of nothing but greed and selfish gain, no matter the future costs to society. The reformers’ answer was to turn over government rule to a “natural aristocracy” created by breeding and education, the denizens of the “best class” who could restore order to a disintegrating society and rein in the “incorporated power and greed,” as Brooks Adams put it, of “robber barons” like the Rockefellers and Morgans and the other “malefactors of great wealth” criticized by T.R. Roosevelt.</p>
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		<title>The Left-Wing Agenda and Race Retrogression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-left-wing-agenda-and-race-retrogression/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-left-wing-agenda-and-race-retrogression</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-left-wing-agenda-and-race-retrogression/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:03:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[african americans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[policies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=126247</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The time is long overdue to start looking beyond the political rhetoric.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Picture-52.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-126398" title="Picture-5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Picture-52.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a>One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: &#8220;White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80&#8242;s, Census Shows.&#8221;</p>
<p>The 1980s? Wasn&#8217;t that the years of the Reagan administration, the &#8220;decade of greed,&#8221; the era of &#8220;neglect&#8221; of the poor and minorities, if not &#8220;covert racism&#8221;?</p>
<p>More recently, during the administration of America&#8217;s first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, &#8220;Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.&#8221;</p>
<p>While the median net worth of whites was ten times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was nineteen to one in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. With Hispanics, the ratio was eight to one in 1988 and fifteen to one in 2009.</p>
<p>Race is just one of the areas in which the rhetoric and the reality often go in opposite directions. Political rhetoric is intended to do one thing — win votes. Whether the policies that accompany that rhetoric make people better off or worse off is far less of a concern to politicians, if any concern at all.</p>
<p>Democrats receive the overwhelming bulk of the black vote by rhetoric and by presenting what they have done as the big reason that blacks have advanced. So long as most blacks and whites alike mistake rhetoric for reality, this political game can go on.</p>
<p>A Manhattan Institute study last year by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor showed that, while the residential segregation of blacks has generally been declining from the middle of the 20th century to the present, it was rising during the first half of the 20th century. The net result is that blacks in 2010 were almost as residentially unsegregated as they were back in 1890.</p>
<p>There are complex reasons behind such things, but the bottom line is plain. The many laws, programs and policies designed to integrate residential housing cannot be automatically assumed to translate into residentially integrated housing.</p>
<p>Government is not the sole factor, nor necessarily the biggest factor, no matter what impression political rhetoric gives.</p>
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		<title>Golden State Gloom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/golden-state-gloom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=golden-state-gloom</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/golden-state-gloom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:23:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bailout]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Governor Jerry Brown]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=125248</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For a look at America under a second Obama term, look to withering California.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/0711-ASNARL-BROWN-California-Budget_full_600.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-125256" title="0711-ASNARL-BROWN-California-Budget_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/0711-ASNARL-BROWN-California-Budget_full_600.gif" alt="" width="375" height="244" /></a>For a number of years, California has maintained its reputation as a &#8220;cutting edge&#8221; state, the incubator of grandiose ideas that eventually find their way to the more &#8220;benighted&#8221; regions of the country. California is indeed ahead of the curve in that it offers a compelling look at where unfettered progressivism in all its destructive glory eventually leads. It is a destructiveness the Obama administration aims to impose on the rest of the nation should the president win re-election in 2012.</p>
<p>The 2010 election was essentially a repudiation of Democrats and the Obama administration in virtually every state across the nation&#8211;save California. While 63 seats in the House of Representatives changed hands from Democrats to Republicans, <a href="http://conservapedia.com/2010_Midterm_Elections">not even one</a> Democrat incumbent from California lost a seat. Democrat Jerry Brown was <a href="http://www.examiner.com/democrat-in-los-angeles/california-stays-democratic-as-brown-boxer-win-election">elected</a> Governor and Sen. Barbara Boxer was re-elected to the Senate. Leftists were ecstatic. &#8220;California held on last night against the Republican rager that swept the nation,&#8221; <a href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/11/california-tea-party-midterms-2010">wrote</a> <em>Mother Jones&#8217;</em> Josh Harkinson. <em>Huffington Post&#8217;s</em> Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-trounstine/california-voters-turn-ba_b_778095.html">noted</a> that the &#8220;raging red wave that swept across the country&#8221; didn&#8217;t reach the Golden State.</p>
<p>Jennifer Jones was far less optimistic&#8211;and far more accurate. &#8220;California seems determined to pursue liberal statism to its logical conclusion (bankruptcy),&#8221; she <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2010/11/california-stays-blue-as-barbara-boxer-hangs-in-there/22436/">wrote</a> for Commentary Magazine.</p>
<p>Technically speaking states cannot go bankrupt. But they can run out of money, precisely like California is&#8211;<em>again.</em> In 2009, facing a staggering budget shortfall of $26 billion, the state was forced to <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/02/news/economy/California_IOUs/">issue</a> IOUs to many of its creditors and furlough state employees. Last month, CA state Controller John Chiang <a href="http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/california-slipping-toward-bankruptcy-again/409341">notified</a> the legislature that the state will run out of money sometime in March, unless $3 billion in cuts or revenues can be found to keep the state solvent for fiscal year that ends in June. Next year looks even worse, with the state facing a deficit of $6.6 billion.</p>
<p>Cities are a different story. They <em>can</em> go bankrupt, and Stockton, CA is on the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/03/11/148384030/an-example-to-avoid-city-of-stockton-on-the-brink">brink.</a> Mayor Ann Johnston expresses the essence of progressive &#8220;logic&#8221; that brought this city of nearly 300,00 people to its knees. &#8220;When we went on a real spending spree and built the arena, the ballpark, a lot of community infrastructure&#8211;did a whole lot of things to improve the community that were bonded,&#8221; she says. &#8220;I mean, these were all financed through municipal bonds.&#8221; That would be $300 million worth of bonds fueled by a real estate boom &#8220;city leaders thought&#8230;was going to continue forever,&#8221; Johnston added.</p>
<p>As for public service employees, Stockton is a microcosm. Pay raises and enhanced benefit packages for police and firemen became the order of the day. City Manager Bob Deis says Stockton is currently facing a $20 million deficit in a $160 million budget. Yet those numbers pale in comparison to the far bigger problem &#8220;Right now, we have an unfunded liability in the retiree health program around $450 million,&#8221; said Deis. Stockton would be the largest city in America to go bankrupt. Yet they are not alone. The northern California cities of Hercules and Lincoln, are <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833004577247464140386148.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">attempting</a> to restructure their debt and cut employee costs to forestall insolvency, and municipal finances in San Jose and San Diego are also <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-03-01/greenhut-if-stockton-is-broke-then-why-isn-t-san-diego">reaching</a> unsustainable levels, driven by the same public employee pension debt and healthcare costs strangling municipalities across the entire state.</p>
<p>Yet progressive arrogance and denial run deep. Even modest pension reforms proposed by Gov. Brown are going nowhere in the Democratically-dominated state legislature, and Democratic Sacramento Assemblyman Roger Dickinson has actually introduced a Public Employees Bill of Rights <em>protecting</em> the status quo of union largess. How tough it is for public employees? 15,000 California government retirees have pensions greater than $100,000 per year, and 1332 public sector employees currently <a href="http://reason.org/blog/show/california-illinois-continue-to-mak">make</a> over $150,000 per year. And lest anyone think Gov. Jerry Brown is the voice of reason, think again: he and his fellow Democrats in the state legislature continue to support a high-speed rail project connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco whose cost estimates have <a href="http://reason.org/blog/show/jerry-brown-continues-to-push-hsr">exploded</a> from between $40-$45 billion two years ago to $98.5-$117.6 billion&#8211;before the first piece of track has been laid down.</p>
<p>California&#8217;s solutions? Like all good progressives, Brown has <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48040">proposed</a> &#8220;tax the rich&#8221; increases in California&#8217;s seven income tax brackets that currently begin at 9.3 percent for people making $47,056 a year, up to 10.3 percent for people with incomes over a million dollars. Brown wants to raise the latter figure to 12.3 percent on everyone making $250,000 or more. The governor insists on these increases even though the top one percent of California earners currently pay 50 percent of the state&#8217;s income tax. He also wants to raise state sales taxes (which vary by county) up to a range of 7.75 percent to 10 percent. All of these proposals will be on the 2012 ballot.</p>
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		<title>Occupy Wall Street (Hearts) Wall Street</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ann-coulter/occupy-wall-street-hearts-wall-street-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=occupy-wall-street-hearts-wall-street-1</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ann-coulter/occupy-wall-street-hearts-wall-street-1/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soros]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=109507</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left doesn't really care about those "villain" bankers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/occupy-wall-street_400x270.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-109508" title="occupy-wall-street_400x270" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/occupy-wall-street_400x270.gif" alt="" width="375" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>The worst thing about Occupy Wall Street is that it&#8217;s ruining a good cause: hating Wall Street. Just when opposing Wall Street was gaining momentum, these brain-dead zombies are forcing us to choose between thieving bankers and them.</p>
<p>If the Flea Party were really concerned about the greedy &#8220;Wall Street 1 Percent,&#8221; shifting money around to make themselves richer and everyone else poorer, their No. 1 target should be <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981#">George Soros</a>.</p>
<p>Of course, we don&#8217;t know exactly how much money Soros has, since he keeps all his money in offshore bank accounts.</p>
<p>We do know that Soros has been convicted of insider trading. And we know that his general modus operandi is to run around the world panicking sovereign nations, so he can pocket the difference when their currencies collapse.</p>
<p>But the Occupy Wall Street protesters love Soros! It&#8217;s Fox News they hate.</p>
<p>Last week, the great minds of the OWS movement, bored with playing bocce ball and getting stoned, decided to protest at the homes of Wall Street&#8217;s robber barons. They then proceeded to walk right past George Soros&#8217; apartment building in order to protest at the homes of Rupert Murdoch and David Koch.</p>
<p>THEY&#8217;RE NOT WALL STREET!</p>
<p>You may not like Koch and Murdoch&#8217;s products &#8212; fertilizer and media &#8212; but neither one has anything to do with Wall Street. Unlike money manipulators such as <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981#">John Corzine</a> (Democrat), <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981#">Robert Rubin</a> (Democrat) and George Soros (Democrat and Obama&#8217;s biggest supporter), Koch and Murdoch make money from corporations that actually produce something.</p>
<p>They take risks, make things and get menaced by the government. Wall Street schemers take no risks, produce nothing and get bailed out by the government.</p>
<p>Even assuming, for purposes of argument, that Koch and Murdoch are as evil as these morons seems to think, the protesters call their demonstration &#8220;Occupy Wall Street,&#8221; not &#8220;Occupy Businesses Whose Products We Disapprove Of.&#8221;</p>
<p>This would be like protesting the Holocaust by walking past Adolf Hitler&#8217;s house and protesting at O.J. Simpson&#8217;s house.</p>
<p>The Flea Partiers try to win good will by pretending to protest &#8220;Wall Street&#8221; &#8212; but they ignore Wall Street&#8217;s villains. They claim to speak for 99 percent of Americans, but their sponsor, George Soros, would be delighted if America collapsed and the 99 percent were impoverished. All he cares about is his own power and pocketbook.</p>
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		<title>The Face of Hate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jacob-shrybman/the-face-of-hate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-face-of-hate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jacob-shrybman/the-face-of-hate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2010 04:00:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Shrybman]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=60583</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Genocide girl, Jumanah Imad Albahri, helps expose the true agenda of anti-Israel activism on campuses.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/iaw07.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60593" title="iaw07" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/iaw07.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="316" /></a></p>
<p>The world should be thanking Jumanah Imad Albahri, the by now infamous Hezbollah and Hamas supporting <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fSvyv0urTE">MSA student</a> at University of California San Diego who, at a recent David Horowitz lecture, publicly demonstrated the true face of anti-Israel activism on campuses.</p>
<p>As universities around the globe wrap up for the summer, many students will leave unaware that the liberalism they claim to stand for is often quite false. Case in point: The Middle East Forum has reported that the Saudi government has spent <a href="http://www.meforum.org/572/turning-off-the-tap-of-terrorist-funding">$87 billion</a> spreading radical Islam in the last decade. As a clear product of this activity, we have seen a frightening increase in campuses around the globe hosting &#8220;Israel Apartheid Week.&#8221; More non-Muslim students have become active in these events in conjunction with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), the Pan-Arab radical Islam organization that is the derivation of these Saudi funds.</p>
<p>When watching the short <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/18/lies-of-a-truthful-girl/">YouTube video</a> of the MSA student at UCSD (that proved to the world how MSA actively supports terrorism) I remembered back a year ago when my Sderot Media Center event at DePaul University was hijacked by MSA and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) along with their following of false liberals. As I described a year ago in the Jerusalem Post article, <a href="http://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&amp;cid=1238562905981"><em>Shell-shocked in DePaul</em></a>, what these so-called liberals were preventing was free speech and what they were promoting was everything that liberalism has historically fought against. Due to the radical response of these MSA students and false liberals, this incident made the Anti-Defamation League&#8217;s top four 2009 anti-Semitic campus events of the year.</p>
<p>Even more telling of the true face of this false liberalism is the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oLvwMxwHFs">short video of Cartoonist Lars Vilks</a>, who created the cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed published in a Denmark newspaper, being attacked at Uppsala University in Sweden. Leave aside the multiple death threats Vilks has received and the price Al Qaeda has put on his head, and watch in the video how students physically attack him during a lecture on free speech. As the police try to wrestle down the attacking mob, the students are chanting &#8220;Allah hu Akbar!&#8221; In this type of liberalism, freedom of speech and press are not allowed but the infamous Muslim jihadist mantra, of course, is.</p>
<p>This false liberalism stands beside the sword of Mohammed that has spread across every continent in the form of student organizations like MSA and SJP. This false liberalism clearly supports Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda. This false liberalism stands against freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This false liberalism supports honor killings such as the Said sisters that were murdered in Texas by their father for dating non-Muslims. This false liberalism supports the lynching of homosexuals. This false liberalism stands against the progression of women and for the oppression seen on the streets of the radical Islamic territories of the Gaza Strip and Iran. This false liberalism that silenced me in Chicago laughed at live footage of Jewish children running from missiles in Sderot. What has been masked on university campuses worldwide as liberalism is only masked radical Islam.</p>
<p>Unlike, as Daniel Pipes proves, the popular avoidance of the usage of the terms &#8220;terrorist&#8221; or &#8220;terrorism&#8221; following the attacks in <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/6055/still-asleep-after-mumbai">Mumbai</a> and <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/7737/sudden-jihad-inordinate-stress-ft-hood">Ft. Hood</a>, when the unpopular pro-Israel opinion is voiced, it is deemed right-wing, extreme, fanatical, conservative, fascist, close-minded, and other exacerbated connotations. I received many responses to an article about removing the terrorist organization of Hamas from Twitter, an apolitical article that readers would undoubtedly agree with.</p>
<p>Some of the responses included:</p>
<p><em> •	You Guy are wrong Hamas is a resistance organization who are defending their small-left land called GAZA</em>… <em>HAMAS has the right to resist until it liberates all Palestine [sic.]</em></p>
<p><em>•	WHO is a terrorist? Yet a Terrorist. Isael has been taught a small lesson by the Hesbollah and Hamas and they will teach again and again untill those settlers Including Jacob Shrybman should go back to America and where they Came from (sic).</em></p>
<p><em>•	Jacob Shrybman is a Settler who came from America and occupied a piece of Palestine (sic).</em></p>
<p><em>•	Jacob, Do you think that trying to silence one of the few voices this imprisoned people have is going to make Israel look less a jailer (sic)?</em></p>
<p><em>•	Hamas was also a response to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the ethnic cleansing that has gone with that occupation. So, I state again that given Israel&#8217;s sixty years of state sponsored and condoned terrorism, attacking Hamas without acknowledging Israeli crimes is hypocritical.</em></p>
<p><em><span style="font-style: normal;">While all five comments vary in their extremity, they all point to the same thing. Each comment in some way excuses or encourages the terrorists&#8217; action using this false liberalism and then bastardizes the democratic state of Israel.</span></em></p>
<p>Looking at examples from just this month of the MSA student in San Diego publicly voicing her support for Hezbollah&#8217;s dream of gathering all the Jews in Israel to kill them all in one place; of a student mob in Sweden attacking a controversial cartoonist at his lecture on free speech while chanting &#8220;Allah hu Akbar,&#8221; and the commonality of the five article comments above, we clearly see this false liberalism as only a mask for collusion with radical Islam.</p>
<p><em>Jacob Shrybman is the Assistant Director of the<a href="www.SderotMedia.org.il"> </a><a href="http://www.SderotMedia.org.il/">Sderot Media Center</a></em><em>. He hosts elected officials from around the world and international media visiting the Sderot/Gaza region. He has been published in The Jerusalem Post, The Huffington Post, YNet News, and has appeared on several international television and radio stations.</em></p>
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		<title>Commentary: George Will Knocks it Out of the Park</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/commentary-george-will-knocks-it-out-of-the-park/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=commentary-george-will-knocks-it-out-of-the-park</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:42:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51491</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[by Peter Wehner The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) gathering this weekend included some odd moments, some odd speakers, and some odd outcomes. But it also included some fine moments and impressive speeches — especially one fantastic address by columnist George Will. In his remarks, Will laid out the fundamental difference between conservatism and modern-day [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>by Peter Wehner</strong></p>
<p>The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) gathering this weekend included some odd moments, some odd speakers, and some odd outcomes. But it also included some fine moments and impressive speeches — especially one fantastic address by columnist George Will.</p>
<p>In his remarks, Will laid out the fundamental difference between conservatism and modern-day liberalism on the issue of equality of opportunity (which conservatives tend to support) vs. equality of outcomes (which liberals tend to support). This difference has led liberals to actively favor creating dependency on the state. Much of Will’s speech demonstrates why he believes this proposition is true.</p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/242511" target="_blank">Read more here.</a></strong></em></p>
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		<title>The Grasping Hand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-sloterdijk/the-grasping-hand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-grasping-hand</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-sloterdijk/the-grasping-hand/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:00:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Sloterdijk]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47933</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The modern democratic state pillages its productive citizens.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="story_text">
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47938" title="hand" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hand.jpg" alt="hand" width="450" height="465" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org">City Journal</a>]</strong></p>
<p><span>T</span>o assess the unprecedented scale that the modern democratic state has attained in Europe, it is useful to recall the historical kinship between two movements that emerged at its birth: classical liberalism and anarchism. Both were motivated by the mistaken hypothesis that the world was heading toward an era of the weakening of the state. While liberalism wanted a minimal state that would guide citizens almost imperceptibly, leaving them to go about their business in peace, anarchism called for the total death of the state. Behind these two movements was a hope typical of the European nineteenth century: that man’s plunder of man would soon come to an end. In the first case, this would result from the elimination of exploitation by unproductive classes, that is, the nobility and the clergy. In the second case, the key was to reorganize traditional social classes into little groups that would consume what they produced. But the political history of the twentieth century, and not just in its totalitarian extremes, proved unkind to both classical liberalism and anarchism. The modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes and spits out money.</p>
<p>This metamorphosis has resulted, above all, from a prodigious enlargement of the tax base—most notably, with the introduction of the progressive income tax. This tax is the functional equivalent of socialist expropriation. It offers the remarkable advantage of being annually renewable—at least, in the case of those it has not bled dry the previous year. (To appreciate the current tolerance of well-off citizens, recall that when the very first income tax was levied in England, at the rate of 5 percent, Queen Victoria worried that it might have exceeded acceptable limits. Since that day, we have become accustomed to the fact that a handful of productive citizens provide more than half of national income-tax revenues.)</p>
<p>When this levy is combined with a long list of other fees and taxes, which target consumers most of all, this is the surprising result: each year, modern states claim half the economic proceeds of their productive classes and pass them on to tax collectors, and yet these productive classes do not attempt to remedy their situation with the most obvious reaction: an antitax civil rebellion. This submissiveness is a political tour de force that would have made a king’s finance minister swoon.</p>
<p>With these considerations in mind, we can see that the question that many European observers are asking during the current economic crisis—“Does capitalism have a future?”—is the wrong one. In fact, we do not live in a capitalist system but under a form of semi-socialism that Europeans tactfully refer to as a “social market economy.” The grasping hand of government releases its takings mainly for the ostensible public interest, funding Sisyphean tasks in the name of “social justice.”</p>
<p>Thus, the direct and selfish exploitation of a feudal era has been transformed in the modern age into a juridically constrained and almost disinterested state kleptocracy. Today, a finance minister is a Robin Hood who has sworn a constitutional oath. The capacity that characterizes the Treasury, to seize with a perfectly clear conscience, is justified in theory as well as in practice by the state’s undeniable utility in maintaining social peace—not to mention all the other benefits it hands out. (In all this, corruption remains a limited factor. To test this statement, it suffices to think of the situation in post-Communist Russia, where an ordinary party man like Vladimir Putin has been able, in just a few years as head of state, to amass a personal fortune of more than $20 billion.) Free-market observers of this kleptocratic monster do well to call attention to its dangers: overregulation, which impedes entrepreneurial energy; overtaxation, which punishes success; and excessive debt, the result of budgetary rigor giving way to speculative frivolity.</p>
<p>Free-market authors have also shown how the current situation turns the traditional meaning of exploitation upside down. In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital. This reversal would imply the coming of a post-democratic age.</p>
<p>At present, the main danger to the future of the system involves the growing indebtedness of states intoxicated by Keynesianism. Discreetly and ineluctably, we are heading toward a situation in which debtors will once again dispossess their creditors—as has so often happened in the history of taxation, from the era of the pharaohs to the monetary reforms of the twentieth century. What is new is the gargantuan scale of public debt. Mortgaging, insolvency, monetary reform, or inflation—no matter, the next great expropriations are under way. Today, the state’s grasping hand even reaches into the pockets of generations unborn. We have already written the title of the next chapter of our history: “The pillage of the future by the present.”</p>
<p><em>Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher; his article was translated by Alexis Cornel.</em></div>
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		<title>Norman Podhoretz: It’s Not Rush Limbaugh Who Should Apologize &#8211; Commentary</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/norman-podhoretz-it%e2%80%99s-not-rush-limbaugh-who-should-apologize-commentary/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=norman-podhoretz-it%25e2%2580%2599s-not-rush-limbaugh-who-should-apologize-commentary</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:15:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47585</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In my new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left. I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In my new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left. I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in recent decades to be better served by the forces of the Right. In the course of describing and agreeing with the book the other day, Rush Limbaugh cited a few of the numerous reasons for the widespread puzzlement over the persistence of liberalism within the American Jewish community. And while discussing those reasons, he pointed to the undeniable fact that for “a lot of people” — prejudiced people, as he called them twice — the words “banker” and “Wall Street” are code words for “Jewish.” Was it possible, he wondered, that Obama’s attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyer’s remorse within the American Jewish community, which gave him 78 percent of its vote?</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/podhoretz/222056">Commentary » Blog Archive » It’s Not Rush Limbaugh Who Should Apologize</a>.</p>
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		<title>United in Hate:  The Left&#8217;s Romance with Tyranny and Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jonathan-schanzer/united-in-hate-the-lefts-romance-with-tyranny-and-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=united-in-hate-the-lefts-romance-with-tyranny-and-terror</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:10:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jonathan Schanzer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47399</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dr. Jamie Glazov exposes the hypocrisy of leftists and liberals who claim to champion the principles of liberalism and feminism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47403" title="nasrallah_chomsky" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/nasrallah_chomsky.jpg" alt="nasrallah_chomsky" width="450" height="313" /></p>
<p><strong>[This review is reprinted from <a href="http://www.meforum.org/meq/issues"><em>Middle East Quarterly</em></a>]</strong></p>
<p>Dr. Jamie Glazov, editor of<em> FrontPageMag.com</em>, exposes the hypocrisy of leftists and liberals who claim to champion the principles of freedom, democracy, liberalism, and feminism yet support both communist and Islamist dictatorships, which implement none of these principles.</p>
<p>David Horowitz, Glazov&#8217;s boss, also wrote a book in 2004, <em>Unholy Alliance, </em>on this subject, but Glazov digs deeper. The author, who fled the Soviet Union as a child and earned a PhD from York Univeristy in Toronto in Soviet studies, points in the first 100 pages of the book to a nucleus of American apologists in the 1930s who heaped praise on communist strongman Joseph Stalin, including Walter Duranty of <em>The New York Times</em> and author Upton Sinclair. In the generation that followed, intellectuals including novelist Normal Mailer and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir continued to apologize for communist regimes in Cuba, China, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.</p>
<p>With the decline of communism, the Left began to support Islamism. Whereas journalists, novelists and activists led the charge in the first wave, Glazov explains in the second half of the book, the most vociferous defenders of Islamism now come from the Ivory Tower.</p>
<p>After the Iranian revolution in 1979, French philosopher Michel Foucalt, who enjoyed stints at the University of Buffalo and University of California Berkeley, lauded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a &#8220;saint.&#8221; The late English professor Edward Said, famous for his anti-Western philosophy, Orientalism, became a popular apologist for Palestinian Islamist violence in the 1990s. In 2001, Rutgers University English professor, Barbara Foley, called the 9-11 attacks a legitimate response to the &#8220;fascism&#8221; of U.S. foreign policy. In 2006, Noam Chomsky, an M.I.T. linguistics professor, lauded Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose group calls for the destruction of America and Israel.</p>
<p>What Glazov does not explicitly note is that the foremost apologists for Islamism in the universities are the specialists in Middle Eastern Studies. From Columbia&#8217;s Rashid Khalidi to Georgetown&#8217;s John Esposito, the field has become overwrought with professor-activists who now rationalize Islamism to new generations of students.</p>
<p>But, Glazov provides ample proof that the professors are not alone. Filmmaker Michael Moore likened Iraqi terrorists to &#8220;minutemen.&#8221; Media mogul Ted Turner reported lauded the 9/11 hijackers as &#8220;brave.&#8221; And, of course, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter met Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, against the wishes of the U.S. State Department, and now seeks to engage in diplomacy with the group best known for suicide bombing.</p>
<p>Glazov&#8217;s lucid and compelling book would be strengthened by distinguishing more clearly between liberal-Left and far-Left. Indeed, not everyone who identifies with the former supports the ideals of the latter. Still, <em>United in Hate</em> highlights an important and disturbing trend that has made the battle of ideas against Islamists and despots that much harder to win.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>To order United in Hate,<a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1264299706&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr"> click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47406" title="united" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/united1.jpg" alt="united" width="350" height="515" /><br />
</strong></p>
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		<title>The Message of Massachusetts &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/the-message-of-massachusetts-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-message-of-massachusetts-wsj-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:34:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46876</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Whether or not Republican Scott Brown wins today in Massachusetts, the special Senate election has already shaken up American politics. The close race to replace Ted Kennedy, liberalism&#8217;s patron saint, shows that voters are rebelling even in the bluest of states against the last year&#8217;s unbridled pursuit of partisan liberal governance. Tomorrow marks the anniversary [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575011021604106924.html"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/NA-BD524_BROWN_C_20100115193754.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>Whether or not Republican Scott Brown wins today in Massachusetts, the special Senate election has already shaken up American politics. The close race to replace Ted Kennedy, liberalism&#8217;s patron saint, shows that voters are rebelling even in the bluest of states against the last year&#8217;s unbridled pursuit of partisan liberal governance.</p>
<p>Tomorrow marks the anniversary of President Obama&#8217;s Inaugural, and it&#8217;s worth recalling the extraordinary political opportunity he had a year ago. An anxious country was looking for leadership amid a recession, and Democrats had huge majorities and faced a dispirited, unpopular GOP. With monetary policy stimulus already flowing, Democrats were poised to get the political credit for the inevitable economic recovery.</p>
<p>Twelve months later, Mr. Obama&#8217;s approval rating has fallen further and faster than any recent President&#8217;s, Congress is despised, the public mood has shifted sharply to the right on the role of government, and a Republican could pick up a Senate seat in a state with no GOP Members of Congress and that Mr. Obama carried by 26 points.</p>
<p>What explains this precipitous political fall? Democrats and their media allies attribute it to GOP obstructionism, though Republicans lack the votes to stop anything by themselves. Or they blame their own Blue Dogs, who haven&#8217;t stopped or even significantly modified any legislation of consequence.</p>
<p>Or they blame an economic agenda that wasn&#8217;t populist or liberal enough because it didn&#8217;t nationalize banks and spend even more on &#8220;stimulus.&#8221; It takes a special kind of delusion to believe, amid a popular revolt against too much government spending and debt, that another $1 trillion would have made all the difference. But that&#8217;s the latest left-wing theme.</p>
<p>The real message of Massachusetts is that Democrats have committed the classic political mistake of ideological overreach. Mr. Obama won the White House in part on his personal style and cool confidence amid a recession and an unpopular war. Yet liberals in Congress interpreted their victory as a mandate to repeal more or less the entire post-1980 policy era and to fulfill, at last, their dream of turning the U.S. into a cradle-to-grave entitlement state.</p>
<p>We had been encouraged a year ago by Mr. Obama&#8217;s selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because we thought he would have learned from the Clinton failure of 1993-1994 and knew enough to stand up to the Congressional left. How wrong we were. Mr. Emanuel and his boss have instead deferred to Congress&#8217;s liberal barons on every major domestic policy.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575011021604106924.html">The Message of Massachusetts &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Hillary Goes Weak-Kneed on Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dick-morris/hillary-goes-weak-kneed-on-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillary-goes-weak-kneed-on-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:12:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dick Morris]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46625</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The impotence of sanctions not going for the jugular is obvious.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46630" title="hillary-clinton-46_1201962c" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hillary-clinton-46_1201962c.gif" alt="hillary-clinton-46_1201962c" width="450" height="282" /></p>
<p>A squishy, misguided, weak-kneed liberalism has emerged in Hillary Clinton&#8217;s comments about the kind of sanctions that would work best in halting Iran&#8217;s nuclear program. Rather than take the one step that would really be effective — cutting off the flow of refined gasoline to Iran — she instead insists that we need to target the Iranian leadership with sanctions.</p>
<p>Her husband wisely rejected the same kind of advice in deciding on the sanctions to impose on Serbia during the Bosnia war, opting for broad-based economic sanctions to deter aggression. The sanctions were incredibly effective, and the mere threat of their re-imposition in 1996 was enough to bring Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic to his knees.</p>
<p>But now Hillary says sanctions must target Iran&#8217;s Revolutionary Guard &#8220;without contributing to the suffering of the ordinary (Iranians), who deserve better than what they currently are receiving.&#8221;</p>
<p>But the impotence of sanctions that do not go for the jugular is obvious, and the abysmal record of targeted sanctions aimed at Iranian leaders is enough to discredit the entire process. However, sanctions can be effective — immediately — if they strike at a nation&#8217;s most vulnerable point.</p>
<p>The House of Representatives approved a resolution at the end of December that imposed sanctions against Iran, banning any company from doing business in the United States if it supplied oil products to Iran. Co-sponsored and pushed by Illinois Republican Rep. Mark Kirk (who deserves support in his bid for a Senate seat), the measure has real teeth and is now pending before the Senate.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s comment about avoiding sanctions that &#8220;contribute to the suffering&#8221; of the people of Iran can only be interpreted as a push-back against the sanctions that have passed the House.</p>
<p>This kind of weakness, on which criminal regimes like Iran&#8217;s thrive, is just the kind of impotence that liberal governments display.</p>
<p>From Munich to today, leaders have found it difficult to wage war against those who threaten world peace or even to impose serious sanctions against them. The argument is always the same: It will hurt ordinary people.</p>
<p>Well, so will atomic bombs.</p>
<p>Unless we inflict enough damage on Iran to force it to stop its weapons program, we are leaving Israel exposed and vulnerable to almost certain destruction.</p>
<p>Iran, despite having the second-largest deposits of oil in the world, lacks refining capacity and must import 40 percent of its gasoline. The threat of a cutoff is the ultimate weapon, short of force, to be used in compelling Iran to abide by the resolutions of the international community and refrain from producing nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s comment can only have brought a sigh of relief to the lips of the Iranian mullahs. It sends the clear signal that the Obama administration lacks the toughness to impose real sanctions and its disapproval can be safely disregarded in Tehran.</p>
<p>If gasoline imports were curtailed, the &#8220;ordinary&#8221; Iranians would blame their own government. They know that Iran has been isolated from the world by its own government, and surveys show this cutoff rankles the population mightily. They are very worried about getting the cold shoulder from the rest of the world and worry about the consequences for their already blighted and fragile economy.</p>
<p>A gasoline shortage can only stoke the fires of rebellion so brilliantly flaring forth on Iranian streets and can only bolster the courage of those who brave gunfire and police clubs to express their demands for liberty.</p>
<p>Hillary: Don&#8217;t go squishy on us now!</p>
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