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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; television</title>
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		<title>To Amnesty 5 Million</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/to-amnesty-5-million/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-amnesty-5-million</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:55:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[address]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245773</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The lawless Obamnesty has arrived.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245774" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama2-450x281.jpg" alt="President Obama Delivers Remarks On Executive Action Immigration Reform" width="388" height="242" /></a>Ignoring the brutal, historic slap-down angry American voters gave his party this month, President Obama unveiled plans for a unilaterally imposed amnesty that will shield an estimated 5 million illegal aliens from deportation.</p>
<p>Whether Republicans, now in possession of a thunderous mandate to fight Obama tooth and nail, will fight this despotic usurpation of the lawmaking powers of Congress remains to be seen.</p>
<p>Obama doesn&#8217;t care. He is pressing on, hoping to fill America with millions of new Democrat voters. And he&#8217;s going to kill American jobs in the process.</p>
<p>&#8220;We expect people who live in this country to play by the rules,&#8221; said the president. The address from the White House came yesterday, which just so happened to be Revolution Day (also known as Civil War Day) in Mexico.</p>
<p>&#8220;We expect those who cut the line will not be unfairly rewarded,&#8221; the president continued. Yet Obama went on to propose just such a reward in the form of a special &#8220;deal&#8221; for unlawful immigrants:</p>
<blockquote><p>So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens or illegal residents. If you register, pass a criminal background check and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.</p></blockquote>
<p>Strangely, Obama, who routinely flouts the Constitution, still acknowledges some limits to his power. The deal, he said, does not apply to recently arrived illegal aliens or illegals who have yet to sneak into the country.</p>
<p>&#8220;It does not grant citizenship or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive,&#8221; Obama said. &#8220;Only Congress can do that. All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.&#8221;</p>
<p>Whether the benefits illegal aliens receive are as generous as benefits that citizens receive is beside the point. Illegal aliens are already eligible for extensive benefits from the government and Obama is a big believer in getting poor people addicted to welfare. No serious person believes illegals won&#8217;t have access to social programs.</p>
<p>In the address Obama played semantic games. What he&#8217;s doing is not an amnesty, he said:</p>
<blockquote><p>Amnesty is the immigration system we have today. Millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time. That’s the real amnesty, leaving this broken system the way it is. Mass amnesty would be unfair.</p></blockquote>
<p>The former part-time adjunct constitutional law lecturer has it wrong. A failure to enforce a law isn&#8217;t tantamount to amnesty. Amnesty is an official governmental act of forgiveness that excuses a violation of the law. Being in a state of legal limbo in which law enforcement hasn&#8217;t yet called your number isn&#8217;t the same as amnesty.</p>
<p>Nor is the immigration system broken, at least not in the way Obama means.</p>
<p>When progressives say the system is broken, they mean it is functioning in a less than optimal manner, failing to capture every single prospective illegal alien available to wade across the Rio Grande or walk across the nation’s largely undefended border with Mexico. To them, immigration policy is a taxpayer-subsidized get-out-the-vote scheme for Democrats and the best reform they could imagine would be to abolish America’s borders altogether. Obama&#8217;s new amnesty plan is a step in this direction.</p>
<p>It is also a profoundly cynical move that rewards lawbreaking and begets future immigration amnesties. It will spell electoral death for the Republican Party in coming years because Latinos, who are believed to comprise the bulk of the illegals, have traditionally shown a strong preference for the Democratic Party and its left-of-center public policies. The amnesty for 5 million illegals is likely just the beginning. The government recently issued a procurement order seeking a contractor to make as many as 34 million immigration documents over the coming five years.</p>
<p>During his address, Obama quoted the Book of Exodus, saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger &#8212; we were strangers once, too. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.</p></blockquote>
<p>But the immigrants in question are not the legal immigrants of the past who followed the rules when they came to this country. They are invaders who broke the law and who continue to break the law by being here. America is not, nor has it ever been, a nation of illegal immigrants.</p>
<p>To qualify for relief from deportation, individuals will have to register with the government, pass criminal and national security background checks, pay their taxes, and pay a processing fee, according to a White House handout. Applications can&#8217;t be filed until early next year.</p>
<p>Parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents as of the date of the announcement are eligible, provided that they are not &#8220;enforcement priorities&#8221; and have been present in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2010. Also eligible are individuals who arrived in this country before Jan. 1, 2010 and before turning 16 years old, regardless of how old they are now. Processing times for certain categories of green card applicants will be accelerated. Recent arrivals who entered the country after Jan. 1 of this year will not be eligible to apply.</p>
<p>Obama lapdogs were ecstatic about the planned amnesty.</p>
<p>Echoing Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) who absurdly compared Obama&#8217;s executive order to the Emancipation Proclamation, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked, &#8220;Does the public know that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order?&#8221;</p>
<p>Except that the Emancipation Proclamation freed categories of slaves, innocent people victimized by an abhorrent institution, not illegal aliens who took it upon themselves to invade the country and abuse the goodwill of Americans. The only thing the two executive orders have in common is that a president signed them.</p>
<p>Republicans are deeply split on the amnesty issue so anyone expecting Republican lawmakers to give Obama a well-deserved rhetorical mauling two weeks after the GOP crushed Democrats in midterm elections will be disappointed in coming days. That&#8217;s not what the emasculated party of Lincoln does because it is terrified of being called racist for opposing the nation&#8217;s first (half) black president.</p>
<p>Despite running a virtually content-free campaign, on Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning at least 53 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 244 out of 435 seats. In the new year Republicans will control at least 31 state governors&#8217; mansions and at least 68 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska&#8217;s legislature has only one chamber). In at least 23 states Republicans will control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Democrats can make the same claim about only 7 states.</p>
<p>The election was arguably, depending on the psephological metrics used, the worst showing for the Democratic Party in its history.</p>
<p>Despite the newly enfeebled status of the Democrats, the House GOP&#8217;s response was predictably weak. Instead of righteously inveighing against the grave threat that Obama&#8217;s actions pose to the republic, on Twitter the official House Republican feed meekly exhorted the president to cooperate with them.</p>
<p>&#8220;We need a real fix, not a quick fix. Let&#8217;s fix our broken immigration system together,&#8221; read one GOP tweet. Another said, &#8220;Mr. President, stop acting alone. Let&#8217;s work together.&#8221; Maybe the GOP&#8217;s communications professionals would like to roast some s&#8217;mores and sing Kumbaya with the president.</p>
<p>And Obama must be quaking in his jackboots. Even after six years of getting beaten to a pulp, constantly sucker-punched by the nation&#8217;s Alinskyite president, congressional Republicans still aren&#8217;t anywhere close to grasping what he really is. They continue to treat Obama as if he&#8217;s a legitimate, sincere president who actually wants to do what&#8217;s best for America. They foolishly believe Obama cares about his falling public approval numbers and his presidential legacy. They refuse to acknowledge that he is a radical revolutionary figure hellbent on destroying, or in his own words, fundamentally transforming, the U.S. They actually seem to think Obama is interested in negotiating with them to find policy solutions that benefit the country. Many elected GOPers appear not to have an inkling that embracing amnesty is the same as signing a death warrant for the Republican Party.</p>
<p>House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who supports amnesty in principle but is under intense pressure from conservative lawmakers, is trying to put down a rebellion in his own House GOP conference. Although Obama has previously protested that he is not a king or an emperor, &#8220;he&#8217;s sure acting like one,&#8221; Boehner, who may face a challenge to his speakership in January, said yesterday.</p>
<p>Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was characteristically vague.</p>
<p>&#8220;If President Obama acts in defiance of the people and imposes his will on the country, Congress will act,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Retiring Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told <i>USA Today</i> earlier this week that Obama&#8217;s amnesty could spark civil unrest. &#8220;The country&#8217;s going to go nuts, because they&#8217;re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president, and it&#8217;s going to be a very serious situation.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re going to see &#8212; hopefully not &#8212; but you could see instances of anarchy &#8230; You could see violence,&#8221; Coburn said. Obama will be behaving like &#8220;an autocratic leader that&#8217;s going to disregard what the Constitution says and make law anyway.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Instead of having the rule of law handling in our country today, now we&#8217;re starting to have the rule of rulers, and that&#8217;s the total antithesis of what this country was founded on,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Here&#8217;s how people think: Well, if the law doesn&#8217;t apply to the president &#8230; then why should it apply to me?&#8221;</p>
<p>House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/393119/hal-rogers-obama-republican-mark-krikorian"><span style="color: #0433ff;">appears to have taken the wrong lesson</span></a> from the electoral bloodbath this month that set Democrats back 150 years. Although voters delivered the message that they want Obama stopped, Rogers interprets the election as a mandate for surrender.</p>
<p>&#8220;I believe a major consequence of this election is a loud and clear mandate from the American people for Washington to stop the gridlock, work together across ideological lines and start producing real accomplishments on their behalf,&#8221; Rogers wrote in an op-ed.</p>
<p>Rogers wants Congress to pass a long-term funding bill called an omnibus appropriations bill before the government&#8217;s authority to spend money expires on Dec. 11. It would keep the government operating for the rest of the federal fiscal year which runs to Sept. 30, 2015.</p>
<p>There will be &#8220;an extraordinary amount of work to do when the new Congress convenes in January &#8230; but there simply won&#8217;t be the political bandwidth available to address these pressing issues if Congress is bogged down in old battles and protracted to-do lists.&#8221;</p>
<p>Some Republicans have proposed defunding the parts of the government that would process amnesty-related paperwork.</p>
<p>Separately, Rogers has made the absurd suggestion that Congress approve a big, all-encompassing spending bill now and then rescind amnesty-relating funding next year. Rescissions happen but they&#8217;re relatively rare. Why bother giving Obama a green light to proceed with the amnesty now in the hope of slamming on the brakes in the new year?</p>
<p>The real problem with enacting an omnibus spending bill, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/393119/hal-rogers-obama-republican-mark-krikorian"><span style="color: #0433ff;">according to</span></a> Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is that such a funding measure &#8220;would enable Obama to complete his lawless amnesty scheme.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rogers insists that the amnesty cannot be stopped through the appropriations process.</p>
<p>It would be &#8220;impossible to defund President Obama&#8217;s executive order through a government spending bill,&#8221; House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing said yesterday, explaining that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is funded by user fees.</p>
<p>It is a facile, easily disproved argument. USCIS, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is part of the federal government. It was created by Congress and Congress can do anything it wants to it. It can give it money, take money away from it, give it a spanking, or order it to stand on one leg and bark like a dog.</p>
<p>In a development overshadowed by the unveiling of the amnesty, DHS <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/20/us-usa-ebola-immigrant-protection-idUSKCN0J41JS20141120"><span style="color: #0433ff;">announced</span></a> yesterday that it will grant &#8220;temporary protected status&#8221; to up to 8,000 people from the Ebola-afflicted African countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. These visitors may apply for work permits for 18 months. Unlike ordinary recipients of temporary protected status, these Ebola refugees will not be allowed to travel to their home countries and then return to the U.S., in order to prevent the spread of Ebola.</p>
<p>Or so the story goes. If Obama can find a way to let them stay in the U.S., he&#8217;ll do it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Sitcom Infantalization and the Death of America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/sitcom-infantalization-and-the-death-of-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sitcom-infantalization-and-the-death-of-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Jul 2013 04:24:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adolescence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adult]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[responsibility]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sitcoms]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196719</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How television moved from idealizing mature adults to overgrown children. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/the-big-bang-theory-cast.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196787" alt="the-big-bang-theory-cast" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/the-big-bang-theory-cast-450x318.jpg" width="270" height="191" /></a>It’s not difficult to peg precisely when the American sitcom moved away from following the lives of mature adults to idealizing the lives of overgrown adolescents. But there’s no question that two generations of Americans have now grown up in a world where virtually everyone worth watching on television is a twentysomething to thirtysomething without a home, a spouse, children, or even a solid job in many cases.</p>
<p>That transition began with the modern shift of the early 1970s, when CBS led the way in moving from traditional situation comedies like <i>Green Acres</i> and <i>The Beverly Hillbillies</i> to more urban-centered comedies like <i>The Mary Tyler Moore Show </i>and <i>All in the Family</i>. Both of those shows focused on non-traditional situations. <i>The Mary Tyler Moore Show</i> focused on a single woman living with a roommate while working at a news station. <i>All in the Family</i> focused on a father and mother living with their grown daughter and son-in-law. The twist: the father was a bigoted moron, and the mother was a good-hearted idiot, while the liberal son-in-law, who didn’t have the ability to provide for his wife, was the smartest one of the bunch.</p>
<p>Fast forward forty years. There are still family-oriented sitcoms, although they all feature non-traditional families being equated to traditional families, or completely dysfunctional traditional families (<i>Modern Family</i>, <i>Glee</i>, <i>Two and a Half Men</i>, <i>Family Guy</i>). There are work-oriented sitcoms, although those sitcoms largely revolve around people who dislike their jobs (<i>The Office</i>, <i>Parks and Recreation</i>). But all of those sitcoms revolve around people who are in their forties.</p>
<p>What of people in their thirties? They are treated like people in their twenties used to be. <i>The Big Bang Theory</i> features late-twenties scientists rooming together, or with their mother, struggling with love; it took five seasons for one of the main characters to get married. Nobody on the show has had children. <i>New Girl</i> features three men living with a woman in an apartment. All are approaching or above age thirty. All but one have dead-end jobs. None are married, none have children.</p>
<p>That used to be the exception rather than the rule. Now, thanks in part to the plethora of television characters who live glorious and fun single lives without responsibility, that’s become the societal ideal. The median age of marriage was stagnant from 1950 to 1970; it was 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1950, and 23.2 and 20.8, respectively, in 1970. As of 2010, the median age of first marriage is now 28.2 among men and 26.1 among women.</p>
<p>As for childbearing the numbers are similarly stunning. The average age for first childbirth for women in the United States is 25, lower than the average age for marriage (no wonder there are such massively rising rates of unwed motherhood across socioeconomic lines). The median age in 1950 was 22.8. That may seem like a minor rise, but as Jonathan Last has pointed out in his fantastic <i>What to Expect When Nobody’s Expecting</i>, a rising age of first birth and a lower age of last birth means fewer children.</p>
<p>Not all of this is attributable to television – not even close. But television, as both a reflective and a transformative medium, has changed how people think about marriage and family. Marriage on television is largely relegated to negativity. Married couples are generally miserable (<i>Everybody Loves Raymond</i>, <i>The Simpsons</i>), while single people lead glamorous lives full of sexy partners and interesting jobs (<i>Sex and the City</i>, <i>Friends</i>). Nobody has to live with the consequences of spending adulthood as in a suspended state of adolescence.</p>
<p>America, however, will. When Americans stop getting married, stop having children, stop aspiring for a home and a homestead, the predictable effect is an unmoored civilization, both morally and economically. We cannot all live in our father-in-law’s house. Someone has to pay the bills. And someone has to pick up the slack for a population that increasingly blows off responsibility for the fleeting fun of college-style living.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Will the First Obama-Romney Showdown Impact Voters?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/will-the-first-obama-romney-showdown-impact-voters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-the-first-obama-romney-showdown-impact-voters</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:50:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Denver]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Even at their most memorable, presidential debates don't live up to the hype. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/628x471-2.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146810" title="628x471-(2)" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/628x471-2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a>Mitt Romney and Barack Obama talked in Denver on Wednesday night. The American people listened. What did the electorate discover?</p>
<p>The Republican articulated an opposition to “trickle-down government” and support for the idea that “the private market and individual responsibility always works best.” The Democrat held that the “government has the capacity—federal government has the capacity—to open up opportunities” and that there are “some things that we do better together.”</p>
<p>In other words, candidates repeated the themes they have stressed on the campaign trail. For a voter that hasn’t been paying attention, the debate may have proved instructive. And for the challenger, merely standing on the same platform with the president certainly proved beneficial. But for educated voters—i.e., the ones watching the 90-minute discussion instead of <em>Here Comes Honey Boo Boo</em>—the debate offered little new in the way of substance.</p>
<p>In terms of style, viewers learned much. A sunny Romney smiled and engaged his opponent. A grim-faced Obama rarely even looked at his opponent. He displayed his teeth only with a testy smile, with his happy mouth disagreeing with his angry eyes. The former wanted to be there; the latter seemed bothered by the perfunctory affair.</p>
<p>The clear debate victory on substance but especially on style is good news for Romney. As much as we imagine debates as intellectual forums, the electorate always awards more points for style than for substance.</p>
<p>In the twenty-four presidential debates in American history, what the politicians have said has paled in importance to how they appeared when they said it. The events have proved less cerebral give-and-takes than showcases for candidates to emotionally connect (or not) with voters. Wednesday night conformed to this pattern. The president’s sour mood seeping through his seething smile seemed likely to repulse and not attract voters. The former governor’s warm and engaging personality dispelled notions of him as an out-of-touch millionaire.</p>
<p>Determining who won and who lost presidential debates has always been more about the candidates’ manner than their words. In 1960, a tanned and vibrant John Kennedy cut a contrast to a pale and sickly Richard Nixon sporting a five-o’clock shadow even on black-and-white television. In 1992, George H.W. Bush reinforced a perception of an aloof chief executive by checking his watch. In 2000, Al Gore’s repeated interrupting sighs and invasion of George W. Bush’s personal space conveyed arrogance and awkwardness.</p>
<p>Even when candidates most memorably harmed themselves with their own words, the way they said it rather than what they said hurt most. Gerald Ford’s infamous 1976 gaffe denying Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was compounded by the Manchurian Candidate manner of his remarks. When CNN anchor Bernard Shaw threw high-heat at Michael Dukakis by asking him if he would favor the death penalty if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered, the Massachusetts governor reinforced his reputation as a wooden policy-wonk by answering the emotion-laden question in a stoic manner.</p>
<p>The debates have left us with memorable one-liners and lingering catch phrases: “There you go again,” “fuzzy math,” “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” and, most recently, “trickle-down government.” But they haven’t given voters anything they haven’t already heard during the lengthy campaigns that preceded them.</p>
<p>The candidates debate foreign, economic, and social policy. The only topic beyond debate is the debates themselves. Do they really matter as an intellectual exercise? For the first 42 presidential elections, Americans chose a president without a staged conversation between the aspirants. The connection between winning a debate and presiding over the federal government wasn’t apparent to voters until very recently. Sixteen years after the first presidential debate in 1960, such forums became obligatory for the nominees of the two major parties.</p>
<p>After last night’s drubbing, the president may be wishing debates weren’t required affairs. One senses that the bothered Barack had this feeling even before the action started.</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>Norman Lear&#8217;s Left-Wing Paranoia About &#8216;The Right&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/larry-elder/norman-lears-left-wing-paranoia-about-the-right/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=norman-lears-left-wing-paranoia-about-the-right</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/larry-elder/norman-lears-left-wing-paranoia-about-the-right/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:03:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=117587</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[They're coming for your children! ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Norman_Lear_100x75.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117588" title="Norman_Lear_100x75" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Norman_Lear_100x75.gif" alt="" width="375" height="256" /></a></p>
<p>They&#8217;re coming for your children! They&#8217;re coming for the womenfolk! Then they&#8217;re coming after you! Norman Lear, the famous television show producer, offered this hysterically paranoid assessment of the allegedly growing and presumably insidious power of &#8220;the right&#8221;:</p>
<p>&#8220;I want to suggest that we lefties start laying claim to what we see as &#8216;sacred&#8217; and serve it up proudly to the religious right — to the James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove &#8230; hatemongers, sheathed in sanctity, and to the Koch brothers, the types that fund them and use them so effectively for their own political power-grabbing purposes. Over the past several decades, the power-grabbing right has built a powerful infrastructure — radio and TV stations and networks. They&#8217;ve built think tanks, colleges and law schools.&#8221;</p>
<p>How accurate is Lear&#8217;s assessment of the supposed power and influence of the right? Is the right steadily forming a formidable alliance of academics, media outlets, websites, etc., that serve as a fourth column for the &#8220;right wing&#8221;? Even if this were true, what about the power of the left?</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s look at the mainstream media. In &#8220;Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,&#8221; UCLA economist and political science professor Dr. Tim Groseclose uses three different methods to determine the SQ — or slant quotient — of the major media outlets. Of the 20 most prominent news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, &#8220;Good Morning America&#8221; and Time magazine, he found only two that leaned to the right: The Washington Times and Fox News.</p>
<p>True, the network evening news shows no longer hold the market share of years past, but nearly 25 million Americans still turn to Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley each night. That means eight times as many viewers watch ABC/NBC/CBS as watch &#8220;The O&#8217;Reilly Factor,&#8221; the top-rated cable news/talk program.</p>
<p>When people like Lear speak of the growing power of the right-wing cabal, they believe Fox leads the charge. And Bill O&#8217;Reilly is clearly the face of the Fox News network. But as hated as O&#8217;Reilly is by the left, how legitimate is their description of O&#8217;Reilly as a right-wing ideologue?</p>
<p>O&#8217;Reilly is not even a Republican. He is registered as an independent and opposes the death penalty. He supported — at least initially — the Senate&#8217;s so-called &#8220;amnesty bill.&#8221; His opposition to ObamaCare is based on cost rather than the Constitution. He believes that in &#8220;a system where everybody is guaranteed the same health care &#8230; whether you have a lot of money or no money, you&#8217;re gonna get the same health care.</p>
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		<title>Hollywood: The Democrats&#8217; Secret Weapon</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ben-shapiro/hollywood-the-democrats-secret-weapon/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hollywood-the-democrats-secret-weapon</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ben-shapiro/hollywood-the-democrats-secret-weapon/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:50:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107135</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Trashing anything that mildly criticizes the Left -- and promoting anything that criticizes the Right.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/whitney.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107137" title="n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/whitney.jpg" alt="" width="410" height="230" /></a></p>
<p>Network television’s new offerings this year offer more evidence to the effect that Hollywood is the PR machine for the Democratic left.  No matter that our leftist president is wildly unpopular; never mind that Americans are resonating to Constitutional messages as they haven’t for over a century.  In Hollywood, it is always a day of liberal hope and change.</p>
<p>Take, for example, <em>Whitney</em> (NBC).  Comedy Central quasi-star Whitney Cummings finally has her own show.  What’s wrong with Cummings?  Aside from the fact that she once said that Quentin Tarantino had “produced more retarded things than Sarah Palin’s vagina,” Cummings’ new show has her playing a woman who lives with her boyfriend in traditional Hollywood non-marital bliss.  “Getting married would pop the balloon,” says the showrunner, Betsy Thomas.  “This relationship is a modern relationship … it’s balanced … that’s the relationship that reflects the way we live our lives.”  This is merely the next step in the <em>Friends-Modern Family </em>trail that leads away from traditional family and toward “alternative arrangements.”  Just what the doctor ordered when so many children are born into broken homes.</p>
<p>Then there’s the continued propaganda machine that is <em>Glee</em> (FOX).  This year, Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) is running for Congress as a covert Tea Party candidate.  Meanwhile, the saintly Kurt, the gay character who provides the Lady Gaga-esque moral compass for the show, is running for class president, aided by the bisexual cheerleader Britney.</p>
<p>Even shows that should be safe for the family aren’t.  <em>Dancing with the Stars</em> (ABC) has already featured a he/she in Chaz/Chastity Bono, shown Carlton Kressley (<em>Queer Eye for the Straight Guy</em>) bashing the Tea Party (he takes off a gorilla mask and then announces, “It still smells like a Tea Party”), and featured Nancy Grace’s nipple.</p>
<p>You can’t escape the propaganda even in escapist shows – on <em>Terra Nova</em> (FOX), President Obama’s face appears on a $1,000 bill of the future, although to be fair, the future is terrible, which is why everyone wants to go back to the time of the dinosaurs.</p>
<p>None of this is to say that these shows are awful in quality (though some of them are).  It’s just to point out that Hollywood is happy to act as a tool for leftist thought, even if it loses ratings.  <em>Glee’s</em> opener was down over 30% from last year’s premiere.  The most controversial new show, <em>The Playboy Club</em> (NBC), based on Hugh Hefner’s beloved all-American establishment, was dead on arrival – its second episode earned a pathetic 1.3/3 rating, which pencils out to less than 4 million viewers.  <em>Dancing with the Stars</em> had bad premiere numbers, and then dropped in week two.  But television’s honchos don’t seem to get the point.</p>
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		<title>Promoting a Genocidal &#8220;Peace&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/kenneth-levin/promoting-a-genocidal-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=promoting-a-genocidal-peace</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/kenneth-levin/promoting-a-genocidal-peace/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=58256</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What is achieved when Israel’s enemies are encouraged in promoting their plans for a Middle East Holocaust? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/PaliNaziSalute.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58262" title="PaliNaziSalute" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/PaliNaziSalute.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>Indoctrination to genocidal anti-Semitism is epidemic among Palestinians and in Arab and other Muslim states. &#8220;Peace&#8221; plans that do not recognize this as the major obstacle to genuine peace, but rather push steps which ignore it, inexorably lead to more violence and are doomed to fail. Even worse, by their silence on this issue they pander to and help promote such deadly hate-mongering.</p>
<p>Demonization not only of Israel&#8217;s Jews but of all Jews, and calls for their mass murder, are a staple of Palestinian institutions, those controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority as well as those of Hamas.</p>
<p>Hamas&#8217;s charter quotes a Hadith in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will help in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas &#8220;aspires to the realization of Allah&#8217;s promise, no matter how long that should take.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hamas systematically employs its media, mosques and schools to convey the same message. Its schools and children&#8217;s television programming teach their young audience the virtues of killing Jews.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority hardly lags behind its Islamist rivals in peddling genocidal Jew-hatred. PA media depict Jews as a cancer that must be excised and, like Hamas, insist it is a religious duty to do so. PA indoctrination includes delineations of the nature of Jews that entail virtually every hoary anti-Semitic caricature. While PA leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas talk of &#8220;peace&#8221; to Western leaders and media, they use their vehicles of incitement to instill in Palestinians not only commitment to annihilating Israel but also dedication to extirpating the Jews.</p>
<p>For example, a recent official Palestinian Authority Friday sermon, broadcast on PA TV and translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), had the preacher declaring: &#8220;The Jews are the enemies of Allah and His messenger&#8230; the enemies of humanity in general&#8230; Our mutual enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith more than an issue pertaining to occupation and land&#8230; The prophet Muhammad said: ‘You will fight the Jews, and you will kill them&#8230;’&#8221;</p>
<p>In the wider Arab world, even in countries allied to the United States, the same message is incessantly promoted. A recurrent feature of Saudi government television is of clerics or other authority figures demonizing Jews, often with the speaker having children present to whom they are imparting their Jew-hating wisdom.</p>
<p>Even in countries with which Israel is officially at peace, such as Egypt, variations on the same theme are prominent in government-controlled media. Egyptian television and government newspapers have, for example, featured clerical and academic authorities confirming the Jews do indeed use the blood of non-Jews in their recipes for Passover matzoh.</p>
<p>Robert Wistrich, a leading authority on the history of anti-Semitism and author of the recently published book on the subject,  <em>A Lethal Obsession</em>, has written:</p>
<p><em>&#8220;In the Middle East, [anti-Semitism] has taken on a particularly dangerous, toxic and potentially genocidal aura of hatred, closely linked to the ‘mission’ of holy war or jihad against the West and the Jews&#8230;</em></p>
<p><em>&#8220;The scale and extremism of the [anti-Semitic] literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>Also noteworthy is that, aside from the exacerbations introduced by the rise of Islamist groups in recent decades, similar anti-Jewish depredations permeated much of the Arab world before the 1967 war and Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and even before Israel’s founding.</p>
<p>What has been the Western response to this promotion of genocidal Jew-hatred? Largely silence. In the Palestinian arena, the indoctrination has actually been paid for in part by the European Union and individual European states, the United Nations and even American government funds.</p>
<p>But no less morally obscene is the virtual absence of any acknowledgment of this hate indoctrination from all discussions of &#8220;peace.&#8221; There are, here and there, some bland references to ending &#8220;incitement,&#8221; but no evident outrage over the level and nature of the incitement or discussion of what must be done &#8211; or the time it will take &#8211; to reverse the impact of decades of hate-inculcation.</p>
<p>Nor is there any recognition of Israel’s need to be able to defend itself from the onslaught that it has faced in the past and will inevitably face in the future as a result of this indoctrination. The need for Israel to have defensible borders &#8211; recognized in 1967 by the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 in the wake of the Six Day War, and by various U.S. presidents in the ensuing decades &#8211; gets scant recognition from today’s self-styled promoters of peace, even as the intensity and impact of Palestinian and broader Arab genocidal Jew-hatred has only grown.</p>
<p>Territory beyond the pre-1967 cease-fire line that Israel has every right under 242 and under international law to claim for the purpose of national defense, territories that should, given their legal status, be depicted as &#8220;disputed,&#8221; are declared &#8220;Palestinian&#8221; by Western politicians and media.</p>
<p>Israel’s claims are dismissed as illegitimate land-grabs and the threats against her are ignored.</p>
<p>Those interested in a genuine peace would recognize that true peace is a long way off and will never be achieved as long as Israel’s enemies continue to indoctrinate their people in genocidal anti-Semitism. They would draw public attention to this obscenity and to its obstruction of possible movement toward a real peace. And they would seek in the interim lesser, and less murder-enabling, goals entailing a separation of Palestinians from Israel to the degree commensurate with Israel’s retaining strategic territories necessary for its defense; goals that, for example, would not put Israel’s major population centers within range of the type of assaults that have followed upon Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.</p>
<p>Genuine peace-seekers would aspire to arrangements that enable Palestinians to pursue their own, separate political course without rendering Israel more vulnerable to those whose agenda is the annihilation of its people.</p>
<p>Promoters of anything less, of any plan that is silent about the hate-indoctrination and the existential threat it represents to Israel, or gives it no more than a passing nod of acknowledgment as a problem, are not pursuing peace. Promoters of any formula that talks of &#8220;peace&#8221; as reachable in short order and dismisses Israel’s need for defensible borders are not agents of serious attempts to attain peace. Whether such formulas emanate from gentile or Jew, from the EU, or individual European states, or the UN, or the Quartet, or the State Department or the White House, or are advanced by Israel’s Meretz party, or the devotees of Peace Now, or the beneficiaries of the New Israel Fund, or the groupies of J Street &#8211; their promoters are in reality silent appeasers and accommodators, and not infrequently abettors, of those who are both propagandizing for and actively aspiring to another genocide of the Jews.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.﻿</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Global Warming: The Other Side</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/walter-williams/global-warming-the-other-side/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=global-warming-the-other-side</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/walter-williams/global-warming-the-other-side/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:00:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48896</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ignore the hype and consider the evidence. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/GlobalWarmingSnow.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-48898" title="GlobalWarmingSnow" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/GlobalWarmingSnow-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hour-long  television documentary titled &#8220;Global Warming: The Other Side,&#8221; presents  evidence that our <a href="#" target="_blank">National Climatic Data Center</a> has been manipulating weather data just as the now  disgraced and under investigation British University of East Anglia Climate  Research Unit. The NCDC is a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and  Atmospheric Administration. Its manipulated climate data is used by the Goddard  Institute of Space Studies, which is a division of the National Aeronautical and  Space Administration. John Coleman&#8217;s blockbuster five-part series can be seen <a href="www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/81583352.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>The Coleman documentary presents research by computer expert  E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D&#8217;Aleo. During  the 1960s and into the 1980s, the number of stations used for calculating global  surface temperatures was about 6,000. By 1990, the number of stations dropped  rapidly to about 1,500. Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of  the Earth. Not adjusting for their lost made temperatures appear to be higher  than was in fact the case. According to Science &amp; Environmental Policy  Project, Russia reported that CRU was ignoring data from colder regions of  Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data. That means data  loss was not simply the result of station closings but deliberate decisions by  CRU to ignore them in order to hype their global warming claims. D&#8217;Aleo and  Smith report that our NCDC engaged in similar deceptive activity where they have  dropped stations, particularly in colder climates, higher elevations or closer  to the polar regions. Temperatures are now simply projected for these colder  stations from other stations, usually in warmer climates.</p>
<p>Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little  difference in terms of the response to manmade global warming hysteria. Why? <a href="#" target="_blank">Vested</a> economic and political  interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at  stake.</p>
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<p>Therefore, many people who  recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to  defend it anyway. Automobile companies have invested billions in research and <a href="#" target="_blank">investment</a> in producing &#8220;green  cars.&#8221; General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to  outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact  fluorescent light bulbs (CFL). Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten  Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention  massive subsidies. Thousands of major corporations around the world have taken  steps to reduce carbon emissions including giants like IBM, Nike, Coca-Cola and  BP, the oil giant. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Dell have vowed to become  &#8220;carbon neutral.&#8221;</p>
<p>Then there&#8217;s Chicago Climate Futures Exchange that plans to  trade in billions of dollars of greenhouse gas emission allowances. Corporate  America and labor unions, as well as their international counterparts have a  huge multi-trillion dollar <a href="#" target="_blank">financial</a> stake in the  perpetuation of the global warming fraud. Federal, state and local agencies have  spent billions of dollars and created millions of jobs to deal with one aspect  or another of global warming.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s deeper than just money. Schoolteachers have created  polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our children when in fact  there are more polar bears now than in 1950. They&#8217;ve taught children about  melting glaciers. Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was  forced to admit that their Himalayan glacier-melting fraud was done to &#8220;impact  policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete  action.&#8221;</p>
<p>What would all the beneficiaries of the global warming hype  do if it becomes widely known and accepted that mankind&#8217;s activities have very  little to do with the Earth&#8217;s temperature? I don&#8217;t know but a lot of people  would feel and look like idiots. But I bet that even if the permafrost returned  as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional  stooges would still call for measures to <a href="#" target="_blank">fight global warming</a>.</p>
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		<title>Politicians in Wonderland</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/politicians-in-wonderland/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=politicians-in-wonderland</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/politicians-in-wonderland/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:02:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48479</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What's the real story on how many jobs the president has created?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48480" title="GYI0000729870.jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/obama.jpg" alt="GYI0000729870.jpg" width="450" height="356" /></p>
<p>There was a recent flap because three different members of the Obama administration, on three different Sunday television talk shows, gave three widely differing estimates of how many jobs the president has created.</p>
<p>That should not have been surprising, except as a sign of political sloppiness in not getting their stories together beforehand. They were simply doing what Barack Obama himself does — namely, just pulling numbers out of thin air. However, being more skilled at creating illusions, the president does it with more of an air of certainty, as if he has gone around and counted the new jobs himself.</p>
<p>The big question that seldom— if ever— gets asked in the mainstream media is whether these are a net increase in jobs. Since the only resources that the government has are the resources it takes from the private sector, using those resources to create jobs means reducing the resources available to create jobs in the private sector.</p>
<p>So long as most people do not look beyond superficial appearances, politicians can get away with playing Santa Claus on all sorts of issues, while leaving havoc in their wake— such as growing unemployment, despite all the jobs being &#8220;created.&#8221;</p>
<p>Whatever position people take on <a style="border-bottom: 0.075em solid darkgreen ! important; font-weight: normal ! important; font-size: 100% ! important; text-decoration: underline ! important; padding-bottom: 1px ! important; color: darkgreen ! important; background-color: transparent ! important; background-image: none; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt;" href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/thomas-sowell/politicians-in-wonderland.html#" target="_blank">health care</a> reform, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus— usually a sign of mushy thinking— that it is a good idea for the government to force insurance companies to insure people whom politicians want them to insure, and to insure them for things that politicians think should be insured.</p>
<p>Contrary to what politicians expect us to do, let&#8217;s stop and think.</p>
<p>Why aren&#8217;t insurance companies already insuring the people and the conditions that they are now going to be forced to cover? Because that means additional costs— and because the insurance companies don&#8217;t think their customers are willing to pay those particular costs for those particular coverages.</p>
<p>It costs politicians nothing to mandate more insurance coverage for more people.</p>
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<p>But that doesn&#8217;t mean that the costs vanish into thin air. It simply means that both buyers and sellers of insurance are forced to pay costs that neither of them wants to pay. But, because soaring political rhetoric leaves out such grubby things as costs, it sounds like a great deal.</p>
<p>It is not just costs that are left out. It is consequences in general.</p>
<p>With all the laments in the media about skyrocketing unemployment among young people, and especially minority young people, few media pundits even try to connect the dots to explain why unemployment hits some groups much harder than others.</p>
<p>Yet unusually high unemployment rates among young people is not something new or even something peculiar to the United States. Even before the current worldwide recession, unemployment rates were 20 percent or more among workers under 25 years of age in a number of Western European countries.</p>
<p>The young have less experience to offer and are therefore less in demand. Before politicians stepped in, that just meant that younger workers were paid less. But this is not a permanent situation because youth itself is not permanent, and pay rises with experience.</p>
<p>Enter politicians. By mandating a minimum wage that sounds reasonable for most workers, they put a price on inexperienced and unskilled labor that often exceeds what it is worth.</p>
<p>Mandated pay rates, like mandated insurance coverage, impose on buyers and sellers alike things that they would not choose to do otherwise.</p>
<p>Workers of course prefer higher wage rates. But the very fact that the government has to impose those wage rates means that workers were unwilling to risk not having a job by refusing to work for less than the wage rate that has been mandated. Now that choice has been taken out of their hands, with the hidden cost in this case being higher unemployment rates.</p>
<p>It is of course no secret that there is no free lunch. It is just an inconvenient distraction that gets left out of political rhetoric.</p>
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		<title>Peggy Noonan: The Obama Contradiction &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/peggy-noonan-the-obama-contradiction-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=peggy-noonan-the-obama-contradiction-wsj-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/peggy-noonan-the-obama-contradiction-wsj-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:53:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48124</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you&#8217;re always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it&#8217;s awkward. The vice president and the speaker have been instructed by media professionals not [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031563325226450.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/OB-FJ794_0127_O_G_20100127211956.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you&#8217;re always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it&#8217;s awkward. The vice president and the speaker have been instructed by media professionals not to let their eyes do what they want to do, which is survey the doings in the chamber. Instead they must stare unwaveringly at the back of the president&#8217;s head. This is so that they appear to be fascinated by what he&#8217;s saying, as if he&#8217;s so interesting that they can&#8217;t take their eyes off him. It&#8217;s also so that you, the viewer, don&#8217;t become distracted by wondering whom they&#8217;re looking at in the audience.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s uncomfortable for them, and boring. You, as a member of the TV audience, get to watch the president. The speaker and the vice president get to think, &#8220;Huh, he&#8217;s getting a little gray in the back.&#8221; The reason Nancy Pelosi often seems a little dart-eyed in these circumstances is that she&#8217;s always trying to get a look at the chamber when she thinks the camera isn&#8217;t on her. Joe Biden seems happy to be the fascinated person with crinkly eyes and shining teeth. But for Mrs. Pelosi it&#8217;s a challenge. This is her chamber, all her people are here, and she wants to be looking at John Boehner&#8217;s face and Harry Reid&#8217;s and see who&#8217;s cheering and who&#8217;s wearing what.</p>
<p>But the three-shot the other night was also the president&#8217;s problem. It underscored that he gave the first year of his presidency to the Democrats of Congress, that they wrote the costly and unpopular health-care and spending bills.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031563325226450.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond">The Obama Contradiction &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>At Last, Some Decent Israeli Films</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/at-last-some-decent-israeli-films/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=at-last-some-decent-israeli-films</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/at-last-some-decent-israeli-films/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:08:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46783</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Film-makers emerge who don't care to please the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish crowd.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46785" title="filmreel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/filmreel.gif" alt="filmreel" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>The Israeli film industry as a whole leaves little to the imagination and much to disappoint. It is dominated by political ideologues of a distinctly leftist slant who tend to see their country through the eyes of its enemies, favoring the Palestinian narrative, claiming to understand the policies and grievances of the surrounding Muslim nations, relentlessly critical of the army, the settlers and the so-called religious Right, and basking parasitically in the approval of the liberal elites who give out the international prizes and citations.</p>
<p>An excellent example of such opportunistic practices is provided by Ran Edelist who directed a documentary entitled <em><a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P1-135983867.html">Ruach Shaked</a></em> about an Israeli reconnaissance unit operating in the Sinai during the Six Day War. The film claims that the unit had killed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war, a revelation which caused a media firestorm and led to members of the Egyptian parliament calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and the suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel. Edelist has admitted that errors were made with regard to voice-over commentary and wrongly juxtaposed archival footage—in point of fact, the enemy casualties were actually <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/Fedayeen.html">fedayeen</a> trying to infiltrate into Israel and no POWs were executed. Such films, however, are pre-screened and it is hard to believe that such obtrusive blunders were overlooked, yet Edelist and Ittay Landsburg Nevo, head of the left-leaning Israel Broadcasting Authority, defended the production whose pejorative effect on the political scene could have been predicted with even the most rudimentary foresight.</p>
<p>Similarly, Israel’s cable TV Channel 8 and the Jerusalem Cinematheque have been willing to fund anti-Zionist filmmaker <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyal_Sivan">Eyal Sivan</a>, a typical self-abnegating Jew who managed to avoid his military service, was a speaker at “Israeli Apartheid Week” in London in 2007, and signed a public document condemning “the brutality and cruelty of Israeli policy” during the summer 2006 war with Hizbullah. Israel’s Channel 2’s Keshet franchise has frequently aired the docudramas of <a href="http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=869">Motti Lerner</a>, who plays fast and loose with the historical truth and believes, according to a paper he delivered at Brandeis University, that Israeli society is diseased, suffering from an “inability…to empathize with the Palestinians.” Along the same lines, Shimon Dotan’s documentary, <em><a href="http://www.altfg.com/blog/film-reviews/hot-house-shimon-dotan/">Hot House</a></em>, funded chiefly by Israel’s New Foundation for Film and Television, sympathetically profiles female terrorist Ahlam Tamini who murdered fifteen people, eight of them children, in the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. Yet, speaking for the Palestinians, Dotan comments: “We owe them empathy.”</p>
<p>Then we have Ari Folman’s recent <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir">Waltz with Bashir</a></em>, the recipient of many awards and critical accolades. Although an improvement over the general run of Israeli-bashing films, it nevertheless magnifies the strength and firepower of the enemy while appearing to stress the comparative weakness and fear of the IDF. Its effect is to demoralize. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as a cohort of flakes, freaks, wimps and anxiety-ridden semi-losers who have trouble reconciling the importance of their mission with the courage and resolution required of them—indeed, the central character is so traumatized he <em>cannot even remember</em> the operation and travels about interviewing his former comrades to fill in the yawning blank. And the entire context of the march into Lebanon, the reason it was deemed necessary by the Israeli high command, the years of indiscriminate shelling, incursions and kidnappings suffered by Israelis in the north of the country, is conveniently forgotten not only by the protagonist but by the director as well.</p>
<p>Israeli cineaste Hannah Brown, puffing what she calls Israel’s <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261364558313&amp;pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">smash hit</a> decade, revels in the acclaim flowing from the politically correct international festivals and derides individuals skeptical of this trend as right-wing “party poopers.” Regrettably, this doesn’t change the fact that “most directors are on the Left,” as she graciously allows, and that their partisan colors show through their productions. Any film by the widely celebrated, tediously pedantic and unfailingly depressing left-winger <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Gitai">Amos Gitai</a> renders this obvious. As <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&amp;cid=1261364476523">Seth Frantzman points out</a>, Israeli directors tend to make films about a Jewish woman falling for a Palestinian suicide bomber (Dror Zahavi’s <a href="http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-310/_nr-617/i.html"><em>For My Father</em></a>) or a Jewish woman falling in love with an Arab who murders her brother (Keren Yedaya’s <em><a href="http://cineuropa.org/trailer.aspx?lang=en&amp;documentID=108740">Jaffa</a></em>). What is the message of such films? Frantzman asks, and replies: “That Israelis should ‘love the other’ to the extent that they love murderers.” That seems to be about right.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there are some notable film-makers who are more concerned with telling the truth than with making a reputation for themselves by catering to the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish crowd. Eran Kolirin’s <em><a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bands_visit/">The Band’s Visit</a></em> is a fine companion piece to Eytan Fox’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_on_Water_%28film%29"><em>Walk on Water</em></a> and Gidi Dar’s <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushpizin">Ushpizin</a></em>,<em> </em>all superbly directed films with fascinating characters, a non-ideological theme and a credible story about evolving relationships that bring people closer together rather than set them apart in resentment and intransigence. These are beautifully composed and warm-hearted movies that affirm Israeli life, for all  its warts, avoiding both sentimentality and the lurid, selective episoding of the mainstream <em>mishpoca</em>.</p>
<p>Now comes a new film that joins the Reform Cinemagogue of refreshing, untendentious and largely non-sectarian productions, altering the jaundiced tone and acerbic flavor of their majoritarian predecessors. <em><a href="http://www.film.com/movies/lemon-tree/19012819">The Lemon Tree</a></em>, directed by Eran Riklis, already famed for <a href="http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/sharonabella/interview_with_film_director_eran_riklis"><em>The Syrian Bride</em></a>, is a sensitive, bittersweet look at the Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio which tries to be reasonably fair to both sides in the conflict. The story turns upon the status of a lemon grove owned by Salma Zidane, a Palestinian widow whose family has tended the lemon trees for generations. Her peace and modest prosperity is shattered when the just-appointed Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Navon, and his wife Mira move into their new home on the Green Line, which abuts directly on the widow’s property.</p>
<p>The issue is security, for the lemon grove furnishes perfect cover for Palestinian terrorists who might be planning to attack the minister’s home. At the same time, the widow’s livelihood is equally at stake. The minister oversees the construction of a fence between the two properties, preventing the widow from tending to her trees, which begin to wither from lack of water. He then orders the lemon grove razed—a scenario based on a similar, real-life situation involving former Israeli Defense Minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaul_Mofaz">Shaul Mofaz</a>. The emblem, of course, is unmistakable. The clash between the widow and the minister, between two homes, two narratives and two necessities, is obviously Riklis’ allegory of the Israeli/Palestinian standoff and of the “wall,” both physical and psychological, which divides them.</p>
<p>Plainly, the Israelis are not given a free pass. The minister is self-righteous, loud and aggressive, relishing his recent appointment, enjoying the perquisites of authority, and deaf to the legitimate needs of his Palestinian neighbor. The soldier who guards the Minister’s home is a good-natured idiot, who reflects rather poorly on the IDF. The Israeli military lawyer is a bully. To Riklis’ credit, however, the Palestinians are not depicted as romantic innocents who can do no wrong, or as the world’s chosen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29">Na’vi</a> struggling to regain their illusory Pandora. We are afforded a glimpse behind the politically-generated image. The widow has a brief affair with the young lawyer she has hired to represent her as her case moves through the Israeli justice system. For this breach of “honor” she is threatened by the local clan chieftain with certain unspecified but clearly menacing consequences. This is still a primitive and misogynous society, as we are meant to see, caged in tribal preconceptions. The lawyer is a sympathetic figure but eventually succumbs to the allure of PR glory for having won a partial legal victory—the fence will remain but only half the orchard will be cut down—exchanging his disheveled attire for a shiny new suit, his unprepossessing office for an upscale address, a commitment for a career, and his unpretentious self for the heroic persona of defender of “the people.” He is on the make, like most of the Palestinian nomenklatura.</p>
<p>The film’s intentions are noble but, if it has a weakness, it concerns precisely the controversial nature of the fence, or “wall,” which, in the political and military framework of the hostility between two peoples, is the direct result of the Palestinian intifadas. The Minister may be a rather disagreeable figure, obstreperous and peremptory, but he surely does not deserve his wife’s growing estrangement over the raising of the fence and her decision to leave the marriage. The fence is meant to protect her too, despite her vicarious identification with the beleaguered widow. More importantly, the fence that Navon has ordered built, aka the “separation barrier” condemned by much of the world, and the partial lopping of the orchard, are not the product of personal caprice or of a policy of invasive sequestration. It is Salma’s own people who have made it inevitable, indeed who may be said to have built the fence on their own initiative by unleashing a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians.</p>
<p><em>The Lemon Tree</em> skirts the central issues of Israeli security and Palestinian responsibility, and in this way partly conforms to the “progressivist” and post-Zionist bias that actuates much of the Israeli intelligentsia, the media and the so-called “peace” faction. It does not in this regard bear adequate witness to the true situation that prevails in the country. The fact that it was co-written by Israeli-Arab <a href="http://www.a2palestinefilmfest.org/filmmakers.html">Suha Arraf</a>, a former journalist for the left-leaning <em>Haaretz</em> newspaper, might explain this partial skewering of reality. And yet it must be admitted that <em>The Lemon Tree</em> distinguishes itself from the general run of Israeli anti-Israeli films and “documentaries,” treating its characters in the round, introducing an element of human tenderness, leveling criticism on both parties to the conflict—a welcome departure from the norm—and thus constructing at least a theoretical fence between itself and the majority of one-sided cinematic lemons that have it in for Israel.</p>
<p><strong>[Editor&#8217;s note: To order a copy of David Solway&#8217;s new book <em>Hear, O Israel!</em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hear-O-Israel-David-Solway/dp/0973406534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256122893&amp;sr=1-1"><em>click here</em>.</a></em>]</strong></p>
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		<title>In ‘Game Change,’ Insight, Anew, on the 2008 Campaign &#8211; NYTimes.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/in-%e2%80%98game-change%e2%80%99-insight-anew-on-the-2008-campaign-nytimes-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=in-%25e2%2580%2598game-change%25e2%2580%2599-insight-anew-on-the-2008-campaign-nytimes-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/in-%e2%80%98game-change%e2%80%99-insight-anew-on-the-2008-campaign-nytimes-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:16:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=45629</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why another book on the 2008 campaign, a year after the inauguration of President Obama? What more is there to say about a race that was covered day in and day out by newspapers, magazines, television, radio and bloggers? Is there anything more to learn about the candidates — and does it matter to an [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Why another book on the 2008 campaign, a year after the inauguration of President Obama? What more is there to say about a race that was covered day in and day out by newspapers, magazines, television, radio and bloggers? Is there anything more to learn about the candidates — and does it matter to an American public now focused on unemployment and health care and terrorism?</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/books/11book.html?hpw">Books of The Times &#8211; In ‘Game Change,’ Insight, Anew, on the 2008 Campaign &#8211; Review &#8211; NYTimes.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Danny Glover</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/discover-the-networks/danny-glover/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=danny-glover</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/discover-the-networks/danny-glover/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Discover The Networks]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44936</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Excerpt from the Danny Glover profile: Glover supports Not In Our Name, the Revolutionary Communist Party movement which “pledges resistance to [America's] endless war, detentions and roundups, [and] attacks on civil liberties.” Glover is a strong backer of the socialist magazine Monthly Review, which he says “challenges us to think, inspires us to action, and makes us realize that the impossible is [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44937" title="Glover" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Glover.jpg" alt="Glover" width="400" height="280" /></p>
<p><strong><em>Excerpt from the Danny Glover profile:</em></strong></p>
<p><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px">Glover supports <a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://frontpagemag.com/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6163">Not In Our Name</a>, the </span><a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://frontpagemag.com/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6197">Revolutionary Communist Party</a> movement which “pledges resistance to [America's] endless war, detentions and roundups, [and] attacks on civil liberties.”</span></p>
<p><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px">Glover is a strong backer of the socialist magazine </span><em><a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://frontpagemag.com/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7105">Monthly Review</a></em>, which he <a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.monthlyreview.org/aboutmr.htm">says</a> “challenges us to think, inspires us to action, and makes us realize that the impossible is only difficult, not insurmountable.”</p>
<p>On several occasions, Glover has <a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/mack-assails-glovers-movie-deal-with-hugo-chavez-2007-05-22.html" target="_blank">visited</a> Venezuela and made guest appearances on President<a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://frontpagemag.com/individualProfile.asp?indid=2144">Hugo Chavez</a>&#8216;s television and radio talk show, <em>Hello, President</em>. Glover is a Board member of Venezuela&#8217;s &#8220;TeleSUR&#8221; news network, which Chavez created in 2005&#8230;.</p>
<p><strong><em>To view the full Danny Glover profile, </em></strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1119"><strong><em>click here</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Ted Turner, Billionaire Funder of the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/john-perazzo/ted-turner-billionaire-funder-of-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ted-turner-billionaire-funder-of-the-left</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/john-perazzo/ted-turner-billionaire-funder-of-the-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:45:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44186</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ted Turner is the founder and owner of several television networks; he was also the owner of major league baseball&#8217;s Atlanta Braves for three decades. With a personal fortune of some $2 billion, Turner ranks among the wealthiest individuals on earth&#8230;. Outspoken about his leftwing political views, Turner candidly calls himself &#8220;a socialist at heart.&#8221; &#8230; A longtime admirer of Fidel Castro, Turner has called the [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44187" title="Ted Turner" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Ted-Turner.jpg" alt="Ted Turner" width="443" height="306" /></p>
<p><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px">Ted Turner is the founder and owner of several television networks; he was also the owner of major league baseball&#8217;s Atlanta Braves for three decades. With a personal fortune of some $2 billion, Turner ranks among the wealthiest individuals on earth&#8230;. Outspoken about his leftwing political views, Turner candidly calls himself &#8220;<a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.american-partisan.com/cols/herman/101199.htm">a socialist at heart</a>.&#8221; &#8230;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px"><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px">A longtime </span><a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/11/29/161828.shtml">admirer</a> </span>of <a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=912">Fidel Castro</a>, Turner has called the former Cuban president &#8220;one hell of a guy.&#8221; &#8230;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px"><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px">In April 2008, Turner made the unsubstantiated claim that within a few decades, most of humanity would be extinct as a result of global warming&#8230;. </span></span>Turner also described the insurgents who were then fighting U.S. troops in Iraq as &#8220;<a style="COLOR: maroon; TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Turner%20Iraqi%20Insurgents%20Patriots%20Warming.html">patriots</a>&#8221; who simply &#8220;don&#8217;t like us [Americans] because we&#8217;ve invaded their country.&#8221; &#8230;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; FONT: medium 'Times New Roman'; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: #000000; WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px"><span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px"><strong><em>For the full Ted Turner profile, </em></strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2004"><strong><em>click here</em></strong></a>.</span></span></p>
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		<title>Interview With Robert Morgenthau: Obama &#8220;smoking pot&#8221; if he thinks &#8220;being nice&#8221; to Iran is &#8220;going to get him anywhere&#8221; &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/interview-with-robert-morgenthau-obama-smoking-pot-if-he-thinks-being-nice-to-iran-is-going-to-get-him-anywhere-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=interview-with-robert-morgenthau-obama-smoking-pot-if-he-thinks-being-nice-to-iran-is-going-to-get-him-anywhere-wsj-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:40:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43489</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the criminal justice system, the people of Manhattan have been represented for 35 years by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. This is his story.Mr. Morgenthau, who inspired the original D.A. character on the television program &#8220;Law and Order,&#8221; will retire on Thursday at age 90. Much of the barely fictitious drama is [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In the criminal justice system, the people of Manhattan have been represented for 35 years by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. This is his story.Mr. Morgenthau, who inspired the original D.A. character on the television program &#8220;Law and Order,&#8221; will retire on Thursday at age 90. Much of the barely fictitious drama is set in his office in Manhattan&#8217;s Criminal Courts Building. This week, amid half-filled boxes and scattered personal mementos, he sat down to discuss his life&#8217;s work.Even though he knows I&#8217;m wearing a wire—actually an audio recorder placed on the table between us—America&#8217;s D.A. speaks candidly, including about his public blowups with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Morgenthau says this is the first mayor he hasn&#8217;t gotten along with, and that the relationship went south when his office started investigating the city&#8217;s role in the death of two of New York&#8217;s bravest in an August, 2007 fire. Among other mistakes, city inspectors had failed to note that the water had been turned off at the old Deutsche Bank building opposite Ground Zero. The blaze resulted in 33 &#8220;mayday&#8221; calls from firefighters, and the D.A. is amazed that only two lost their lives.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704039704574616433529879494.html">Interview With Robert Morgenthau: The World&#8217;s District Attorney &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Ben Bernanke: Bust of the Year – by Vasko Kohlmayer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/vasko-kohlmayer/ben-bernanke-bust-of-the-year-%e2%80%93-by-vasko-kohlmayer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ben-bernanke-bust-of-the-year-%25e2%2580%2593-by-vasko-kohlmayer</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:02:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vasko Kohlmayer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=42871</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why should we expect the Fed Chairman to solve a crisis he didn’t see coming?

]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-42872" title="bernanke" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bernanke.jpg" alt="bernanke" width="535" height="335" /></p>
<p>“The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord.” Thus <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1946375_1947251_1948043,00.html">wrote</a> <em>Time</em> magazine about Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, winner of the magazine’s “Person of the Year” award for 2009. Virtually crediting Bernanke with halting the world&#8217;s descent into an abyss, <em>Time </em>reverentially portrays him as a benevolent demigod, wisely presiding over our economic healing.</p>
<p>But when one carefully reads the featured <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1946375_1947251_1948043,00.html">interview</a>, an impression forms that is sharply at odds with the one intended by <em>Time</em>&#8216;s panegyric. The interview is, in fact, so full of red flags that one almost wants to run for the closest <a href="http://doctorbulldog.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/panic-button.jpg">panic button</a>. Perhaps the most revealing moment comes when Bernanke talks about whether he foresaw the 2008 crisis:</p>
<blockquote><p>“We were certainly aware of the risks of financial crisis, but one as large and as dangerous as this one, I certainly did not anticipate. I wish I had, but I didn&#8217;t.”</p></blockquote>
<p>This is an astonishing admission from the Fed Chairman. The man who is now supposed to fix our problems did not see them coming in the first place. One may perhaps think that the problems were so byzantine that they were undetectable until they at last erupted in the crisis. But this is not so. There <em>were</em> those who saw the problems clearly. A few predicted the crisis with uncanny accuracy.</p>
<p>One of them was Peter Schiff, a financial commentator and president of Euro Pacific Capital. From 2005 onward, Schiff warned about the upcoming meltdown both on television and in writing. Early in 2007 Schiff published a book called <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Proof-Economic-Collapse-Sonberg/dp/0470043601">Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse</a> </em>in which he told what was going to happen and advised how to prepare.</p>
<p>His predictions proved prescient and those who followed his advice were able not only to preserve their wealth but also to increase it. It is paradoxical that as Schiff was sounding the alarm, mainstream pundits – those of the Greenspan/Bernanke worldview – were laughing in his face. (You can see an eye-opening compilation of Schiff&#8217;s pre-crisis appearances on major television networks and the sneers he received by clicking <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0YTY5TWtmU">here</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw">here</a>.)</p>
<p>Peter Schiff was not the only person who saw the crisis coming. Texas congressman Ron Paul saw it also. As early as September, 2003 he <a href="http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-09-15/ron-paul-on-msnbc-end-the-fed/">warned</a> in the banking committee of the US Congress about the danger of a real-state bust:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If we continue to inflate this bubble this way the housing crisis is going to cause an explosion and there is going to be damage worldwide.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Almost no one on the committee – or in America at large for that matter – listened to Ron Paul&#8217;s warnings. Instead Paul was mocked and accused of insensitivity toward the poor. Needless to say, his foresight was vindicated in spectacular fashion by subsequent events.</p>
<p>Of course, Peter Schiff and Ron Paul have no crystal ball that enables them to foretell future events with uncanny accuracy. Their grasp of financial and economic situation is rooted in the <a href="http://mises.org/">Austrian school of economics</a>. An outgrowth of classical liberalism, its main proponents are Ludwig von Mises, Nobel Prize winner Friedrich von Hayek and Murray N. Rothbard. One of the main focus areas of this school is the business cycle – the boom-and-bust recurrence – which defines the trajectory of western-style economies.</p>
<p>The Austrian school sees the central bank as the driver of the business cycle. This it causes by holding interest rates artificially low, which sends misleading signals through the economy. Fueled by cheap credit, more projects are begun than existing economic resources can support. These projects are termed malinvestments. Once inflation becomes a concern and the central bank – the Fed – is forced to raise interest rates, those projects must be abandoned. It is this that brings on the bust, more commonly referred to as “recession,” which is something we are living through right now. During this painful period of readjustment, labor and resources that were tied up in malinvestments must be relocated to more sustainable uses. The bust – unpleasant as it invariably is – is in reality a necessary and much-needed corrective. Because of this, it should be left to run its course. Any attempt on the part of government to forestall it will only make the inevitable day of reckoning all the more painful.</p>
<p>Yet this is precisely what our government, under Bernanke’s advisement, has been attempting to do. It has tried to keep up the inflated property prices; it has bailed out malinvestments; and, perhaps most dangerously, it has kept interest rates at near zero percent.</p>
<p>Ben Bernanke&#8217;s Fed has had a hand in all three policies. It has been buying toxic mortgage-backed securities, it has been providing cash for the bailouts, and it has been holding the federal funds rate at the rock bottom. And even though these misguided policies have softened the bust by partially re-inflating the bubble, they will produce disaster down the road. They have only postponed the inevitable and the next bust will be more violent than it would have been without all this government intervention. Equally alarmingly, the Fed&#8217;s loose monetary policy has put great downward pressure on the currency. The dollar has lost nearly twenty percent of <a href="http://www.fxstreet.com/rates-charts/usdollar-index/">its value</a> since February 2006, the month when Ben Bernanke took the reins of the Federal Reserve. The policies he has pursued have greatly contributed to this decline.</p>
<p>But such is the way of government that those who cause most damage also receive most fawning and admiration. FDR, who kept America in the grip of the worst and longest recession in the country&#8217;s history, is widely worshiped today. Jimmy Carter, whose policies likewise caused much economic hardship, is feted as an elder statesman and was even given a Nobel Prize. Barack Obama – America&#8217;s most radical president who is taking this country down the road to socialism even while spending it into oblivion – received a Nobel Prize barely nine months into his first term. How fitting that each of the three men has also been named <em>Time</em>&#8216;s Person of the Year.</p>
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		<title>Neal Ungerleider: Saudi Arabia to execute TV psychic, Falafel Mafia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/neal-ungerleider-saudi-arabia-to-execute-tv-psychic-falafel-mafia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=neal-ungerleider-saudi-arabia-to-execute-tv-psychic-falafel-mafia</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:15:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=40426</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the United States, television psychics are merely mocked. In Saudi Arabia, they are executed. The Saudi Arabian government is planning to execute Lebanese television psychic Ali Sibat. Sibat was found guilty of witchcraft by a Saudi court in November, a crime which carries the death sentence. It appears that Sibat was targeted for arrest [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In the United States, television psychics are merely mocked. In Saudi Arabia, they are executed.</p>
<p>The Saudi Arabian government is planning to execute Lebanese television psychic Ali Sibat. Sibat was found guilty of witchcraft by a Saudi court in November, a crime which carries the death sentence.</p>
<p>It appears that Sibat was targeted for arrest and trial while visiting Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. Saudi Arabia’s special religious police, the Mutaween, grabbed him out of his hotel room and placed the host in custody. Sibat was then tried on charges related to his satellite television show:</p>
<p>via <a href="http://trueslant.com/nealungerleider/2009/12/04/saudi-arabia-to-execute-tv-psychic/">Saudi Arabia to execute TV psychic &#8211; Neal Ungerleider &#8211; Falafel Mafia &#8211; True/Slant</a>.</p>
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		<title>Putin to Consider New Presidential Bid &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/putin-to-consider-new-presidential-bid-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=putin-to-consider-new-presidential-bid-wsj-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:18:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=40243</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In an electric four-hour solo performance on live television, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he will think about whether to reclaim the presidency &#8212; one of the strongest signals yet that he may run again for Russia&#8217;s top office in 2012. Mr. Putin, who also vowed that Russia would step up its efforts against terrorism, [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In an electric four-hour solo performance on live television, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he will think about whether to reclaim the presidency &#8212; one of the strongest signals yet that he may run again for Russia&#8217;s top office in 2012.</p>
<p>Mr. Putin, who also vowed that Russia would step up its efforts against terrorism, spoke during a question-and-answer show on television and radio that highlighted his dominance of Russia&#8217;s political scene.</p>
<p>&#8220;I will think about it, there is still enough time,&#8221; Mr. Putin said when asked whether he will run in the next election.</p>
<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t hold your breath,&#8221; Mr. Putin told another person who asked whether he was planning to leave politics.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125984321465074499.html">Putin to Consider New Presidential Bid &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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