Apes, Pigs, and F-16s

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, January 26, 2013

 

When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:

 

Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!

 

You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.

 

The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi. It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60 of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.

 

Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.

 

You may recall hearing this little ditty from the Hamas charter — often echoed by ministers of the Palestinian Authority and in the preachments of Brotherhood jurist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, on whose every word millions hang weekly on al-Jazeera (or is it al-Gore?):

 

 The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslims make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!”

 

Again, these are not sentiments dreamt up by “violent extremists” waging a modern, purely political “resistance” against oppressive “Zionists.” The prophet’s admonition that Muslims will be spared the hellfire by killing Jews is repeated in numerous authoritative hadiths (see, e.g., Sahih Muslim Book 41, No. 6985; Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 56, No. 791).

 

Hadiths, it is worth emphasizing, are the recorded actions and instructions of Mohammed, who is taken by Muslims to be the “perfect example” they are to emulate. And in case you suppose, after years of listening to Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama, that the prophet must ultimately have come around on the Jews, you might want to rethink that one. Another hadith, relating Mohammed’s dying words, recounts his final plea: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians.” (Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 8, No. 427.)

 

Now of course, none of this is to say that it is impossible for Islam to evolve beyond anti-Semitism. As individuals, millions of Muslims want no part of the ancient hatreds. As scholars and activists, a number of Muslim reformers admirably endeavor to erase this legacy by limiting it to its historical context, reducing it to allegory, or casting doubt on its provenance. Let’s hope these efforts eventually bear fruit. After all, as noted above, anti-Semitism stains the West’s legacy, too; and as discussed in this space before, the history of Christianity in America is a history of evolving beyond punishments and practices akin to those we today presume to look down our noses at as if we were total strangers to invidious discrimination and assaults on freedom of speech and conscience.

 

Nevertheless, the humility with which we must acknowledge this history is not an excuse for failing to grapple with what it means. Elite Western opinion came to condemn what it once practiced by correctly reasoning that those noxious practices cut against the grain of our guiding doctrine, which is predominantly Christian. Evolution was in no way easy, but it was logical.

 

In Islam, to the contrary, the doctrine itself is the most daunting barrier against evolution. And now, with the self-defeating encouragement of the West, Islamic-supremacist ideology has, throughout the Middle East, broken out of the shackles that kept it in check. The result of this “democratization” (the regnant euphemism for sharia installed by popular vote) is an increasingly rabid rise of intolerance.

 

The answer to this challenge is to take the Islamists head-on. It is to show them for what they truly are: enemies of civil rights, totalitarian tormentors of women and non-Muslims. The answer is not to arm them — as the Obama administration, with the maddening support of some leading Republicans, is arming Morsi’s regime — with a score of F-16 fighter jets and a couple of hundred Abrams tanks.

 

When not manufacturing history, tears, and indignation this week during her long-overdue testimony on the Benghazi massacre, outgoing secretary of state Hillary Clinton stunned careful listeners by repeatedly mentioning the “global jihad” against America. These were stark violations of Obama-administration strictures against any reference to Islam in discussions of the threat to the West.

 

They also marked quite a departure for Mrs. Clinton. She has played no small part in propagating the “Islamophobia” canard. She has championed the imposition of sharia blasphemy standards on speech that is protected by the First Amendment. And, with an assist from Senator John McCain, she has cowed 99 percent of Beltway Republicans into silence over the longstanding ties of her top adviser, Huma Abedin, to the Muslim Brotherhood and to an al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef, whose now-defunct “charity” (the Rabita Trust) was designated as a global terrorist organization under American law. Who knows: Maybe someday, after enough F-16 transfers and sharia constitutions, Charles Krauthammer will be moved to a fleeting mention of these irrefutable facts, making it socially acceptable for our heroes to come out from under their desks and talk about the national-security implications. I can dream, can’t I?

 

In the Clinton tradition, there was more calculated confusion than clarity in the secretary’s meandering testimony. Mrs. Clinton frets over the “jihadists” but insists that we must be able to “partner” with the region’s Islamists . . . like Morsi and the Brotherhood. Do you suppose she’s noticed that the Muslim Brotherhood demands the release of the Blind Sheikh, just like al-Qaeda does? That Morsi and Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch) publicly yearn for the destruction of Israel, just like al-Qaeda does? That the Brotherhood’s top priority is the imposition of sharia, the same imperative that drives al-Qaeda’s rampage?

 

Alas, this is not a series of strange coincidences. These are the major points that define a Muslim — violent or nonviolent — as an Islamist. When you “partner” with Islamists, you are abetting the global jihad, not opposing it. When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing.

Obama: Reagan of the Left

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, January 24, 2013

 

The media herd is stunned to discover that Barack Obama is a man of the Left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches, the commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural address, that is.

 

Where has everyone been these four years? The only surprise is that Obama chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for ““malice toward none”“ ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal manifesto.

 

But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had unveiled his transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress four years ago (February 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”

 

Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care, which is 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.

 

Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm shellacking that cost him the House. But now that he’s won again, the revolution is back, as announced in Monday’s inaugural address.

 

It was a paean to big government. At its heart was Obama’s pledge to (1) defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and (2) expand it unrelentingly for the 21st.

 

The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — is the very definition of reactionary liberalism. Social Security was created when life expectancy was 62. Medicare was created when modern medical technology was in its infancy. Today’s radically different demographics and technology have rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone knows that, unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.

 

As for the second part — enlargement — Obama had already begun that in his first term with Obamacare. Monday’s inaugural address reinstated yet another grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a state-created green-energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s regulatory apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today, shale gas tomorrow).

 

The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Václav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.

 

Monday’s address also served to disabuse the fantasists of any Obama interest in fiscal reform or debt reduction. This speech was spectacularly devoid of any acknowledgment of the central threat to the post-industrial democracies (as already seen in Europe) — the crisis of an increasingly insolvent entitlement state.

 

On the contrary. Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.

 

For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.

 

In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a direct response to Ronald Reagan’s first. On January 20, 1981, Reagan had proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology — as confirmed 15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “the era of big government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to abolish welfare.

 

Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he preserves the old ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more just social order where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are the great task of government.

 

Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed the political zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new Reaganite norm.

 

Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the 50-year pre-Reagan liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural address, ideologically unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker, his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left. If he succeeds in these next four years, he will have earned the title.

Taxpayers Go Where Taxes Are Low

By Deroy Murdock

Friday, January 25, 2013

 

The only thing more stunning than the kleptomania of tax-hiking politicians is their unswerving faith that taxpayers, especially wealthy ones, simply will smile and surrender even more of their money. This fundamental misunderstanding of human nature is impervious to mounting evidence that taxpayers go where taxes are low.

 

French President Francois Hollande thought he could impose a 75 percent top tax rate and watch revenues flow into Paris like the Seine. Instead, actor Gérard Depardieu rushed into the loving arms of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s 13 percent flat tax. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, of all people, reportedly may move to London to escape Hollande’s thievery. (Potential fraud charges also may fuel Sarkozy’s wanderlust.)

 

Last year, a record 1,788 Americans renounced their citizenship, mainly in favor of countries with lower taxes and friendlier political rhetoric.

 

Golf great Phil Mickelson generated headlines this week when he suggested that high taxes might drive him from California — or perhaps America.

 

“There are going to be some drastic changes for me,” Mickelson said.

 

“If you add up all the federal [levies], the disability, the unemployment, the Social Security, and the state, my tax rate’s 62, 63 percent.” Imagine keeping just 37 cents of every dollar you earn. Is that a fair share?

 

Before President Obama, Washington Democrats, and even some invertebrate Republicans boost taxes any higher, they should read How Money Walks. Author Travis Brown demonstrates how Americans between 1995 and 2010 shifted some $2 trillion in wealth by abandoning California, Illinois, New Jersey, and other high-tax states and unpacking in low-tax states such as Florida, Nevada, and Texas.

 

“After spending several years mapping and analyzing these data, one correlation keeps popping up: Income moves to where it is most welcome, tax-wise,” Brown writes. “Money walks because opportunity talks.”

 

As I observe in an essay for Brown’s book, this reality is undeniable among the Empire State and its neighbors.

 

While New York City’s bright lights and endless excitement still lure people, Gotham also has watched many of its denizens decamp. While this state’s steep living expenses and anti-business tone repel potential residents, painful tax obligations lead too many New Yorkers to cry “Uncle!” — just before they hire moving vans.

 

“I have identified the most compelling incentive of all: a major tax break immediately available to all New Yorkers,” explained Tom Golisano, chairman of Paychex, Inc. “To be eligible, you need do only one thing: move out of New York State.” As he wrote in “Adios, New York,” a New York Post op-ed in May 20009, Golisano spent about 90 minutes transferring his voter registration, driver’s license, and domicile certificate from New York State to Florida. “Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually,” Golisano calculated. “By domiciling in Florida, which has no personal-income tax, I will save $13,800 every day. That’s a pretty strong incentive.”

 

“I left New York in 1997 strictly to get away from the onerous taxation,” Rush Limbaugh declared on his national radio program, soon after Golisano spoke up. “I don’t want to talk numbers, but it was humongous. . . . So I used my mobility and I moved.” Limbaugh landed in income-tax-free Florida.

 

Unfortunately for the popular broadcaster, every day that he works in New York State (which he sometimes visits), the authorities tax his income proportionally. They do so despite Limbaugh’s protests and ongoing legal challenges. “My number is $20,000 a day, every day I work in New York, $20,000 a day,” Limbaugh noted. “Sometimes 18, sometimes 20. My income changes year to year, so I guess it averaged out $18,000 a day.”

 

One-way traffic from the Empire State to the Sunshine State is so steady that Harrington Moving and Storage, Inc., specializes in easing that exodus. “Our professionals work hard to ensure that you don’t have to during your move from New York to Florida,” boasts the Maplewood, N.J.–based company on its website. “You can rest assured knowing that your New York to Florida move will be smooth, relaxing, and seamless throughout.”

 

Contiguous with the Empire State, Connecticut still is smarting over the relocation of hedge-fund manager Edward Lampert. With an estimated net worth of $3 billion, according to Forbes, Lampert was considered the fifth-wealthiest man in the Nutmeg State. In August 2011, Connecticut increased taxes by $875 million, retroactively to that January. It cut the maximum property-tax credit from $500 to $300 and lifted its top state income-tax rate from 6.5 percent to 6.7 percent. Then, on June 1, 2012, Lampert moved his company, ESL Investments, to Florida. Lampert also took with him the $10.6 billion that ESL reportedly controlled at that time.

 

“We are all aware that the changes to the tax structure in Connecticut last year have given many people pause as to whether this is the best place to do business and reside,” Greenwich first selectman Peter Tesei told the Hartford Courant. “I am concerned about the departure of Mr. Lampert and his firm, and would ask the state of Connecticut to take another look at its policies.”

 

Supply-side economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore found similar unintended consequences just across the Hudson from New York. In 2004, New Jersey boosted its top tax rate from 6.35 percent to 8.97 percent. As they wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Examining data from a 2008 Princeton study on the New Jersey tax hike on the wealthy, we found that there were 4,000 missing half-millionaires in New Jersey after that tax took effect.” State deficits soon erupted like Jersey barriers beside a ditch.

 

“Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place,” Laffer and Moore also pointed out. By definition, there is no way to measure, for instance, the positions that a retail chain does not create when it never opens stores in New York State because its owners prefer not to lose their shirts by crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan.

 

For now, put aside the talent that New York State’s high taxes repel, the jobs and careers that they strangle in the crib, and the goods and services that New Yorkers cannot enjoy when the entrepreneurs who generate them vanish in disgust or simply stay out. Gotham’s and the Empire State’s punitive taxes are most pathetic for their counterproductivity. New York’s sadistic tax code almost certainly chases away more revenues than government would collect if it lacked America’s gold medal among per capita state-tax burdens.

 

Referring to local liberal Democrats who hope to succeed him at City Hall and then jack up taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last October that this idea “is about as dumb a policy as I can think of.” Just before the Columbus Day Parade, Bloomberg elaborated: “If you want to drive out the 1 percent of the people who pay roughly 50 percent of the taxes, or the 10 percent of the people who pay 70-odd percent of the taxes, that’s as good a strategy as I know.” Bloomberg added: “That’s exactly the [way] to do it, and then our revenue would go away, and we wouldn’t be able to have cops to keep us safe, firefighters to rescue us, or teachers to educate our kids.”

 

From class-warrior-in-chief Barack Obama to sticky-fingered city councilmen, politicians always should remember that taxpayers are not oak trees. Shake them too hard, and they and their money soon will be gone with the wind.

Does Poverty Still Matter?

By Mona Charen

Friday, January 25, 2013

 

The Republican party is picking up the pieces. Speaking of the ticket’s loss for the first time since the election, Representative Paul Ryan noted that many voters “don’t think or know that we have good ideas” on fighting poverty and “helping people move up the ladder of life.”

 

It’s not surprising that Ryan, who got his start working for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America, sees the world this way. Though it’s a total secret to members of the press and the Democratic party, conservative intellectuals have been grappling with the problems of poverty in America for several decades and have arguably advanced more reforms (including school choice, charter schools, enterprise zones, and community policing) than liberals have. Some of those reforms, such as those adopted by Rudolph Giuliani in New York, profoundly improved the lives of the poor by, among other enhancements, making their neighborhoods far safer.

 

Still, the popular perception of Republicans as the party of the rich has been reinforced by the party’s opposition to tax hikes (always characterized by the press as “even for the wealthiest”) and by the Democrats’ relentless spin. Six in ten respondents to a December Bloomberg poll said Republicans were too concerned about protecting the rich. A McLaughlin poll from 2011 found that 88 percent of likely voters considered a candidate’s position on poverty to be important in determining their vote.

 

If Republican politicians do begin to focus more on poverty, as Ryan recommends, they will have the field to themselves. Democrats no longer talk about the poor.

 

Barack Obama began his career as a community organizer. In 2007, he excoriated George W. Bush for failing those in “vast swaths of rural America” and in inner cities “who cannot hire lobbyists” and “cannot write thousand-dollar campaign checks.” The government, Senator Obama said, “cannot guarantee success and happiness in life,” but can “ensure that every American who wants to work is . . . able to find a job, and able to stay out of poverty.”

 

The anti-poverty talk was missing from the 2012 campaign. It was all about the middle class. Perhaps that’s because Obama’s first term created so very much more poverty. There are more poor in America today than at any time since the Great Depression. There were 32 million Americans collecting food stamps in 2008. Now that figure is 47 million. Spending on food stamps doubled between 2007 and 2011.

 

Unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the Obama first term, leading many to abandon the search for jobs altogether. In 2008, 7.2 million Americans were getting Social Security disability payments. Today, it’s 8.7 million, an increase of 20 percent. A normal increase due to population expansion would have been 4 percent. Obama blamed his predecessor, but the steep decline in labor-force participation didn’t begin until six months into Obama’s term. Forbes magazine calculates that if long-term discouraged workers, those who’ve dropped out to collect disability payments, and those working part time because they cannot find full-time work were counted, the real unemployment rate would hover around 22 percent.

 

Median household income fell by 8 percent during the Obama first term — since the end of the recession in 2009 it’s dropped by an average of $3,040 per household — and income inequality grew compared with the Bush years. For African Americans, the drop in household income was even more dramatic — 11.1 percent.

 

Obama talked about the middle class in 2012 for two reasons: 1) because his record left him vulnerable on the subject of poverty, and 2) because Democrats believe that Americans do not like poverty programs. “People are much less inclined to support something that goes toward a targeted population than something that they can benefit from,” Rachel Black of the New America Foundation told Politico. This is why Democrats fight tooth and claw to block reforms of Medicare and Social Security that would decrease benefits or increase taxes for wealthier recipients. They believe that the middle class would stop supporting the programs if they were at all means-tested.

 

But most voters do not disapprove of TANF, Medicaid, Head Start, and dozens of other programs aimed at the poor.

 

Ryan is right to see an opportunity for Republicans in talking about poverty. It might improve the Republican brand in the eyes of all voters. It opens a door to talk about the best anti-poverty program — economic growth, which has been conspicuously absent under Obama. It also highlights a fact the Democrats want to bury: All Americans are poorer as a result of Obama’s policies, but the poor are hit hardest.

Europe's Wishes Came True

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, January 24, 2013

 

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly "war on terror" and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion.

 

The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer Mediterranean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek economy soared. Spain's real estate market was to become the hottest in the world. Italy seemed to resemble Germany more than Portugal.

 

President George W. Bush was not just hated in Europe, but caricatured as the symbol of backward free-market capitalism, rank American consumerism and U.S. imperialism abroad. Only with the election of the progressive Barack Obama would Europe finally find a like-minded, sophisticated American president.

 

Yet European Union prosperity has now proved a phantom -- one conjured up by accounting gimmickry, borrowed German money and corrupt EU apparatchiks. Neither the EU at large nor most individual European nations can sustain their present rate of redistributionist entitlements. To end cash transfers across borders spells the breakup of the union. To embrace austerity at home ensures near anarchy in the streets of individual nations.

 

The worry is not that Greece will implode, but whether France can remain financially solvent. More realistic countries such as Germany, Latvia and Sweden are quietly drifting away from the socialist model, preferring balanced budgets, lower taxes and fewer regulations.

 

The EU may be worried that Obama's United States is becoming more like the EU at the very time many in Europe are starting to take a second, kinder look at the old free-market model of the United States. An America of low taxes, low unemployment and robust growth once meant a huge market for European goods, as the United States drove a prosperous world economy and had enough cash to protect the Western world.

 

All that has changed after four years of unprecedented $1 trillion-plus U.S. budget deficits. National debt has hit a historic $16 trillion, with no reversal in sight. Unemployment has been at 7.8 percent or above for 48 consecutive months. GDP growth is calcified at an anemic 2 percent. Record numbers of Americans draw on unemployment, disability and food stamps.

 

There is even greater irony in foreign policy. Europe blasted Bush for his cooked-up war on radical Islam and his needless interventions abroad. But with the ascendency of Barack Obama, Europe finally got a mirror image of itself. Both Iraq and Afghanistan will have ended according to strict timetables of withdrawal, not with any lasting security on the ground.

 

France and Great Britain went into Libya, while America "led from behind." Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship was replaced with chaos that has birthed a terrorist haven that threatens to become the new Afghanistan. The odious anti-Semite and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi now runs a near-bankrupt Egypt that looks a lot like Haiti. After the messes in Libya and Egypt, the West watched impotently as Syria became something like Mogadishu.

 

France is forced to unilaterally intervene in its old colony, Mali, to stop an Islamist takeover of the entire country. America watches from the sidelines, as undermanned French forces are offered meager logistical support from EU allies. In Algeria, radical Islamists brazenly executed dozens of Western hostages.

 

Yet Obama has found widespread public support for his new isolationism. Apparently, liberals prefer to borrow money at home for more entitlements rather than spend money on interventions abroad. Many conservatives enjoy the schadenfreude of watching as Europe plays (poorly) the old thankless unilateral role of the United States.

 

Obama has loudly promised a pivot in the U.S. security profile toward the Pacific region. That change represents the unspoken reality that socialist redistribution has reduced Europe to near-irrelevancy. Supposedly, free-market Asian economies are the new nexus of wealth and power. Oil and gas finds in America are providing unexpected energy independence from the Persian Gulf. Or perhaps the new strategic emphasis reflects the demographic realities of the Obama coalition of various minority groups -- and fewer European-American voters.

 

The Hawaiian-born and Indonesia-raised president certainly seems more interested in Asia than he does in the old colonial Mediterranean world of aging and shrinking European nations, Arab quagmires, oil intrigue, Islamic terrorists and the Israeli-Palestinian open sore.

 

In short, Europe got the European Union of its hopes and a changed America of its fantasies -- but both are rapidly becoming its worst nightmares.

Obama Supporters on Climate Bill Costs: No Thanks!

By Peter Schiff
Thursday, January 24, 2013

On Monday we sent out correspondent Tom Elliott down to the National Mall to talk to the attendees at Obama's 2nd inaugural about the president's big plans to tackle climate change in his second term. Everyone he spoke with loved what they had to hear.

But when he asked about the issue on a more personal level -- whether their families often talk about climate change, whether they're personally taking actions to prevent climate change, or whether they would be willing to pay more in taxes or more for gas & electricity to help finance the eventual legislation -- their enthusiasm quickly evaporated.

Black Families Hurt by Magazine's War on Conservatives

By Larry Elder

Thursday, January 24, 2013

 

Dear Ebony,

 

I do not have high hopes, given the way Ebony treats black non-liberals, that you will review my new book, "Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives, Eight Hours." It is, in the end, about the importance of fathers -- and the damage done to a child who grows up without one.

 

Why do I know you will ignore my book despite its examination of the most important issue facing "black America"? Your magazine treats black conservatives as if they were the enemy, that they bring nothing valid to the discussion.

 

Ebony magazine, a monthly staple of American black life since 1945, publishes an annual list of the 100-plus (now 150) "Most Influential Blacks in America." Why not rename it the "Most Influential Liberal Blacks in America"?

 

Each year, Ebony leaves out conservative, heavyweight black intellectuals like Walter Williams, a distinguished professor of economics and former department chairman at George Mason University. In addition to his 10 books on economics and race relations, Williams writes a popular weekly syndicated column carried in about 200 papers. If another black person ran the econ department at any other major, non-historically-black college or university, I don't know whom that would be! Yet you ignore Williams -- because you think his politics hurt black people.

 

What if they don't?

 

Williams, for example, is a leading critic of the minimum wage, a policy that he and many economists argue increases unemployment. The late Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize economics winner, called minimum wage law "one of the most, if not the most, anti-black law on the statute books." Even if Ebony disagrees, 90 percent of all economists believe minimum wage laws increase unemployment among those with lower skills -- the very people the laws purport to help.

 

At 14 percent black unemployment, versus 7.8 percent nationwide and 6.9 percent for whites, Williams calls this an outrage and blames left-wing policies. Even Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, admitted: "As the chair of the Black Caucus, I've got to tell you, we are always hesitant to criticize the President. With 14 percent (black) unemployment, if we had a white president, we'd be marching around the White House. ... The President knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn't to someone white."

 

Each year, Ebony leaves out Thomas Sowell of Stanford's Hoover Institution. He has only written some 40 books about economics, politics and race relations. His column appears in more than 300 papers, making him one of the most widely read writers in the English language. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet ("Glengarry Glen Ross") called Sowell "our greatest contemporary philosopher."

 

Sowell writes that government anti-poverty programs cause more poverty while inducing a self-defeating dependency on government. "Liberals," he recently wrote, "try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.

 

"The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today."

 

Sportscaster Bob Costas, in commenting on the murder-suicide of a black NFL player, called it a case of the "gun culture." No, it's the "fatherless culture." That player, Jovan Belcher, like so many blacks, was raised without a father.

 

A disproportionate amount of crime comes from homes with an AWOL dad. Today, 72 percent of blacks, 53 percent of Hispanic and 36 percent of whites are born out of wedlock. Look at the murder stats from New York City, with its population of 44 percent whites, 25 percent blacks and 29 percent Hispanics. Yet in 2011, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 91 percent of the homicide suspects. Unless we are prepared to say that blacks and Hispanics are genetically predisposed to commit crime, it is only sensible to ask what the devil is going on here!

 

And each year, Ebony leaves out Clarence Thomas, who is one of only nine sitting Supreme Court justices. You leave him out, as you do Williams and Sowell, because you don't like their politics.

 

How dare you discount these men? Liberal policies of the last 50 years bear no responsibility for causing the nation's black out-of-wedlock birth rate to go from 25 percent in 1965 to 72 percent today? However you feel about "black conservatives," their viewpoint deserves airing.

 

Ebony does the black community a disservice by ignoring it.

 

I once interviewed Kweisi Mfume, then the head of the NAACP. I asked this question: "As between the presence of white racism and the absence of black fathers, which poses the bigger threat to the black community?" Without hesitation, Mfume said, "The absence of black fathers."

 

Sincerely yours,

 

Larry Elder

 

Former subscriber