Category: Web

  Barack Hussein Obama can’t seem to get over the Trayvon Martin case.  First, it was his statement that his son would look (and act ?) like Trayvon.  Now, he says that “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago”.  One wonders what next pearl of wisdom will escape the lips of  POTUS:  “I...

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous admonition to “live not by lies” was the first thing that came to mind when the long-suffering George Zimmerman was finally acquitted.  However, I am hesitant to engage to in jubilant ululation since justice would’ve truly been served if Zimmerman was not indicted and put on trial. Zimmerman’s ordeal reminded me of...

  Yesterday, Poland commemorated the 70th anniversary of the 1943-44 Volhynia and Eastern Galicia massacres perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) led by Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.  Bands of armed Ukrainians descended upon Polish villages in Galicia and Volhynia and massacred at least 40,000...

  Mohamed Morsi’s removal from power is not a “massive blow” to political Islam, much less the proof of its failure. It is the result of the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to monopolize all power, coupled with the MB government’s gross economic and social mismanagement. The Army intervened because the stability of the state was threatened, and...

  Just yesterday, according to the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency, a court in central Israel sentenced an Israeli Arab to 30 months in prison for joining the anti-Assad rebels in Syria.  The defendant crossed over to Syria from Turkey and spent six days training with the Islamist rebels, who asked him to carry out a...

  “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Ben Franklin is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often...

  Much of the discussion over the immigration bill that just passed the Senate focuses on how it will deal with illegal immigration.  But much of the financial backing for the bill comes from Silicon Valley, which wants to vastly increase legal immigration, particularly the H1B visa program, which allows American employers to import technical...

  The little piece on Egypt I scribbled out and I posted the other day could have been put up any time since the beginning of the Cairo protests, planned, supported, and subsidized by the US Department of State.  If I can find a moment, I’ll revise and expand, but for now, I am just...

  It is almost as if Mohammed Morsi has been reading Chronicles–or at least studying Egyptian history.  (And if he fails–as I hope he does–to take decisive action, he will soon be an unimportant piece of that history.)  Nightmares like Egypt can be ruled in only one of two ways:  either by a fanatical religious tyranny...

In light of the recent untimely passing of James Gandolfini, I could not help but contrast his character Tony Soprano with the cinematic mafiosi of earlier times, especially the main characters of Sam Francis’ and Pat Buchanan’s favorite “The Godfather”.  In many ways, Tony Soprano was a broken man, like Gandolfini himself.  After all, could...

Last week, Fr. Francois Mourad, a Syrian Catholic priest, was brutally murdered by Islamist rebels in Syria.  There is some uncertainty as to whether Fr. Mourad was beheaded or shot, although it seems more likely that he was shot.  What there is no doubt about is that his killers are part of the armed rebellion trying to topple the...

  Almost two months have passed since the death of Giulio Andreotti, arguably the most powerful politician in Italy’s post-World War II history. In recent weeks I have struggled with a draft obituary of this complex man who deserves to be better known abroad, but the task proved daunting. There are too many loose ends, strange...

  On U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’ … I say let Allah sort it out.” So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is not infrequently the case, she nailed it....

  A judge in the Eastern District of Michigan held that a high school economics teacher violated his student’s free speech rights for kicking him out of class (hat tip to Mark Brennan).  The student, Daniel Glowacki, dared to voice disapproval of homosexuality – a major offense in today’s educational institutions. This took place back in...

Today, the Senate passed an immigration bill that promises amnesty to illegal immigrants and a massive increase in legal immigration.  If this bill becomes law, one of its predictable effects will be to drive down the wages of Americans, particularly working class Americans.  Indeed, many millions of Americans are either unemployed or underemployed.  This week, the Cleveland Plain...

  Speaking at the end of the meeting of the EU-Ukraine Cooperation Council in Luxembourg on June 24, European Enlargement Commissioner Štefan Füle warned Ukraine that “time is running preciously short” for the government in Kiev to meet all European Union conditions in time to sign a free trade and association agreement in November. “Ukraine has made...

  The NYT recently published a brief op-ed piece by one Judy Nicastro – a self-described “non-religious”, “old school liberal” from Seattle. In fashionably maudlin prose, Nicastro writes about aborting her son at 23 weeks. That repulsive little article is a good example of the worldview of abortion proponents. Now, what was the reason for Nicastro’s decision...

  It is all too easy to get lost in the hurly-burly of contemporary politics, which is mostly about appetite, and miss larger and more fundamental changes that are taking place. Ideas we have long been told were characteristic of the American regime no longer have any place in the body politic.  For instance, the...

  Looks like the British government will finally be able to rid its long-suffering citizens of the Muslim terrorist preacher (what a string of redundant adjectives!) Abu Qatada. After almost a decade of trying to throw out this troublemaker, who called for the murder of Jews and apostate Muslims and their families, Britain and Jordan...

Tonight media reports are hyping a deal to add a border fence to the Amnesty Bill currently being considered in the Senate.   Only the gullible will believe that such a fence will ever be built.   After all, Congress authorized building a 700 mile border fence in 2006, but only 36 or so miles of the type of fence...

  Yesterday’s congressional performances by the head of the National Security Administration and the deputy director of the FBI deserve an award, but it is the KIDS awards handed out for best children’s TV programs.  Even an American adolescent should be able to spot the lies and contradictions.   First, we were informed that surveillance...

  Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two...

  The Sweeney, directed by Nick Love, 2012, 112 minutes. British crime dramas are often well done, but that is not the case with this movie knockoff of a popular 1970s television series about an elite London police squad.  This is one of the most unintentionally (I think) silly films I have seen in a while. ...

  Living in America these days is something like being a character in a Philip K. Dick novel:  Instead of learning from our mistakes and moving on, our leaders continue to hit the replay button, over and over and over.   Syria is using chemical weapons against the rebels, so we are told, and  leading...

  “Liberalism” is the predominant form of snobbery in our time. A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat.  A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican. Nothing fails like success.  But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action. The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August.  I can...

  In the summer of 2011 the US Congress voted to raise the national debt ceiling on the condition that a “super committee” of six democrats and six republicans would meet and hammer out a way to reduce the national deficit. If they could not come up with a plan by November 2012, automatic tax...

  Hundreds of Turkish police officers backed by armored cars moved in on Istanbul’s Taksim Square early Tuesday morning and reclaimed the site after pulling out on June 1. By midday bulldozers had removed barricades of paving stones and corrugated iron. The crackdown surprised protesters, hundreds of whom had been sleeping in a makeshift camp...

A bill that the media is touting as providing “comprehensive immigration reform” is currently making its way through the Senate.  In essence, the bill will provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and vastly expand legal immigration, while doing nothing to prevent future illegal immigration.  In fact, we know from past immigration amnesties that they...

Whenever it is polically expedient, Barack Obama criticizes free trade.  He did it in 2008, when he told Ohio primary voters that he would renegotiate NAFTA.  He did it in 2012, when his campaign saturated the industrial Midwest with ads criticizing Mitt Romney for outsourcing jobs to China at Bain Capital.  But these noises are...

  Until a few weeks ago, political leaders in the United States and Western Europe had claimed with monotonous regularity that the government of Syria was on the verge of collapse. “Assad’s rule is coming to an end. It is inevitable,” Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told a Senate committee in...

A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years...

Last weekend, Paris saw the third march of roughly one million people against gay marriage.  Those in attendance heard an amazing speech from Ludovine de la Rochere, the president of the organization that has been sponsoring the marches.  In it, de la Rochere echoed de Gaulle’s famous words from June 18, 1940:  “The law is today in effect: so isn’t the last word...

  French police have arrested a suspect in the knife attack on a French soldier.  The suspect is 22 year old male “fairly recently converted to Islam.”  The attack in a Paris suburb recalls the recent beheading of an English soldier in the London suburb of Woolwich, where the attacker, again, appears to have been...

  perspective 8 | Topsy-Turvy by Thomas Fleming views 12 | Uncle Sam Goes Bust by Doug Bandow 16 | Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics by Mark G. Brennan reviews 20 | Mal de Mer by Chilton Williamson, Jr. [Sea Changes by Derek Turner] 22 | Why Garry Wills? by James Kalb [Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills]...

  Only in America. Only in America could religious conservatives get worked up over the Boy Scouts’ decision to admit openly homosexual boys to their ranks.   We all knew this decision was inevitable, if not this week then next year.  What possible difference can it make?  The mere fact that there was a debate...

  Jihadophilia (/d??’h??do’f?lj?/) is a mental disorder affecting members of the Western (West European, North American and Anglo-Antipodean) elite class, mostly politicians, journalists, academics and civil servants. J. is characterized by a breakdown of the ability to name Muslims as perpetrators of the acts of Islamic terrorism, by the tendency to systematically ignore Islam as a factor in terrorist attacks...

Every Christmas, we are instructed that there is no War on Christmas.  But the hostility to Christianity and Western culture that motivates the War on Christmas is in fact widespread.  The latest reminder came in an online piece this week in La Stampa, describing how the education minister in the Spanish province of Asturias had ordered schools there to...

  If we lived in a real (not to say free) country, then we would be reading something like the following exchanges:   Congressman Issa:  So, Ms Lerner, how and when exactly did you learn that your department was illegally targeting conservative and pro-life groups. Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I...

  Dominique Venner, prominent French author and much-decorated Algerian war veteran who shot himself before the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on May 21, was a determined foe of homosexual “marriage”—which was legalized in France last weekend—and the threat of Islam to the French society. In Venner’s view, both issues were equally “disastrous” for...

  Last week I traveled to Budapest to attend a conference on the thorny issue of EU-Ukraine relations. The visit prompted me to explore an apparent paradox. Here is a decent little country in the heart of Europe—good food, safe streets, rich soil—which could be a Pannonian version of Holland, but it is not a happy place....

  Obama administration officials have convenient ways of evading responsibility.  Hilary made her getaway before some of the truth about Benghazi began to ooze out from the cracks, and Holder not only has recused himself from the investigation of the AP story but he blames subordinates for all his woes.  Best of all, perhaps, is...

  It remains to be seen who will be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. After this week’s congressional hearings on Benghazi it is certain that Hillary Clinton—the worst Secretary of State in American history—will not be that person. If this country’s political system has some spark left, the Libyan scandal will also come to...

  Three weeks after the bombings it is possible to make some firm and a few tentative conclusions. The most important fact is that the outrage was an act of Islamic terrorism. The attackers were Muslims, but the U.S. elite class—by ignoring that fact or denying its relevance—makes a comprehensive anti-jihadist strategy less likely than...

  Let me second Tom Piatak.  I think the best way to start appreciating Ella is by getting (off iTunes, for example) the various songbooks she recorded–Cole Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart.  In these she sings mainly straight without a lot of jazzing around.  My wife generally dislikes most jazz (except George Shearing and a...

  The national celebration of sodomy continues thanks to Sports Illustrated’s new cover story featuring the first “major sport” athlete to come out of the closet while still an active player.  Jason Collins, a seven-foot-tall black man, writes his own “coming out” story in the current number of SI, along with several other pieces by writers who see...

Google often gets grief over the events and people it chooses to honor.  Much of this criticism is justified.  But sometimes Google gets one right, as it did today, when it honored Ella Fitzgerald.  Here is Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, recorded in 1956.  Popular music does not get any better than this–the finest vocal...

  America has a severe educational problem: It is full of people, many of them in prominent positions, who have been educated beyond their intelligence. In fact, such people are more prominent as leaders in most American institutions  than people of knowledge and character. Another educational problem: several million people who have been made unemployable...

  Last night’s shoot-out in Boston must have brought as much joy to the Kremlin as it has dampened the spirits of  the White House.  Thrilled with the announcement that the primary suspects in the Boston Marathon Massacre were white, anti-American leftists were hoping for the big score, another Tim McVeigh to prove that Tea...

  Until a week ago it appeared that the government in Belgrade would give up the last vestiges of its claim to Kosovo for the sake of some indeterminate date in the future when Serbia may join the European Union. A series of unreciprocated concessions over the past few months have encouraged the KLA regime’s...

  Several commenters have decried the lack of media coverage of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia.  Gosnell is charged with the deaths of one pregnant woman and seven children who were born after botched abortions; those children were killed by having their spinal cords severed.  Witnesses have testified that many more babies were also...