Member Login

You are not currently logged in.








» Register
» Lost your Password?

Article Archives

IF NAPOLEON SCRATCHED A LIBERAL, HE’D FIND…

PBS is the beau ideal of many liberals when it comes to free speech.  Their point of view is subsidized by the taxpayers.  Other points of view are suppressed. Now in yet another triumph for the liberal view of free speech (free for me but not for thee), the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled city officials may override the First Amendment if the exercise of free speech by some city employees offends the delicate sensibilities of liberals. Liberal intolerance of other than liberal opinions is behind efforts to reinstate the inaptly named "Fairness Doctrine" in radio. I see this every day at the very liberal newspaper where I work.  Conservatives often write angry letters to the editor, criticizing the arguments made in an editorial, or what they perceive as the slant in a news story.  Liberals unhappy with my columns often demand that I be fired.  They object not just to my point of view, but to the fact that it was expressed.  To paraphrase Napoleon...

Read more...

OUT OF AFRICA

Sleeping in a tent with a half million wildebeest nearby on the short grass plains of Africa's Serengeti is like sleeping next to an eight-lane freeway at rush hour - with all the cars honking their horns. The incessant snorts and grunts of the vast herds vibrate the leaves off the trees which fall like rain on the tent.  They are punctuated by the whistling barks of thousands of zebras, and interrupted by the cackling cry of hyenas on a kill.  One hyena pack's cries are so close they must be less than 100 feet away. In the short breaks of silence when the hyenas cease and the wildebeest resume, there are lions coughing in the distance. With the coming of dawn, things quiet down.  The wildebeest and zebras emerge out of the relative safety of the trees where we are camped and onto the plains the Masai call endless - for that is what Serengeti means in their tribal language, "endless plains." I have had no contact with the outside world now for going on two weeks.  Not a single phone call or email, not a newspaper or short-wave radio.  I'll be posting this once I reach the town of Arusha, which is the jumping-off spot for safaris to the Serengeti, but as of now I haven't the faintest idea of what's been happening in the world. The world seems very far away from where I am writing this, on the veranda of my tent with a plain of endless grass spread before me, countless black dots of munching wildebeest covering the dark green all the way to the horizon.   It seems a perfect place to discuss just how we all got out of Africa and into that far away world so long ago - for it is an astounding and fascinating story.

Read more...

THE FREE MARKET ANSWER TO MICHAEL MOORE’S SICKO

Michael Moore's new docutribe Sicko is set to unleash a torrent of disinformation about the U.S. health care system that will play into the hands of those who wish to turn our entire health care industry over to government bureaucrats. However, we're firing back with a new internet movie that attacks one of the central premises of his propaganda: that 45 million Americans have no health insurance - and no access to health care. Uninsured in America is a new 9-minute film which examines the facts behind the oft-repeated cries of an "uninsured crisis".

Read more...

WHAT IS CENTRAL ABOUT HUMANS?

The newspaper I read regularly carried a story on June 20th, 2007, from Cox News Service, under the byline of a Bill Hendrick, reporting on a finding at Emory University's primate center that "the local customs that define human cultures also exist in the world of chimpanzees." The story goes on to say, "That means that humans aren't the only animals with culture, said Frans de Waal...." The evidence for this is that when a couple of chimps began to use a new method for mutual cleansing, in a while the entire group adopted the method but chimps outside the group kept to the old ways. The first question is, is the report itself accurate-

Read more...

OPERATION ARROWHEAD RIPPER

Imagine it's June 7, 1944, the day after the D-Day invasion.  You pick up your newspaper.  There's no mention of Normandy on the front page, and only a brief reference to it in a roundup story on an inside page. The biggest battle since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime is under way in Iraq.  Its outcome could determine whether the war is won or lost.  But our news media have paid less attention to it than to Paris Hilton's legal troubles. The heart of the offensive is Operation Arrowhead Ripper, in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, involving some 8,000 American and 2,000 Iraqi troops.

Read more...

RECIPE FOR OUTFLOW

Assume you are an agent for a country that is hostile to the United States, and you want to undermine the American economy by attacking a couple of key industries. Which ones would you go after? You would learn that the computer, Internet and wireless industries, coupled with the world's most productive financial engineering, have provided much of the U.S. economic growth for the last quarter-century. Given that you, as an agent of a foreign government, could not possibly literally blow up these sectors, what would you do?

Read more...

THE DANGERS OF EUROPEAN ANTI-AMERICANISM

This past year more than one trillion dollars flowed between the U.S. and the EU. The EU now accounts for 21 percent of U.S. merchandise exports and 19 percent of U.S. merchandise imports, and about 34 percent of U.S. services exports and 37 percent of U.S. services imports. The U.S. is not only the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, but far and away the world's largest investor elsewhere. Of the more than two trillion dollars the U.S. has invested directly abroad, a little more than half ($1.1 trillion) is invested in Europe. Europeans account for 70 percent ($1.2 trillion) of the direct investment in the U.S. The bottom line is that the U.S. and Europe are economically joined at the hip, and any actions which damage trade and investment between these two economic giants hurt everyone. The U.S. and EU have a combined population of about 650 million people, and their combined GDP equals 57 percent of the world's total. The U.S. has also provided...

Read more...

ON THE WRONG TRACK

In the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released Tuesday, 69 percent of those polled think things in this country "are seriously off on the wrong track." The "wrong track" numbers haven't been this high since the late 1970s.  There were good reasons then for public discontent.  The economy was stagnant, but inflation was soaring. The Watergate scandal and our defeat in Vietnam were fresh in the public mind. But today the stock market is hitting record highs; inflation and unemployment are near record lows.  Our discontent is less with our circumstances than with our perception of our political "leadership." President Bush's polling numbers have been plumbing the political depths for quite some time. But he's less unpopular than...

Read more...

FATAH AND HAMAS

Hamas "fighters" took gunmen captured from the rival Fatah organization from their headquarters in Rafah in the Gaza Strip and "shot them to death gangland style in the street in front of their families," the Associated Press reported Thursday. Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home dressed as a woman. "But when Abu Jadian arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles," the Jerusalem Post reported. That sort of behavior can sow mistrust between partners. At least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded in fighting between the rival Palestinian factions Wednesday, bringing the total for the week to...

Read more...

A TUSKER AT THE STANLEY

The Exchange Bar at the Stanley in Nairobi is arguably the most famous watering hole in Africa.  Named after Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the Dark Continent's greatest explorer, the Stanley Hotel was built in 1902.  Teddy Roosevelt drank here, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, and a long long list of European "crowned heads." It was a great place to find out what the Soviets were up to in Africa during the Cold War, so I hoisted many a Tusker Lager here years ago.  And here I am again.  With no intrigue going on, just a lot of folks ensconced in leather chairs engaged in friendly talk about safaris or business.  I've got a mug of Tusker, of course, but I've also got a wireless Internet connection on my laptop.  What would Hemingway have thought? Yet what keeps coming to my mind is a picture I once took out in the bush not too far from here.  It's of a palm tree: slave_palm You'd never think it was anything special until you realize that palm trees are not native to the East African bush.  You're looking at real and awful history here.  This is a slave palm.

Read more...