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Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives have expressed bewilderment over CBS’s abandonment of the “American Heartland” by choosing Colbert to replace Letterman. Ed Driscoll has contrasted the pick with the Letterman and Leno succession battle. But the real lesson of that battle is that while Leno won on performance, beating Letterman in the ratings, Letterman won on image, retiring as an honored figure, despite his abusive behavior, while Leno was booed out the door Leno is no conservative, but he left with the baffled bewilderment familiar to many on the right of being the better man who is despised for his...

For only ten dollars a day or a month you can feed all the starving children in Africa. For only the price of a cup of coffee a year, you can make sure that no one in Kansas City ever goes hungry again. For just a third of your paycheck, you can subsidize a vast bureaucracy that will conduct studies on the best way to save the world and then come up with proposals that will only cost you half your paycheck. This misplaced philanthropic confidence is the idiot stepchild of a free enterprise society where anything can be accomplished...

Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash - New York Times - December 8 1941 ------------------- A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces. "I don't know what any of this is about," a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. "All I know is that the killing has to stop." In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not...

October 29, 2013 Obama Didn’t Lie About ObamaCare, If You Exclude All His Lies Daniel Greenfield “I did not have sex with that health plan.�The hot new liberal talking point about Obama’s “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan� lie is that it’s actually true of the plans you can keep, but not of the plans you can’t keep.When Obama repeatedly said that, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan�… he apparently meant only the “good� health care plans that he approves of, but not the bad ones.Somehow this is...

Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance. These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster. The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or...

It’s not amnesty. It’s just a bill that legalizes illegal aliens and puts them on a path to citizenship. No amnesty to see here. Issa’s forthcoming legislation takes elements from similar legislation he introduced in December 2003, the Alien Accountability Act. The six-year period is intended to whittle down the undocumented immigrant population into several categories, such as immigrants with family ties to U.S. citizens or immigrants who want to participate in a guest-worker program. -snip- “If somebody has a nexus that would reasonably allow them to become permanent residents and American citizen, we should allow them to do that,”...

Thursday, October 10, 2013 The Obama Blockade Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In the spring of ’48, the collision of wills between the free world and the red slave empire of the east came to a head in Berlin. The Communist strategy had been to push forward, to violate the spirit of the agreements and then the letter of the agreements while always claiming to be the aggrieved party. The Allies had treated the Soviet Union as if it were a credible partner that wanted to work together with them on rebuilding Europe. The Soviet Union...

China doesn’t have the same record of killing foreign enemies overseas that Russia does. But it has a large enough overseas network and piles of cash that it could get the job done if it needed to. Just ask Naw Kham what happened after the Mekong River Massacre. The bodies of the Chinese, the crew of two cargo boats, were found badly mutilated on the Thai side of the river in early October 2011. The killings, the worst slaughter of Chinese citizens abroad in recent memory, angered the Chinese public. Chinese investigators insist that Mr. Naw Kham was the mastermind...

Suffice it to say that apparently Netanyahu and the Israeli military have a plan to take out Iran’s nuclear program. And the man blocking the exit is Barack Hussein Obama, who wants to bomb Syria over WMDs, but doesn’t want to let Israel do what it has to in Iran.

Ronald Ernest Paul, the nation's last best hope for internet gambling and the gold standard, responded to the murder of a Navy SEAL by saying, "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword." But the question is whose sword is it? To the anti-war movement, all conflicts between the free world and the world of slaves are reduced to a pithy formula of moral equivalence. America lifted the sword and has gone on swinging it. It never puts the sword down and therefore it dies by it. Chris Kyle becomes a metaphor for the great beast of war,...

The Ecotality case wasn’t the biggest payoff, but it was particularly outrageous because it got stimulus money when it was already under SEC investigation.The company received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission in October of 2010.The president of Ecotality North America Don Karner was sent an additional subpoena in December of 2011, which specifically asks for any and all documentation surrounding the public announcement of the first Department of Energy grant to the company for $99.8 million on August 5, 2009.Ecotality was awarded $99 million in 2009 and an additional $26 million in October 2011. Since the beginning...

We spend a great deal of time talking about the Muslim Brotherhood’s networks, its agents of influence and the structural elements of its infrastructure. But it may be worth exploring a more basic question. What is its appeal? This isn’t an inquiry about the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and its varied front groups to the educated and wealthy Muslims who make up its key demographic. The Brotherhood promises the Sunni Arab elites that they can stay on top while beating the West by making Islam into as compelling a method of national and international governance as the freedom and...

One empire falls and another rises in its place. It’s an old story and it is what we are seeing in the Middle East. The Islamist resurgence was fed by the collapse of two world powers, the USSR and the US. The fall of the Soviet Union robbed the Arab Socialist dictatorships of their support. The last of these, Syria, is now under siege, by Sunni Islamist militias. Egypt’s Sadat had made the move to the American camp early enough to avoid the fate of Syria or Iraq, but instead his successor, Mubarak, encountered the fate of the Shah of...

Friday, May 24, 2013 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Orwell Lives Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments ORWELL LIVES Witnesses claim it took London police 20 minutes to show up and stop the two Muslim killers. But when it comes to something truly serious, like protecting Muslims from elderly British women, then the coppers were on the case. “An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers." Note...

The United States has become a tool of Muslim Brotherhood expansionism. Obama helped the Brotherhood overthrow governments by political means, but now the Brotherhood is demanding military intervention to help a Brotherhood/Al Qaeda coalition take over Syria. And if Obama goes along with it, he will have turned the United States military into the mercenaries of the Muslim Brotherhood. Americans have died because of Obama’s dirty deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question now is whether Obama will send American soldiers and pilots to die for the Brotherhood. In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. Obama had...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 #FreeJahar and the Media's #FreeJihad Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments The media, in one of its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned its eye on the teenage girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always had their fan clubs. Before the Boston Marathon bombings spawned the #FreeJahar crowd, there were the Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Even if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would...

Sunday, May 12, 2013 Put Not Your Trust in Politicians Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 4 Comments The most obvious lessons of the defeat of gun control and the push for illegal alien amnesty is that politicians don't matter. People do. The Tea Party invested its energy into electing the right people, but as Rick Scott and Marco Rubio showed us, there may be no such thing as the right people. Politicians are in the business of selling out. The difference between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist was that Rubio hadn't really been tested. But that...

Thursday, May 09, 2013 The Playgrounds of War Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating. Tolerance does not usher in some tolerant anarchy in which we learn to tolerate all things. Rather tolerance is a finite substance. It can only be allocated to so many places. While a society changes, human...

Tuesday, May 07, 2013 The Road to Nowhere Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The Heritage Institute report estimates that under amnesty the average legalized illegal household will take in $43,900 in benefits while paying a little over a third of that in taxes. Those numbers are grim from the standpoint of a tottering economy being asked to take on an even bigger pile of debt and they reveal an even grimmer view of the future. Set aside the political debates, the tensions over multiculturalism, entitlements and the great political divide, and those numbers reek of a...

Saturday, May 11, 2013 With Blood on Their Hands Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Lady Macbeth may have been one of literature's most famous villains, but at least she had the guilty conscience to eventually try and wash the blood off her hands. Even if by then it was much too late. via American Digest It is doubtful that Hillary Rodham Clinton will start hallucinating bloody spots on her palms during the book tour for her upcoming 14-million-dollar book or compulsively washing her hands during the 2016 campaign. If she does make it into the White...

The best evidence of the unlamented death of the Arab Spring (2010-2013) was the nervous response in Washington D.C. to the Syrian crossing of the Red Line. The Red Line had been set up so that Assad would eventually run afoul of it, whether by using chemical weapons or by taking the blame for chemical weapons use by the rebels; as the UN alleges happened. Once the Red Line was crossed, the Liberators of Libya would use the opportunity to enforce the will of the people; at least those people with Qatari RPGs and Turkish machine guns. But instead of...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 The Post-Obama Democratic Party Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together. Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened. By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other...

Sometimes poetic justice is very poetic. Other times it’s ironic. And sometimes it’s a teachable moment about the folly of appeasement. Not that Dr. Christopher Stone will have learned anything from his experience. Leftist academics are not very educable. Not even when their Muslim teachers are stabbing them in the neck. (via Debbie Schlussel) A man stabbed in the neck near the US Embassy in Cairo on Thursday has been identified as Chris Stone, an American academic. Stone is associate professor of Arabic and head of the Arabic Programme at City University.

The First Rule of Illegal Immigration is No One Talks About Illegal Immigration May 5, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield 2  Print This Post Liberals love euphemisms the way that goats love eating rotten apples. But the problem with euphemisms is that they eventually take on the derogatory meaning of the thing they were trying to slowly back away from. Retarded started out as a euphemism to replace slow which was a euphemism started to replace moron which was also… you get the idea. Liberals insisted that we use illegal immigrant to replace illegal alien which replaced more insulting terms. Now...

Friday, May 03, 2013 "The Golden Apple" - A Socialist Fairy Tale Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments Once upon a time there was a street fair. It had striped awnings and bright colors and from far and near, farmers came with wagons full of produce to sell at the street fair. The produce was plentiful and cheap and the crowds it drew were huge which created all sorts of concerns for the government. So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At...

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 The Best Minds of My Generation Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The one thing that gave me hope for my generation was our cynicism. We might not believe in anything, but at least we wouldn't believe in everything. We might be apathetic, but that just meant it was harder to enlist us in causes. We didn't just march to the beat of our own drummer, we questioned the need for having a drummer and a beat. We were burnt out on everything and done with it all. Of course it wasn't really...

Monday, April 29, 2013 The Big Fat Red Line Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building. The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns a corner and dives inside a pothole near an exposed sewer grate. And then it is gone. Obama's red line is more famous than my red line. It...

The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack. For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflict with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored. Most...

Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to common beliefs. Eliminate motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it harder to catch terrorists...

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 Terrorism Without a Motive Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 2 Comments Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to...

Monday, April 22, 2013 A Tribal War in Boston Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 10 Comments Terrorism, like urban crime, is one of those things that you're not supposed to think about too much. It's fine to talk about your emotions after a bombing or a mugging. You can even share stories and eventually learn to laugh about it. What you cannot do is talk about where it comes from except in the vaguest terms of social conditions. Like pollution from industry or corruption from government, it's one of those toxic spinoffs of our modern society....

On September 12, 2012, Obama stepped out into the Rose Garden and told the millions of Americans watching at home, “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.” More than half a year has passed since then and justice is nowhere in sight. The perpetrators of the attack openly walk the streets of Benghazi long after the FBI team sent there has gone home. It may well be a coincidence that the first major successful terrorist attack comes as the administration plots a...

Saturday, April 20, 2013 Refusing to be Terrorized Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 2 out of 3 governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.  "Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address. But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that...

Motive still a giant incomprehensible mystery. But there are suspicions that he was one of those Tea Party NRA type of people. Certainly his peaceful tolerant religion notorious for its love of kites, puppies, infidels and women had nothing to do with it. NPR has done some background on Tamerlan Tsarnaev who, it turns out, was surprisingly Muslim. (Not that NPR can say so.) His Islamic attitudes extended to his treatment of American women. LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Well, these women were close friends and roommates of Tamerlan’s girlfriend, Katherine Russell, and they knew him for several years while they...

“One of the Chechen terrorists who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings could have been deported years ago after a criminal conviction and the other was granted American citizenship on the 11th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. “Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently didn’t feel he represented a big enough threat.”

Now that we know who the bombers are and one of them is dead, and that they are Chechen Muslims, the media has gone into “Palestinian” mode insisting that we need to talk about the conflict in Chechnya. We can talk about Chechnya, but the issue there and everywhere else is Islamic nationalism or Islamism. The bombers could have been from Chechnya or Mali or Bosnia or Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan or any Muslim country where Islamists are active. And that’s most Muslim countries, especially after the Arab Spring. There is a conflict in Chechnya and Iraq and Pakistan...

Sleeper? Every believer in Islam is potentially a sleeper, ready to undergo what the experts call “radicalization”. But radicalization is largely a misnomer. The proper term is religiosity...

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Tears Don't Protect Against Murder Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 6 Comments After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

In The Republic, Plato argued that philosophers must be made kings for the ideal city-state to be born. In the pages of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein argues for the benevolent paternalism of the nanny state and its philosopher-kings. It’s an old Sunstein theme and the one that brought him to the attention of politicians who dearly love to imagine themselves in the roles of those philosopher-kings. One of those politicians, Barack Obama, even made Sunstein his Regulatory Czar. Sunstein debuted as the philosopher-king of the technocrats with his book Nudge. Now having left his D.C. Czardom, Sunstein is back...

The first urban political machine was named after a fictional Indian saint unrecognized by any church and whose name, when pronounced with a Y at the end, began to strike many as Irish which only further confused the issue. The godfather of that machine was another fictional saint who became Thomas Jefferson's vice president after successfully rigging an election using a phony water company that eventually became Chase Bank, was tried for murder after killing the first Secretary of the Treasury, was tried for treason after a conspiracy to make himself King of Mexico and plotted to convince New England...

The urban political machine was born in New York but died in Chicago. It’s no longer a separate entity from the rest of the country; one of the inconveniences of urban life along with smog, muggings and excessive regulation. The urban political machine has gone national. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere. You may disapprove of New York’s soda ban or Chicago’s love affair with gun control or Los Angeles’ pandering to illegal aliens; but what happens in the country’s blighted metropolises no longer stays there. You can live surrounded by ten thousand acres of wilderness on one side and...

Apparently America has too many jobs so Obama will be spending taxpayer money to support Russia’s defense industry on behalf of Afghanistan. And he’s doing so over the bipartisan objections of Congress from both the right and left and a ban on buying them written into the NDAA. The US Department of Defense said Thursday it plans to sidestep a Congressional ban to purchase 30 helicopters from Russian state-owned defense firm Rosoboronexport, despite objections from US lawmakers who allege that the firm has equipped the Syrian government to commit brutal crimes against civilians.

The first rule of Jihad Club is that there's no talking about it. For the second rule, see the first rule. The culture of silence and terrorism denial is sometimes well meaning. Since the Bush days, experts on Islam have warned that the best way to defeat Islamic terrorists is to undermine their claim to fighting on behalf of Islam by refusing to call them Islamic. The sheer brilliance of this strategy was only partly undermined by its origins in Saudi Arabia, the country sponsoring Islamic terrorists, and by the fact that recruiting primarily takes place in media and channels...

THAT IS NOT THE ROOSEVELT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR Bull Moose Sportsmen is a front for some figures in the Colorado Democratic Party. Its name and use of T.R. is yet another tiresome effort to co-opt Teddy Roosevelt for the left’s causes. What would Teddy Roosevelt have thought of being exploited by the gun control crowd? “The great body of our citizens shoot less as times goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power," Roosevelt said. "The first step – in...

In the rapist’s defense, his lawyer argued that he wasn’t at all clear about this whole “Women are human beings” thing. Mr Regan said Esmatullah Sharifi was uneducated, illiterate, inexperienced in forming relationships with women, and was confused about the nature of consent. He is in Australia on a permanent protected visa. The judge didn’t buy it then, but the usual lefty approach is to just keep appealing until you find a bleeding heart judge who accepts the horrible notion being put forward. And that didn’t take very long.

All politics are the politics of the future. The one cause that we all champion, regardless of our political orientation, is the cause of the future. All that we fight for is the ability to shape the future. The fundamental political question is, "Do you believe things are getting better or worse?" Ruling parties tend to answer, "Better", opposition parties tend to answer, "Worse". The deeper answer to that question though lies in our perceptions of the past and the future. The left tends to view the past negatively and future shock positively. It wants change to disrupt the old...

State Department “Ramping Up� Program to Bring Muslim Students to the USPosted By Daniel Greenfield On April 1, 2013 @ 7:00 pm In The Point | 16 Comments Apparently the United States is suffering from a surplus of skyscrapers and passenger jet planes. The State Department is hoping that their program can stimulate the economy through some creative destruction. The idea of “education diplomacy” has “really arrived” at the highest levels of American foreign policy, a US State Department official has told an international higher education conference.Meghann Curtis, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Academic Programs at the US Department of State’s...

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed. The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family...

As another Passover begins, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" resound briefly and then fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem. Some of us are already there now. But will that make us free? Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with...

Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of seeing a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour. Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction. Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now. Environmentalism has degenerated into a conviction that all human activity...