Posted on By: Fred

Take the ‘Crony’ Out of ‘Crony Capitalism’

When Judge Richard Posner, the prolific conservative intellectual, released his book “A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression” last year, you might have thought the final verdict was in: Capitalism caused the economic downturn and high unemployment.

That this verdict was pronounced by someone like Posner, who is associated with the University of Chicago and the free-market law and economics movement, gave moral support to all the politicians who were intent on exploiting the recession (as they exploit all crises) to increase government control of the economy.

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Posted on By: Fred

Under Obama, crony capitalism again rules the day

In his best-seller “Inside U.S.A.”, the hugely readable journalist John Gunther described America as it was in the last year of World War II. He interviewed hundreds of politicians, businessmen and journalists, but only four men rated a separate chapter — three politicians and Henry J. Kaiser, the California construction magnate who built dams and ships and manufactured concrete and steel and aluminum.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Under-Obama_-crony-capitalism-again-rules-the-day-84271222.html#ixzz15AQRolkH

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Posted on By: Fred

Obama’s Slave Ship

When I was young and living in Manhattan, I saw an Off-Off-Broadway play called Slave Ship. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

Unbeknownst to me, the performance was conducted in total darkness. The audience was subjected for one very long hour to the harrowing sounds of slavery. There were blood-curdling screams, whippings, and more.

Given that we were trapped in pitch blackness, the audience was held captive like the slaves, compelled to experience the same terror, helplessness, and despair. This was undoubtedly the intention of the play.

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Posted on By: Fred

Only the Tea Party can save us now

Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt – as you do on returning to Britain these days – as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.

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Posted on By: Fred

FreedomWorks.org-Updated….regrettably.

Founded in 1984, FreedomWorks is headquartered in Washington, DC, and has hundreds of thousands of grassroots volunteers nationwide. The organization is [formerly as of 1/5/13] chaired by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey and the President is Matt Kibbe.

FreedomWorks members know that government goes to those who show up, and are leading the fight for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom. Join us!

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Posted on By: Fred

The Winner: Rush Limbaugh

“I hope he fails.” With those famous four words, uttered January 16, 2009 — only days before Barack Obama was to be inaugurated — Rush Limbaugh drew a line in the sand.

And as a result, this morning it is Rush Limbaugh who is the undisputed winner of the 2010 election. The White House is repudiated. The Pelosi-run House of Representatives, supported by the Democrats’ Congressional Campaign Committee, also deliberately targeted Limbaugh. Speaker Pelosi is, abruptly, now history. The Senate is richer by a still-undetermined number of conservatives as this goes to Internet press.

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Posted on By: Fred

National Review

There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined.

Let’s face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

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Posted on By: Fred

Commentary Magazine

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.

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Posted on By: Fred

“The Report of our Death was Greatly Exaggerated.”

So whatever happened to the death of conservatism? Wasn’t it supposed to be long gone by now, crumbling within its sarcophagus, a dim memory of a discredited past? Didn’t we start hearing authoritative rumblings about its impending doom around the time of the last set of midterm elections, in 2006, when disillusioned ex-conservatives like Francis Fukuyama and soi-disant types like Andrew Sullivan began tuning their cellos of lamentation and discontent? Wasn’t that also approximately when disaffected conservative writers were proclaiming, in the pages of the Washington Monthly, that “It’s Time for Us to Go”? The talk was so deafening that I was moved to argue with it back in January 2007 in these pages in an article entitled “Is Conservatism Finished?” I concluded with some gingerness that it was not, but my conclusion came nearly two years before the most liberal candidate to run for the presidency in nearly half a century won a resounding victory.

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