The Psychological Causes of Political Madness
America’s Middle East Delusions
When Samuel Huntington wrote his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, politicians considered it to be off the wall – that is, until a beautiful Tuesday morning in New York City on September 11, 2001.
Christie gets it wrong on OWS and Tea Party
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s attempt to liken Occupy Wall Street protesters to Tea Party activists demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of both movements.
In a video from a town hall meeting, which my colleague Charlie Spiering posted below, Christie responds to a question on the Wall Street protests by arguing that, “I think if you look at the Occupy Wall Street folks and the Tea Party folks, that they come from the same perspective, they just have different solutions. ”
FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.
“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”
The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.
Leftism, the Religion
Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend. This confusion is all the greater now that President Obama has humiliated the Israeli prime minister and created the tensest moment in U.S.-Israel relations in memory.
Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.
Why I Changed My Mind About Unions
The organized tactics of intimidation by the public employee unions in Wisconsin last week came as no surprise to me. I’m from New York, one of the most union-friendly states in the country, and I’ve seen the negative effects of unions my entire life.
Natan Sharansky (1948- )
Natan Sharansky was born in Ukraine in 1948 and studied mathematics in Moscow. He worked as an English interpreter for the great Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, and himself became a champion of Soviet Jewry and a worker for human rights. Convicted in 1978 on trumped-up charges of treason and spying for the United States, Sharansky was sentenced to 13 years in prison. After years in the Siberian gulag, he was released in a U.S.-Soviet prisoner exchange in 1986 and moved to Israel, where he founded a political party promoting the acculturation of Soviet immigrants.
You say you want a revolution?
Since the French Revolution in 1789, revolutions have shown common features that are directly relevant to what is happening in Egypt right now. Since the final outcome in Egypt after Mubarak’s ouster — a new regime — may be weeks, even months or years, away, it is worth pausing to take the long view.
Is O’Reilly losing his touch or is he just irresponsible?
Does access breed obsequiousness? One would be hard-pressed to come to another conclusion with regard to Sunday night’s chat-fest between Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and president Barack Obama. If that was an example of Mr. O’Reilly’s contention that his TV domain is a “no spin zone,” one might consider such a contention to be utterly laughable. Yet the exchange revealed something immensely troubling about the president which, once again, was ignored by the same mainstream media which has largely ignored the troubling revelation that this president sold out Britain to Russia to get the START treaty ratified. Who got sold out this time? Israel, and by extension, Jewish Americans as well.