This report appeared originally at American Power. See, “Noam Chomsky Attacks Israel’s ‘Expansion Over Security’ at UCLA Lecture on ‘Palestine in Crisis’.”

*****

I experimented with video blogging, and this clip captures more of Chomsky’s comments on U.S. policy than his remarks on Israeli expansionism. Here he argues that from Washington’s perspective democracy and freedom in the Middle East are antithetical to American interests. The U.S. and Israel allegedly fear the Arab Spring because the revolutions threaten American hegemony in the region. Chomsky spouts a lot of disinformation, which is his trademark. He says at 40 seconds that “about 90 percent of Egyptians view the United States as the main enemy” and that “about 80 percent in the region wanted to be sure Iran had nuclear weapons”:

Actually, public opinion in Egypt is much more complicated than that, and while there’s obviously variation across individual polls and over time, there’s no support for Chomky’s claim of “80 percent” across the region supporting Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. In fact, according to a Pew Global Attitudes survey in April 2010, “a majority of respondents in Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon as well as Israel said the spread of nuclear weapons was a major threat” (the number was 41 percent in Egypt).

But these are only quick examples of the kind of propaganda one hears at a Noam Chomsky lecture. Indeed, what’s even more fascinating than hearing Chomsky’s America-bashing is observing the rock star status he’s afforded by the huge crowd of collegiate wannabe bohemians, diehard pro-terror communists, and the campus Islamist jihadis who thronged the event. I’ll post pictures later. Chomsky was swarmed by extremist acolytes upon entering the lecture hall. Upon speaking, it was as if his attacks on “American imperialism” and “corporate dominance” were like throwing bags of candy to children. I arrived at UCLA at 5:00pm, and the event was scheduled from 6:00 to 8:00pm. There was a long line out in front of the lecture hall, and while I was dressed casual with my baggy shorts and Famous Stars and Straps shirt and cap, I nevertheless hid the cover of Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s, Anti Chomsky Reader with my copy Chomsky and Ilan Pappé’s Gaza in Crisis. No need to get these thugs riled. That said, I haven’t shaved in weeks, and the beard’s getting a little scruffy, frankly, and thus I imagine that grizzled look went over well among the hordes. Honestly, some Muslim women simply do not smell good, and that’s to say nothing of the countercultural radicals who look like they just awoke from a night’s sleep out on the sidewalks of Westwood. Hey, I guess it’s a good thing that the Muslim dude I saw in building of the Samueli School of Engineering, where I stopped off to take a leak before heading back out to the parking garage, was performing his ablutions right there at the bathroom sink!

In any case, listening to Chomsky drone on lethargically, I was reminded of this passage from David Horowitz’s essay at the reader, “Noam Chomsky’s Anti-American Obsession”:

It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced. Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the overweening purpose of Chomsky’s lifework, which is to justify an idée fixe — his pathological hatred of his own country.

The point was evident at the moment Chomsky commenced. The talk was on “Palestine and Israel in Crisis,” but Chomsky was emphatic in stressing the everything Israel does “is at the direction of the United States.” That claim sets the tone, of course, for Chomsky’s attacks on America’s imperial ambitions in the region. But despite the monotonous delivery, Chomsky was sharp intellectually and stayed on point in discussing the Middle East “crisis.” And note that nothing, not a single fact surrounding the cycles of violence and bloodshed in the region, is the fault of the Palestinians. He made a big point, a number of times, to stress that the U.S. and Israel face a “crisis of legitimation” in world opinion. He argued, by that token, that this was in fact an increasing “crisis of delegitimation” that’s bringing about a “tsunami” of condemnation against the United States, which Chomsky eagerly claimed to be a declining power, but which will nevertheless will remain influential of global affairs for some time to come. (Which begs the question of course of whether or not the U.S. really is the “hegemon” that’s the basis for Chomsky’s decades-long excoriation of his own country.)

Victor Davis Hanson gave the breakfast keynote address at the West Coast Retreat on Saturday, April 2nd. And out of a long day of many outstanding presentations, this one was truly special. I think Hanson’s talk provided the weekend’s biggest “Ah-Ha! Factor.” That’s the moment when all the pieces of the intellectual puzzle snap together and you say to yourself, “Ah-Ha!” It’s a gleeful flash of recognition. The loose ends have been wrapped up and you really see things in a new light.

Hanson described President Obama‘s approach to policy (both foreign and domestic) as a postmodern problématique. Over the last couple of years, Obama has made promises of public policy completely abstracted from reality: on energy (cap-and-trade, eventually abandoned), on health care (ObamaCare, riddled with waivers), and on foreign policy (from Guantanamo to Libya, one brush with reality after another).

Simply put, every single claim President Obama has ever made has been completely divorced from reality.

On Libya, for example, Hanson cracked wise when he compared President Obama’s demands that Muammar Gaddafi step down — “You gotta go” — to the thought of Winston Churchill demanding of Hitler — “Adolf, you gotta go.” Seriously. History’s tyrants aren’t going anywhere unless removed by raw power. But American policy toward Libya’s been soft-and-squishy, dithering and excruciatingly multilateral. And in the end, the goals of the mission remain unclear to this day.

Are we going to remove Gaddafi from power? Well, Obama pledged no to regime change. Are we sending in ground troops? No, but the CIA’s been activated for potential covert operations. The possibility of a quagmire was made all the more likely by the ease of military action in Libya: It’s right there in the Southern Mediterranean. Britain and France can deploy without needing permission from allies for territorial flyovers and Anglo-French expeditionary forces won’t be trudging through barren terrain halfway around the world–like American troops have been doing for nearly ten years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, Gaddafi’s not going quietly, and victory in Libya is now in question.

Hanson laid out a number of scenarios to finish the war:

1. The U.S. could mount a massive land invasion similar to the Iraq deployment, with the goal of deposing the Libya dictatorship and establishing a constitutional regime;
2. The U.S. could pull out of Libya altogether, like we did in Lebanon or Mogadishu, basically washing our hands of a costly mission seen as a rash mistake in hindsight; or
3. The U.S. could implement an extended bombing campaign targeting the center of Gaddafi’s power, much like during the Kosovo war in the late-1990s that sent Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague.

I’d like to follow-up on NewsReal Blog Editor David Swindle’s comments on the last-day session at the Freedom Center’s Retreat. David writes:

The speakers and panels where intellectually intense and at times emotionally draining. The threats facing our country today are challenging — play time is over.

Indeed, it is. And I’m looking forward to David’s continuing coverage of the presentations, and for him to elaborate on both of those points on emotions and threats. For my own part, I’d say frustration — amazingly — was a key sensation I experienced after spending time with my fellow conservatives at the retreat. As many participants expressed, the entire weekend was a sustained experience of intellectual stimulation. The speakers examined some of the most important issues facing our country today. But I felt some frustration because the presentations were so powerful and informative that I wanted to share them with the world! If more citizens had regular access to current information on policy — untainted by the lamestream media’s bias and indeological blinders — we’d be able to tackle our problems much more quickly and way more effectively.

Given that, I have to confess my pleasant surprise at the news that the Obama administration has cancelled plans to put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in New York. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared at pains while delivering the news on Monday, and the Wall Street Journal has a report, “U.S. Reverses on 9/11 Trials: Alleged Terror Plotter, Four Others to Face Military Tribunals as Obama Backtracks:

During the past two years, Mr. Obama has moved closer to embracing some of the Bush policies he had earlier criticized. In a March 2009 speech Mr. Obama endorsed the idea of restarting military commissions, which he had halted upon taking office. And he also announced he would set up a system to hold indefinitely without trial certain prisoners too dangerous to release.

Some of “the Bush policies” cited by the Journal were developed by John Yoo, who was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration. Upon leaving government service, Mr. Yoo returned to teaching constitutional law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. And at the retreat on Sunday, speaking at a panel entitled “Jihad on the Homefront,” Professor Yoo hammered the Obama administration’s foreign policy. President Obama has, he said, in attempting to dismantle the legal framework of the Bush administration’s anti-terror program, made Americans less safe. Not only did Obama attempt to shutter Guantanamo, but under his watch more than a quarter of the enemy combatants released from detention have returned to the field of battle. Professor Yoo indicated that the nature of the war on terror has changed significantly since the first few years after September 11. Al Qaeda has become increasingly decentralized as a terrorist organization, and transnational recruitment in the U.S. and Europe is a growing source of combatants for the next wave of operations. There are less likely to be large-scale attacks along the lines of 9/11, and more like that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner two Christmases ago.

I’ll have more commentary on the retreat later, and some of the other NewsReal bloggers will be commenting when the event videos are finished being edited and uploaded. Meanwhile, you gotta love this editorial from Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “Vindicating Guantanamo: Eric Holder Adopts the Bush Anti-Terror Architecture“:

Yesterday’s Gitmo climb-down came after the Supreme Court rejected appeals from three Guantanamo detainees challenging their indefinite detention. If no other country will take them, the detainees have nowhere else to go.

KSM and his fellow murderers will now be tried by military commissions of the kind that President George W. Bush proposed in the earliest days of the conflict formerly known as the war on terror. Someone should write the headline: Holder vindicates Ashcroft, as in Mr. Bush’s first AG. Or how about: Current State Department Counselor Harold Koh vindicates John Yoo, the much-maligned Bush Justice Department official whose views on Presidential power have also been increasingly adopted by Team Obama.

Compare that to the disgruntled editors at the New York Times, “Cowardice Blocks the 9/11 Trial.”

“Like I said, the concept of having an even hand, to make something more balanced — I don’t think that’s the job of an artist.”

– Director Julian Schnabel, interviewed at New York Times, March 22, 2011.

I’m not familiar with Julian Schnabel’s previous work. Apparently an acclaimed painter, Schnabel directed the 2000 film, “Before Night Falls,” a biographical picture on the life of Cuban gay dissident and intellectual Reinaldo Arenas. One of the film’s reviewers described Arenas as having an “obsession with absolute freedom.” And thus, in turn, the notion of an “obsession with absolute freedom” gives us insight into Schnabel’s motivation for making his latest movie, “Miral,” a pro-Palestinian propaganda flick based on an autobiographical novel by Rula Jebreal. This is so, because frankly, Schnabel’s message in “Miral” is aggressively, shamelessly anti-Israel. The Jewish state is pictured as the caricature of an oppressive, villainous totalitarian regime. It would be too simple to call “Miral” one-sided, because it’s so much more: The film is nothing short of a merciless attack on truth and objectivity. Indeed, Schnabel confesses so much at the epigram to this essay above. The director was asked, by Deborah Sontag of the New York Times, “Did you at any point consider showing Israeli victims of Palestinian violence?” And he responds, “Like I said, the concept of having an even hand, to make something more balanced — I don’t think that’s the job of an artist.”

Or, that’s not the job of an anti-Israel propagandist.

“Miral” tells the story of the lives of four Palestinian women, going back to the establishment of Israel at the end of the British mandate in 1947. One of these women, a pivotal character in the film, is Hind Husseini (played by Hiam Abbass). We see Husseini at the beginning of the movie, in one of the typical scenes staged to maximize emotional sympathy, where she finds 55 children who’ve been orphaned during the war. With wild screams the children recount the gunfire and killing of loved ones and Husseini has the kids follow her home like a Palestinian Pied Piper. From this Husseini goes on to establish the Dar Al Tifel Jerusalem Orphanage and Educational Institution. And within the sanctuary of the school, and the rectitude of its master, we learn of the complicated and intertwined lives of the Palestinians in Israel, and especially of Miral (Freida Pinto), a young Palestinian woman who comes of age during the first intifada of 1987. Miral falls in love with a young PLO operative who is shown being murdered by (we assume) Israeli agents in the film’s closing moments. It’s one more vignette meant to break hearts — and break support for Israel’s national legitimacy

I went to see this movie without prejudice or preconception. I’d heard only minor details of the controversy surrounding “Miral,” most notably the vehement denunciation that was issued by the American Jewish Committee upon the film’s screening at the United Nations. I thus hoped my mind would be clear of preformed bias or ideological castigations. As it turns out, then, I was perhaps even more surprised by Schnabel’s vision of a hellish, Jewish police state. With the exception of a sympathetic Jewish Israeli woman (played by Stella Schnabel, the director’s daughter), Israelis are portrayed as police enforcers and murderous military bureaucrats in the Schutzstaffel mold. It’s one faceless scene after another where Palestinian homes are razed by Israeli heavy machinery and Muslim street protesters are gunned down by police bullets during the uprisings. But never does Schnabel offer a hint of background information, thus viewers are robbed of the chance at greater understanding of the issues and causes — especially those deeply gripping humanitarian violations rooted on the Palestinian side of the Middle East standoff (think Itamar).

I took my oldest son to the see the movie, which was showing at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. On the way there I asked him, “What do you know about the Middle East conflict?” He said he didn’t know anything, which isn’t surprising given the 9th grade public school curriculum. But his best friend is Jewish, so I’m glad that he had a chance to see the film with me. Absent fatherly guidance, my son probably wouldn’t have had the benefit of dissecting the film from the stance of an informed observer, not to mention from the perspective of one knowledgeable of the Left’s worldwide campaign against the Jewish state. In any case, while some mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times were all too happy to whitewash Schnabel’s propaganda, there was fortunately a crop of more penetrating reviews that pushed back against the director’s blatant cinematic distortions. See for example, Lisa Palmieri-Billig’s perfectly-titled review at the Jerusalem Post, “The Bitter Half.” And especially Stephen Whitty at New Jersey’s Star-Ledger, “‘Miral’ Review: A One-Sided Story“:

Not surprisingly, “Miral” has already received bad reviews and complaints from Jewish organizations; Schnabel and the studio are playing the aggrieved-artist card, portraying themselves as friends of Israel whose free speech is being denied. It’s not. It is here and it is intact. And in its loud and strident sloganeering, and dishonest portrayal of conflict without context, it only drowns out any real and quiet pleas for peace.

Also see Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd’s discussion of the film in a recent episode of Poliwood at PJTV.

PHOTO CREDIT: At top, Julian Schnabel pictured with Rula Jebreal (left) and Freida Pinto, c/o Wikipedia.

I paid a visit to the UCLA campus last week to cover the Muslim Student Association’s Palestine Awareness Week. I gathered together an initial report featuring an interview with UCLA’s campus organizer Hamzah Baig, as well as photos from the student demonstrations: “Israeli Apartheid Week, Students for Justice in Palestine, UCLA, February 23, 2011.” Upon additional reflection, the day’s events formed an essential learning experience for me. This was my first time attending Israeli Apartheid Week at any of the California campuses. Not knowing what to expect, I mainly hoped to gather some information for a couple of blog posts. I did that, and more: I came away with the experiential knowledge that our premiere public universities are aiding and abetting Islamist jihad and the global neo-communist campaign for the extermination of Israel.

Here’s the quote from my earlier entry, on my interview with UCLA’s Hamzah Baig, the lead organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine. After arriving and saying hello to the young students from Bruins for Israel, I approached the Muslim activists:

I said hello to a couple of the young ladies, and I asked if I could speak with their lead organizer. I was pointed in the direction of a burly young man named Hamzah Baig. I introduced myself and asked if he’d take questions. He asked “Who’s this for”? And I told him I was a blogger with David Horowitz’s NewsReal Blog. That didn’t seem to phase him at first, so the interview started out pretty casually. I asked him what the goals were for Palestinian Awareness Week. He said that the group wanted to stop Israeli settlements of Palestinian lands and to “end the occupation.” Then I asked, “what occupation”? And he said “the West Bank.” Okay, I thought, hmm, how about a couple of more challenging questions? So I said “Does your group support terrorism against Israelis?” And Baig practically choked on his Arafat scarf. He told me he wanted to be quoted precisely, and then enunciated very slowly, “our group provides no support for terrorism whatsoever.” And I said, oh yeah? What about Hamas? Do you support them? He said, “yeah, sure.” And I said, but Hamas is a known terrorist organization. I then mentioned David Horowitz’s confrontation with Jumanah Imad Albahri at UC San Diego. And I noted that she wouldn’t denounce Hamas and called for the extermination of the Jews. But by this time Baig was getting uptight. He said that “our group has nothing to do with the MSA at UC San Diego. They’re totally separate for us.” And I said, but aren’t you guys MSA here at UCLA? And he said, “yeah, sure, were MSA, but we’re separate.” I said fine, “will you renounce Hamas right now, will your reject Hamas”? He said “we support Hamas programs of education, food and medicine.” “What about terrorism”?, I said. And he again hesitated to respond. I thanked him and asked him if I could take his picture, but he refused. By now he was getting hostile at the questioning and wanted to be away from me. I said, “Why”? “This is a public event, at a public university — why don’t you want to be photographed”? And he just waved me away with his arms and said “no pictures.”

As I detailed previously, the discussion turned from an interview to a confrontation. Hamzah Baig became angry as I took more pictures of the Students for Justice in Palestine. Mr. Baig said “You are harassing my people.” I told him he was harassing me and trying to suppress the truth. I was calling out his pro-terror racket.

I thought about this later, how the Muslim students were not only hostile to scrutiny, but extremely belligerent as well. Clearly the group has much to hide. And noticing how Mr. Baig was so emphatic in denying his group’s ties to terrorism, I decided to do a little research. It’s well-known, of course, that the Muslim Students Association is a front-group for the Muslim Brotherhood (see the entry at Discover the Networks, for example). But the UCLA cell downplays MSA, using the newer title, “Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA.” Well, I found a report from the Anti-Defamation League with additional background. It turns out the Students for Justice in Palestine are being organized by Americans for Muslims in Palestine, which is another Muslim Brotherhood front group:

Since June 2010 … a national organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a group that promotes extreme anti-Israel views, has decided to focus specifically on Palestinian advocacy on college campuses and targeted SJP for this effort.

Looking further, I found the video clip for “SJP at UCLA – Teachin for Palestine Awareness Week 2011.” At the screencap from the video is Hamzah Baig introducing Taher Herzallah, the president of UC Riverside’s Students for Justice in Palestine and a National Campus Coordinator for American Muslims for Palestine:

Taher Herzallah is also one of the original “Irvine 11″, the group of militant Islamists who shouted down Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine last year. Herzallah published a widely-circulated defense of the group at the Orange County Register, “Heckling Israeli Ambassador at UCI Was Right.”

Of course, it doesn’t take a lot of research to find ties between Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA and the Muslim Brotherhood. The group’s Facebook page indicates that Amir Abdel Malik was the featured speaker at UCLA on February 23rd. But recall earlier this month Abdel Malik was captured on video at the MSA West regional conference leading the organization in a pledge of allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood. His racist diatribes are legendary, and his frequent anti-Semitic campus lectures have even been repudiated by the far left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (a group that’s no friend to the counter-jihad movement).

There was another thing that stayed with me from my visit to UCLA. The Apartheid Wall was perhaps the most grotesque monument to propaganda I’ve ever seen. The lasting image I have is of the panel featuring Leila Khaled, who is member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — and was thus a key militant of the Palestinian Black September movement in the years before the Munich Olympics. At the time she was famously photographed holding an AK-47 rifle and wearing a kaffiyeh, which is the picture from the Apartheid Wall at the top of this essay. Khaled was one of terrorists who hijacked TWA Flight 840 in 1969, and her photogenic beauty earned her the reputation as the “poster girl of Palestinian militancy.” And while those events were over 40 years ago, Khaled to this day remains committed to armed struggle against Israel. In an interview featured at the Middle East Media Research Institute, she declared her commitment to the Palestinian right of return, and the cause of Islamist jihad against Israel’s right to exist:

We will set the streets ablaze …

The ultimate goal of the struggle is the establishment of a Palestinian state on the land of Palestine, within the 1967 borders, including Jerusalem …

But this is just one stage – not everything. Ultimately, we have the right to return to Palestine – all Palestine …

If you use force, the enemy withdraws. When the occupier begins to feel that the occupation is costly, what does he do? He withdraws.

A terrorist who wants to set Israel ablaze and return all of Palestine to her people.

So, as the image of Leila Khaled’s armed resistance appeared prominently during Palestine Awareness Week, along with the other documentation provided in this report, perhaps folks might want to reexamine Hamzah Baig’s claim that Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA “provides no support for terrorism whatsoever.”

I received a comment last night from M. Bouffant:

Hey, “public-sector thug,” when Gov. Brown starts cutting your salary & benefits, are you going to take it?Say, why not volunteer to give a few dollars back to cut that deficit right now? Or would that be too “collectivist?”

I’ve had a couple of other comments of this sort as well. Folks like this aren’t regular readers here, or else they’d already have noticed my position on public unions: “‘Have You or Anyone Close to You Belonged to a Union?‘” I’ve never had issues with unions. It’s progressives I have issues with, and I work with these clowns. Mostly selfish and dumb, I called out some folks at my college for their pampered privilege. At one point, of course, a third of the American labor force was unionized, and millions of God-fearing workers have benefited from collective bargaining. My good friend Reliapundit commented at the post:

DD, GREETINGS!one of my gramps was a founding member of local 3 of the ibew. he was a member in good standing his whole life. 65 years in the union. marched with them every labor day. the union was good to him. but, he would have made more money if he had put his dues into an ira/401k and been in his own business. his widow would have been better off. his daughters. and his grandchildren. the unions have outlived their need in the usa. and another thing: government workers should not be allowed to unionize. fdr opposed it for good reason. walker is right. and christie, too. we need to rein in afscme and the seiu. we need to break the union-democrat party axis. the axis of taxes. we need to do it now. G-d Bless You and the USA!

The “axis of taxes.” I like that!

Anyway, this is a pretty common meme on the left, that conservatives are somehow hypocrites if they work in government but nevertheless oppose the idiotic public-sector thugs. Demon-blogger TBogg is endlessly smearing Glenn Reynolds for allegedly blogging Atlas Shrugs — “going Galt” — from the cushy confines at the University of Tennessee. No doubt hate and worthless ridicule gets these folks up in the morning. Sad.

In any case, the New York Times has a related piece this morning, “Bonds in Wisconsin Begin to Fray“:

JANESVILLE, Wis. — Rich Hahan worked at the General Motors plant here until it closed about two years ago. He moved to Detroit to take another G.M. job while his wife and children stayed here, but then the automaker cut more jobs. So Mr. Hahan, 50, found himself back in Janesville, collecting unemployment for a time, and watching as the city’s industrial base seemed to crumble away.Among the top five employers here are the county, the schools and the city. And that was enough to make Mr. Hahan, a union man from a union town, a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker’s sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin, a plan that has set off a firestorm of debate and protests at the state Capitol. He says he still believes in unions, but thinks those in the public sector lead to wasteful spending because of what he sees as lavish benefits and endless negotiations.

“Something needs to be done,” he said, “and quickly.”

Across Wisconsin, residents like Mr. Hahan have fumed in recent years as tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, and as some of the state’s best-known corporations have pressured workers to accept benefit cuts.

Wisconsin’s financial problems are not as dire as those of many other states. But a simmering resentment over those lost jobs and lost benefits in private industry — combined with the state’s history of highly polarized politics — may explain why Wisconsin, once a pioneer in supporting organized labor, has set off a debate that is spreading to other states over public workers, unions and budget woes.

More at the link (via Memeorandum).

Unions. Shooting themselves in the foot while progressives blame the evil Koch billionaires. Sounds like a movie, or something.

“I have considerable respect for non-violence, but I don’t treat it as inevitably a necessary rule …”

That’s the quote from Frances Fox Piven’s discussion at the C-SPAN clip above.

Piven is a long-established Marxist revolutionary of the slow-burn academic variety. She’s notorious for her longstanding call to break the American system through a revolt of the masses from below, called The Cloward-Piven Strategy.

But lately she’s been aggressively promoting a more spontaneous form of violent unrest, massed street revolts to topple the American regime.

As reported a couple of weeks ago at The Blaze, “Frances Fox Piven Rings in The New Year By Calling for Violent Revolution“:

She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality. Collapse the system and create a new one. That‘s the simplified version of Frances Fox Piven’s philosophy originally put forth in the pages of The Nation in the 60s.

Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.

And see also Matthew Vadum’s piece, “Marxist Frances Fox Piven Calls For a Violent Uprising Against the American System.”

But you wouldn’t know it from the New York Times, which has a piece this morning in the left’s classic genre of disinformation and propaganda, “Spotlight From Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats“:

On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.

Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”

Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.

“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.

Notice that? The classic propaganda whitewash. The country’s unofficial newspaper of record is mounting a disinformation campaign against Glenn Beck. The MFM has been widely rebuked for its libelous reporting on the Arizona shooting, but there’s clearly a demand for stories of this sort, since the political payoff has been considerable. While the Times is at pains to indicate that Piven wrote an article “45 years ago” calling for mass uprising, the piece doesn’t report that Piven called for revolt once again, just two weeks ago, in the same journal, The Nation, “Mobilizing the Jobless“:

Protests among the unemployed will inevitably be local, just because that’s where people are and where they construct solidarities. But local and state governments are strapped for funds and are laying off workers. The initiatives that would be responsive to the needs of the unemployed will require federal action. Local protests have to accumulate and spread — and become more disruptive — to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.

A loose and spontaneous movement of this sort could emerge. It is made more likely because unemployment rates are especially high among younger workers. Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by students, who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington. There is no science that predicts eruption of protest movements. Who expected the angry street mobs in Athens or the protests by British students? Who indeed predicted the strike movement that began in the United States in 1934, or the civil rights demonstrations that spread across the South in the early 1960s? We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom — and then join it.

These aren’t the obscure rants of some raving idiot out in the progressive netroots fever swamps. Piven is establishment. But taking the Times‘ propaganda one step further is useful idiot Steve Benen:

If you’ve never heard of Frances Fox Piven, don’t feel bad. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t either. Apparently she wrote some radical stuff about poor people and political activism in 1966, and the voices in Beck’s head tell him this is important and relevant in 2011, never mind the fact that the vast majority of liberals haven’t read her work and have no idea who she is.

That’s a lie. Anyone who reads The Nation knows exactly who she is.

Leftists are liars.

They’re liars. They’re propagandists. And they’re evildoers.

Exit videos from London and Toronto, featuring the kind of spontaneous unrest that Francis Fox Piven wants to bring to America:

See also Left Wing Rebel (via Memeorandum).

And Caryl’s currently a Senior Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS). And he’s got a refreshing take on the WikiLeaks phenomenon, at New York Review, “Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything“:

Among the cables released so far are revelations that have prompted headlines around the world, but there are also dispatches on Bavarian election results and Argentine maritime law. If the aim is to strike a blow against American imperial designs—as Assange has suggested in some of his statements—I don’t see how these particular cables support it. Assange has claimed to Time magazine that he wants to “make the world more civil” by making secretive organizations like the US State Department and Department of Defense accountable for their actions; he also told Time that, as an alternative, he wants to force them “to lock down internally and to balkanize,” protecting themselves by becoming more opaque and thereby more “closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” This is, to say the least, a patently contradictory agenda; I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make sense of it. In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.
As Alan Cowell has written in The New York Times, the careers of some foreign officials—and not necessarily high-level ones—have already been destroyed or threatened by these revelations.

In at least one case the person’s name had been redacted, but his identity was clear enough from the context. One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur as these and other statements are published? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result. (For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.) Can WikiLeaks at least tell us why this was necessary?

In the old days, journalists would have done what WikiLeaks’s print media partners, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, are attempting to do now: make judgments about which documents to release and whether or not to redact the names mentioned in them based on the larger public interest and the risk of inflicting harm on innocent bystanders. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the entire exercise is rendered tragicomically moot by the mountain of raw material looming, soon to be equally accessible, in the background. Khatchadourian contends that WikiLeaks is evolving into something more like a conventional journalistic organization, one that will make value judgments about what it’s doing rather than simply dumping documents into cyberspace willy-nilly. But the sheer scale of what the group does suggests that this is something of a fool’s errand. Assange says the organization has been releasing the cables at the rate of about eighty a day. (By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means that we have three thousand days of revelations to go as this article goes to press.)

The comparison some people have been making between the WikiLeaks document dumps and the Pentagon Papers affair back in the 1970s is illuminating precisely because it shows how little the two stories have in common. As pointed out by Max Frankel, an ex–New York Times editor who was one of those overseeing publication of the papers, the leaker in that case, Daniel Ellsberg,

was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of the risks of disclosure and did not distribute documents betraying live diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting. And it took him years to find a credible medium of distribution, which is now available at the push of a button.

I’m fully aware that Daniel Ellsberg has lent his support to Julian Assange. That’s his right. But I think he might be overlooking a few vital points.

One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, the Internet distribution of official secrets changes the rules of the game. Once all the documents are online they will be subjected not only to the often clumsy ministrations of journalists and historians but also to the far more efficient data-mining programs and pattern- analysis software of foreign governments and private companies (the extent of which, in the case of China’s handling of Google, the cables themselves make clear). The implications for the conduct of government policy (not to mention individual lives) are monumental. I wish I could predict what they might be, but I can’t. I’m not sure anyone can.

There’s more at the link.

I noted Caryl’s credentials at the title above because he seems so unusual — and incredibly lucid. Continuing the essay he unfolds the logic of the argument, which is to say that the enormity of the latest WikiLeaks data dump is greater than any one individual or institution to manage. And the consequences — collateral damage for the information leakers, who are less interested in changing policies than they are in bringing down governments — are the untold and potentially catastrophic risks to the lives and careers of honest people carrying out their jobs in government, military institutions, humanitarian organizations, and so forth. These are questions ultimately of tremendous power, and Caryl in fact indicates his support for much of what WikiLeaks is supposedly all about — greater transparency and accountability of governments. But in the end, Julian Assange comes out looking both quite poor and insignificant in this account. And Caryl perhaps might have continued a bit more by delving into the motivations of Assange, and especially his more enthusiastic adherents on the anarcho- and neo-communist left. If there was ever an equalizing force for anti-establishment actors to take down the state sources of world hegemonic power, WikiLeaks is it. Its utility lies not so much in exposure of government duplicity, corruption, or realpolitik, but in radicalizing the radicals, and enabling their growing revolutionary program. And recall there’s an almost perfect ideological correlation betwen those who favor and those who oppose the WikiLeaks project. Even purportedly moderate leftists are gung ho on this transformationalist agenda, while either naive or in conscious denial to the nihilist destruction that’s essential to the anarcho- and neo-communist program. Caryl does yoeman’s work in getting the alternative meme out in leftist outlets like New York Review. It’s an interesting development that will hopefully gain traction.

I’ll have more later, in any case …

Cross-posted from American Power.

In July 2009 I published “Can Palin Win the 2012 GOP Nomination?” That was 18 months ago. It’s amazing how time flies, and with the New Year upon it might be time to rephrase the question: Will 2011 be the year of Sarah Palin?

That’s a pretty good bet, I’d say. For all intents and purposes, the race for the 2012 major party nominations begins today. Top-tier candidate announcements should be forthcoming shortly. Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for the 2008 Democratic nomination on January 20, 2007. Iowa will hold its presidential caucuses on January 16, 2012 (although the final shape of next year’s nomination calendar is still up in the air). By this point the buzz is not so much when candidates will formally announce, but how: Facebook or Twitter? YouTube is so four years ago.

Anyway, Nate Silver has an update to his previous analysis, “Sarah Palin’s Nomination Chances: A Reassessment” (via Memeorandum). Silver focuses on voter enthusiasm, the impact of the 2010 midterms, the competition in the GOP field (and the prospects that some top-tier candidates might wait until 2016), likely media cheerleading for Palin, her advantages as a woman, ideological purity of the GOP primary electorate, likely attempts by the GOP establishment to torpedo Palin’s campaign, the historical propensity for the out party to nominate ideological extremists, and Palin’s advantages with new media technologies.

My take is that Silver is a bit too infatuated with the role of new technology and blogs, etc., to determine Palin’s nomination chances. He spends little time on the factors that I focused on in June 2009. Perhaps most important is fundraising. So far Palin’s most formidable competition will likely come from Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Newt Gingrich is very likely to announce as well, although I doubt he’ll have a serious chance to win the nomination. There’s also buzz over Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the former who’s considered a powerful fundraiser but whose recent gaffe on Jim Crow segregation could hurt him with the establishment media. Others like Mike Pence, Mitchell Daniels, and John Bolton seem too far off the radar, although again fundraising may be a key indicator or competitiveness. According to an analysis out yesterday, “Romney has raised the most money at $7.4 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. Palin is second at $5.4 million and Pawlenty is third at $3.3 million. The others all raised less than $2 million.” But USA Today ran an analysis this week that suggests Barbour could be surprisingly competitive: “GOP fundraising avoids campaign limits through PACs ahead of 2012.”

From the letters to the editor at Los Angeles Times (in response to this article):

Palestinian- Israeli impasse

Re “Let’s get tough with Israel,” Opinion, Dec. 22

Yousef Munayyer is dead wrong. It’s time to get tough with Arab terrorists, not with the only democracy in the Middle East.

He reiterates the myth of Palestinian refugees, warehoused in camps rather than settled among their prosperous brethren, more than 60 years after the Israeli war of independence. It’s time for him, and for them, to move on.

When the Palestinians renounce violence, perhaps the peace process can begin again. Until then, the Israelis must continue their efforts to settle and pacify the land.

Daniel Fink

Beverly Hills

This is wierd.

The letters at Los Angeles Times haven’t been this good in some time. See my previous entry as well: “Americans Have Strayed From Our Core Values of Social Justice?”

CROSS-POSTED from AMERICAN POWER.

At least The Guardian titled the essay for what it is, “A Shameful Thought for the Day.” Dawkins slams the Vatican’s “obscene indulgences” and then goes after original sin, a foundation of Christian faith:

We’ve already had what little apology we are going to get (none in most cases) for the raped children, the Aids-sufferers in Africa, the centuries spent attacking Jews, science, women and “heretics”, the indulgences and more modern (and tax-deductible) methods of fleecing the gullible to build the Vatican’s vast fortune. So, no surprise that these weren’t mentioned. But there’s something else for which the pope should go to confession, and it’s arguably the nastiest of all. I refer to the main doctrine of Christian theology itself, which was the centrepiece of what Ratzinger actually did say in his Thought for the Day. 

“Christ destroyed death forever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the Cross.”

More shameful than the death itself is the Christian theory that it was necessary. It was necessary because all humans are born in sin. Every tiny baby, too young to have a deed or a thought, is riddled with sin: original sin. Here’s Thomas Aquinas:

“. . . the original sin of all men was in Adam indeed, as in its principal cause, according to the words of the Apostle (Romans 5:12): “In whom all have sinned“: whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature is transmitted to the child.”

Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his “sin” in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself.

That’s right. The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven’s sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.

The Pope’s Christmas message is here, and at The Telegraph, “Pope Benedict XVI delivers BBC’s Thought for the Day.” Plus, from a commenter at The Guardian:

What Dawkins says about the abuses committed by the catholic church is true enough, but reading him one cannot help getting the impression that, given access to the levers of political power, and given the right sort of regime or the right sort of period (eg Russia in the 1930s) , he would happily turn churches into warehouses and put priests in labour camps. Just an impression though. I may be wrong…

No, sir, I don’t think you’re wrong.

RELATED: How atheists celebrate Christmas.

Cross-posted from American Power.

It’s true:

At this point in his presidency I think it is fair to say that Obama is already in the conversation as best president since Abraham Lincoln. His only real competition is FDR and LBJ, and I think it’s a safe bet that Obama will neither beat the Nazis nor start an unwinnable war in Vietnam. In other words, he’s in a battle with FDR to be the best president since the Civil War.

Maybe some of you think that I am joking. I am not. Maybe some of you think I am damning with faint praise. Maybe I am. But that doesn’t mean that I am wrong. I am not wrong.

There you have it.

Folks will remember that these Booman folks are truly diabolical: “Booman Tribune Blood Libels Pamela Geller.” And anti-Israel, here, here, here, here, and here, for example.

And the BooMan is wrong about Obama. This lame duck session will not save his disastrous record so far, although the Democratic-Media-Industrial-Complex is now playing up this last week’s legislative successes as if it’s the coming of a second New Deal. Even the commenters at Booman are running quite badly against the administration. Progressives, readers will recall, are upset by Obama’s cooperation with the corporate oligarchs and some are peeved he hasn’t cracked down on the “fascist” right. And public opinion isn’t helping the president’s case. Retrospective approval of George W. Bush now runs ahead of Obama, and recent surveys have seen the president’s number decline into “the lowest ever” territory for this administration.

Polls aren’t the most reliable indicator of presidential success or legacy, in any case. Objectively, the economic crisis has improved little on Obama’s watch, and this administration’s foreign policy is weakening America on all fronts. And for all the establishment pooh-poohing, the vaunted New Start treaty will mostly tie American hands and give Moscow an undeserved boost in stature. And all the optimistic claims about the rigorous verification regime will prove unfounded as Russia soon begins to cheat out on its commitments. (More on that here.)

That said, folks like BooMan can be found quite regularly among those of the radical progressive Democratic base. They’re the foundation for a obscene cult of personality surrounding this president, and they’re dangerous enemies of both American and Israeli interests.

RELATED: “Obama’s War on Israel.”

Cross-posted from American Power.

At DownWithTyranny!, “At This Point Do We Have to Be Hoping for a Revolution?” (And Memeorandum.)

From Howie Klein in the comments:

On the other hand, more rich people and the criminal spawn can hang themselves, the way Mark Madoff did. That’s justice served — and revolutionary enough.

Amazing.

Folks may have heard. Mark Madoff hanged himself exactly two years after his father Bernard was arrested in the financial Ponzi scheme indictment. See NYT, “Madoff’s Elder Son Found Dead in Suicide.” (And at Legal Insurrection and Memeorandum.)

But read DownWithTyranny! Howie Klein is actually a top activist with the Firedoglake Act Blue coalition, but these folks make no qualms about calling for revolution. Clearly the death of Mark Madoff is fulfilment in miniature of leftist demands for decapitation of the Old Regime, on the order of the French and Russian Revolutions. The context is this student’s “fight back” speech, below, announcing revolutionary solidarity with Britain’s fight-the-cuts uprising from last week’s Coalition of Resistance Conference in Britain. DownWithTyranny! then links to a revolutionary manifesto from Ian Welsh, “An American Future.” The commentary reflects less an explicit agenda than a prediction for the pivotal crisis of capitalism in the near term. While Welsh is ambiguous on the ripeness for proletarian agitation, cleary Howie Klein and his progressive comrades are welcoming an epic confrontation with the capitalist state. The death of Mark Madoff is not a sad family tragedy but a symbol of state crisis, and, ominously, of the murderous reckoning awaiting the forces of reaction. This is, most of all, completely in keeping with the violent sensiblities of the left, which have been on display all week long at this blog. All I can say is hold your most cherished values close, and your loved ones even closer. The proletarian crisis needs a revolutionary vanguard to bring class consciousness to the contented and under-mobillized masses. Britain is gripped right now by an austerity crisis, and at home we’ve had some of our own anarcho-socialist violence. I hope I’m wrong, as I always say. But one of these days a new Weatherman-style organization will break out again with a campaign of domestic terrorism. And that’s just the beginning. It’s a dreadful thought, but these folks are simply not going wait for more suicides. I’m convinced, in due time, they’ll work to accelerate the forces of “revolutionary justice” for thousands of Mark Madoffs.

Cross-posted from American Power.

RELATED: “The Powerful Corpse of Radical Progressivism.”

In recent posts I’ve focuses more narrowly on Friedrich Nietzsche‘s thesis of the social obliteration of God. And unbeknownst to poor Amanda, I’ve provided a dictionary definition at “Navigating Past Nihilism,” and the link there goes to Professor Sean Kelly’s recent piece at New York Times. So basically, leftist lamebrains cited here and elsewhere can just STFU.

In any case, I’m reminded of David Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future. He writes, at pages 28-29, on a June 1990 forum held by the Organization of American Historians. The prominent author Christopher Lasch announced that the West had “won the Cold War,” upon which he was immediately denounced — with “outrage and scorn” — by the radical historians in attendance. Horowitz indicates how the episode reveals the left’s epistemic closure on the failures of revolutionary socialism:

The refusal to confront the past meant that leftists could resume their attacks on the West without examining the movements and regimes they had supported, and thus without proposing any practical alternative to the societies they continued to reject. The intellectual foundations of this destructive attitude had already been created, in the preceding decades, in a development that Allen Bloom described as the “Nietzcheanization of the Left” — the transformation of the progressive faith into a nihilistic creed.

Nihilistic humors have always been present in the radical character. The revolutionary will, by its very nature, involves a passion for destruction alongside its hope of redemption. While the hope is vaguely imagined, however, the agenda of destruction is elaborate and concrete. It was Marx who originally defended this vagueness, claiming that any “blueprint” of the socialist future would be merely “utopian” and therefore should be avoided. The attitutude of the post-Marxist left is no different. Since the fall of Communism, radical intellectuals have continued their destructive attacks on capitalism, as though the catastrophes they had recently promoted posed no insurmountable problem to such an agenda. “I continue to believe,” wrote a radical academic after the Soviet collapse, “that what you call ‘the socialist fantasy’ can usefully inform a critque of post-modern capitalism without encouraging its fantasists and dreamers to suppose that a brave new order is imminent or even feasible.”

But how could a responsible intellect ignore the destructive implications of such an attitude? The socialist critique is, after all, total. It is aimed at the roots of the existing order. To maintain agnosticism about the futures that might replace the reality you intend to destroy may be intellectually convenient, but it is also morally corrupt ….

To raise the socialist ideal as a critical standard imposes a burden of responsiblity on its advocates that critical theorists refuse to shoulder. If one sets out to destroy a lifeboat because it fails to meet the standards of a luxury yacht, the act of criticism may be perfectly “just,” but the passengers will drown all the same. Similarly, if socialist principles can only be realized in a socialist gulag, even the presumed inequalities of the capitalist market are worth the price. If socialist poverty and socialist police states are the practical alternative to capitalist inequality, what justice can there be in destroying capitalist freedoms and the benefits they provide? Without a practical alternative to offer, radical idealism is radical nihilism — a war of destuction with no objective other than war itself.

And from page 57:

Totalitarianism is the possession of reality by a political Idea — the Idea of socialist kingdom of heaven on earth; the redemption of humanity by political force. To radical believers this Idea is so beautiful it is like God Himself. It provides the meaning of a radical life. This is the solution that makes everything possible; the noble end that justifies the regrettable means. Belief in the kingdom of socialist heaven is faith that can transform vice into virtue, lies into truth, evil into good. In this revolutionary religion, the Way, the Truth, and the Life of salvation lie not with God above, but with men below — ruthless, brutal, venal men — on whom faith confers the power of gods. There is no mystery in the transformation of the socialist paradise into Communist hell: liberation theology is a satanic creed.

Amanda Marcotte has offered no definition nor defense of nihilism. She has however attacked those of faith as insane, citing atheist phenomenon Richard Dawkins as her source of authority: The God Delusion. It’s easy to understand why, for by rejecting the eternal gooness of God, she can justify the destructive radical progressivism that drives her ideological program. That program is nihilist. It is, following Nietzsche, the utter abandonment of the social commitment to morality and right. She, like her fellow radicals, rejects morality in favor of hedonism and license, and hence rejects any larger meaning within a body of faith that is God.

–

Cross-posted from American Power.

Cross-posted from American Power, “Thanksgiving Classic, 1994: Detroit Lions Over Buffalo Bills, 35-21.”

*****

My life as a sports fan has gone through many gyrations. Lately I’ve been blogging more than watching football and baseball, although I watch the Thanksgiving Classic every year, and especially the Detroit Lions.

Thinking about it now, I simply never forget Thanksgiving 1994, when Quarterback Dave Krieg gave one of the most outstanding performances of my lifetime. The Lions’ homepage has the details:

1994 – Detroit easily controlled the four-time AFC Champion, Buffalo Bills, 35-21, with reserve QB Dave Krieg at the helm for the injured QB Scott Mitchell. The Lions set the tone on the second play of the game as Krieg used the flea-flicker to connect with a streaking Herman Moore (seven receptions for a then-career-high 169 yards) on a 51-yard touchdown strike. DT Kelvin Pritchett sacked Bills QB Jim Kelly three times and Lions S Willie Clay intercepted the first two passes of his career, returning the second 28 yards for a touchdown.

And the sports page report at the New York Times, November 25, 1994:

Quarterback Dave Krieg, a 15-year veteran making his third Detroit start since Scott Mitchell was injured, played his best football in years. His numbers were striking: 20 completions in 25 attempts for 351 passing yards, with 3 touchdown passes and 0 interceptions.

It wasn’t just his numbers, though, that helped bury the Bills; it was his reads, his picking up secondary receivers and his courage to stand in the pocket and take big hits as he released the ball.

“Dave Krieg had the game of his life,” Kelly said.

The Lions nevertheless cut him loose at the end of the season.

Cross-posted from American Power.

*****

Mona Charen spoke at the Jewish Policy Forum panel in Los Angeles, along with David Horowitz. Michael Medved began the talk with a discussion of electoral politics, and at some point the panelists got to talkin’ about their favorites for the 2012 presidential race. Ms. Charen endorsed Mitchell Daniels (not my favorite, for reasons some might recall). And that’s interesting, since we find that Ms. Charen’s not hip to a Sarah Palin presidential bid. See, “Why Sarah Palin Shouldn’t Run” (at Memeorandum). And this passage is worth consideration:

She is wildly popular with a swath of the Republican electorate, it’s true. And, as a conservative woman politician told me, the consultants (who get paid the big bucks win or lose) will doubtless descend upon her with game plans showing how she can win in Iowa and then cruise to the nomination. Maybe. But the general election would be a problem, since 53 percent of independent voters view Palin unfavorably, according to a recent Gallup poll, along with 81 percent of Democrats.

RTWT.

Fair enough. But my sense, beyond this, is that Ms. Charen is looking at presidential politics a bit clinically. Extreme emotionalism devolved to a form of secular worship in 2008 and the election of “The One.” Ms Charen’s right to note the dangers of it forming on the right heading into 2012. But skimming over this a bit more, Ms. Charen yearns for a conservative politics almost entirely divorced from popular culture. I doubt we’re ever going back to a time of Reagan, much less Goldwater. But check the comments at the post (Townhall has a well organized comments section). If the sentiment there gives any indication, the GOP nomination is Palin’s for the taking. And why not? Sarah Palin is a force of nature. She embodies all the best of the American spirit, and her family emobodies all the best of the American citizen. We don’t know if she’ll be a good president. Leftists had no clue if Barack Obama would be a good president. Democrats picked Obama on faith. There’s danger there, sure. My sense is that Palin’s attuned to popular sensibilities in a way the Barack Obama has never been. She’s anti-elitist. She stands against the elite-arugula entitlement that is the essence of the Democrat-Socialist hegemonic power agenda. And Sarah Palin learns. She’s open to ideas and feedback. If President Obama had even an ounce of those qualities he’d have a much better chance of avoiding early retirement in 2012 — quite possible at the hands of Sarah Palin herself.

RELATED: “Sarah Palin Rallies GOP at ‘Victory 2010′ in Anaheim.”

Cross-posted from American Power.

Cross-posted from American Power.

*****

I’m bothered, increasingly, by the overwhelming tendency of the major actors and institutions of the political regime to treat those on the far left of the ideological spectrum as “liberals.” Leftists are not liberal. They’re anti-liberal. But one of the great achievements of radical left-wing politics in the second half of the Twentieth Century was to successfully label the massive Democrat Party interventions in the economy and bureaucracy as “liberal.” This is no secret, by any means. The late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is widely credited with the claim that “There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.” But thoughout history, the country’s manichean and existential struggle against Soviet Communism made it taboo to formally (and accurately) recognize leftist ideology in America as socialist.

As conservatives continue to sort out the lessons from the 2010 elections, one enduring ideological challenge remains clear: the need to appropriately and consistently identify so-called liberals for what the are, radical left-wing ideologues and statists.

We can see just large how the challenge remains at today’s New York Times, “Bad News for Liberals May Be Good News for a Liberal Magazine.” I’ve obviously altered the title of this blog entry to better reflect what the Times is attempting to say. Basically, and fair enough, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, sees the current resurgence of right-wing politics as providing a burst of life-saving blood to her far left-wing organ:

No weekly magazine tracked by the Media Industry Newsletter has lost more pages of advertising this year than The Nation.

As of Nov. 8, ad pages were down 30 percent compared with last year’s figures, remarkable even though advertising accounts for only a 10th of the revenue. Traffic to TheNation.com has also declined recently. And since 2008, the magazine has run an operating deficit of about $500,000 a year.

Despite all the gloom, could last week’s Democratic pummeling actually have a silver lining for The Nation, once home to writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and even Yeats? Katrina vanden Heuvel, the magazine’s editor and publisher, did not have to think long about that question.

“If you can’t expose the hypocrisy of this new group of Republicans, then we’re not doing our job. And I mean that,” she said in an interview from her office on election night as she sipped a glass of Champagne, defiant as Democratic losses piled up and the mood around her darkened.

“I mean you’ve got a lot to work with,” she said. “You’ve got a Tea Party caucus in the Senate, a Tea Party caucus in the House. So I think you have a lot of rich material.”

If history is any guide, Ms. vanden Heuvel could be proved right.

The Bush years were good — very good — to The Nation. After operating in the red almost every year since it was founded by abolitionists in 1865, the magazine turned a profit in 2003.

More at the link.

Interestingly, The Nation‘s main competitors are blogs like Daily Kos and online news aggregators like Huffington Post. And like The Nation, both of these are neo-socialist outlets, but with more modern technological coolness. And also like The Nation, both Kos and Puff Ho are treated as respectable media organs while effectively functioning as neo-socialist appendages to the Democrat Party in Washington.

All of these folks are on the extreme left of the spectrum, and, along with the New York Times itself, they all advance a progressive and statist agenda that reaches from the tops of the elite media shops in Manhattan to the lowest elementary school classrooms in the inner cities. We’ve seen it over and over. And conservatives need to keep pushing back: Say no to the media lies of neo-socialist press organs as mainstream “liberal” institutions.

*****
More at American Power.

*****

Out of the blue, I got this on Twitter earlier this morning:

I replied here.

@SinglePlayer then blocked me, typical for a leftist totalitarian.

RELATED: At Doug Ross, “New England Journal of Medicine Inadvertently Hands House GOP the Game Plan for Starving ObamaCare.” If you can’t completely kill it (at first), squeeze funding until implementation becomes impossible:

The ACA contains 64 specific authorizations to spend up to $105.6 billion and 51 general authorizations to spend “such sums as are necessary” over the period between 2010 and 2019. None of these funds will flow, however, unless Congress enacts specific appropriation bills. In addition, section 1005 of the ACA appropriated $1 billion to support the cost of implementation in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)…. [and the] ACA appropriated nothing for the Internal Revenue Service, which must collect the information needed to compute subsidies and pay them. The ACA also provides unlimited funding for grants to states to support the creation of health insurance exchanges (section 1311). But states will also incur substantially increased administrative costs to enroll millions of newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries…

Without large additional appropriations, implementation will be crippled.

And thank goodness. That would be like a symphony.

See Dr. Marc Siegel, “ObamaCare Will Clog America’s Medical System“:

ObamaCare was lauded by many for covering all Americans with pre-existing conditions. That’s not the issue. We’re going to get into trouble because of the kinds of coverage that the new law mandates. There are no brakes on the system. Co-pays and deductibles will be kept low, and preventive services will have no co-pays at all. That sounds like a good deal for patients, yes? But without at least a pause to consider necessity and/or cost, expect waiting times to increase, ERs to be clogged and longer lead times needed to make an appointment.

Patients with new Medicaid cards who can’t find a doctor will go where? To emergency rooms. The escalating costs of these visits (necessary and unnecessary) will be transferred directly to the American public, both in the form of taxes as well as escalating insurance premiums.

Beginning in 2014, insurance exchanges will be set up in every state so that individuals can choose a health insurance plan. This will help control costs, right? Wrong. Don’t expect to find individually tailored plans or those with higher deductibles or co-pays. They won’t be there because they can’t receive the government stamp of approval.

In the new system, my patients will be able to see me as often as they’d like. But will they get the same level of care? I don’t think so. I anticipate that more expensive chemotherapies and cardiac stents or transplants, for instance, will have a tougher time being approved, as is already the case in Canada.

Over on the public side, the new Independent Payment Advisory Board — established by the health reform law to “recommend proposals to limit Medicare spending growth” — will advise Medicare that some treatments are more essential and more cost-effective than others. I believe that value judgments inevitably will have to be made, reducing my options as a practicing physician. Private insurers will follow suit, as they often do.

During the battle over this reform, you often heard, even from President Obama, that you’d be able to keep the plan you have. What he didn’t say — but what we now know — is that because of this new law, the private markets will have to remake their plans, that the costs will rise and that the plan you were told you could “keep” is in all likelihood no longer available. But when your plan changes, backers of reform will simply blame it on those evil private insurance companies.

The truth is, private health insurance is a low-profit industry, with profit margins of 4% compared with over 20% for major drug manufacturers. With the additional costs of no lifetime caps and no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, these companies will be compelled to raise their premiums in order to stay in business. The individual mandate is supposed to be the tradeoff by providing millions of new customers, but there is no guarantee that this additional volume will preserve profits with all the new regulations. This is what occurred in New York state in 1992, when a new law denied exclusion on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

Clogged emergency rooms, death-panel rationing, and reduced consumer choice.

That’s what @SinglePayer is all about.

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More great blogging at American Power.

Cross-posted from American Power.

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As expected, conservatives crushed the left on Tuesday (and for good reason). The indicators are everywhere: Republicans picked up 60 seats in the House, 6 seats in the Senate, a majority of governorships, and a whopping 680 seats in state legislatures across the country. The headline from this morning’s New York Times really captures the scale of victory: “Decisive Gains at State Level Could Give Republicans a Boost for Years.”

But in another indicator of just how brutally progressives got slammed Tuesday, it turns out that the far-left Progressive Change Campaign Committee put out a list of 95 progressive Democrats who pledged to back Net Neutrality — legislation that would regulate Internet providers and perhaps open the door to leftist censorship of competing viewpoints. And while this may be some freaky quirk, every single one of those progressive Dems lost election: “95 Candidates Who Pledged Support For Net Neutrality Lost On Tuesday.”

Adam Green is the co-founder of PCCC. Interviewed by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell at the clip, Green offers the classic leftist talking point claiming the reason Dems got hammered is that they weren’t socialist enough. And Red State has a post-election quote from Green making the case for a “bolder” Democrat agenda:

What’s left to say after this wipeout? – Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, says this: “Democrats lost because party leaders never truly fought for popular progressive reforms like the public option and breaking up the big banks, leaving voters uninspired to come to the polls and vote Democratic…. Progressives will be stepping up and insisting that the Democratic Party be bolder, not weaker. We will demand boldness, reward bold leaders, reject ‘leaders’ in name only, and hold Democratic politicians accountable when they don’t fight for popular, progressive change. In short, these next two years, progressives will push Democrats to fight strongly for popular progressive reforms — and save the Democratic Party from its own incredible weakness that savaged Democratic candidates in 2010.”

And again, listen carefully to Green at the clip above. He claims internal PCCC polling in 2009 had 80 percent of Dems, 70 percent of independents, and 50 percent — that’s right, 50 percent — of conservatives backing the public option. Who knows? Who cares? To rely on some iffy poll sample from over a year ago to bolster the case of an even more progressive Democrat Party in the wake of the most epic electoral repudiation in decades is suicidal. This is all of a piece with the cognitive dissonance that’s inflicted leftists since Tuesday. For example, at R.S. McCain, “Democrats in Denial.” And George Will, “A Recoil Against Liberalism” (via Memeorandum).

And more of it at Daily Kos, “Rejecting Liberalism“:

Ignore the pundits and remember the battles over the issues, including the battles that never happened. The voters didn’t reject a liberal agenda because they didn’t see a liberal agenda. Many wouldn’t know what a liberal agenda looks like, because no one has bothered to show them one.

Hey, keep it up Kos-commies. That’ll only pump up Conservative chances even more heading into 2012. See, “Progressives Increase Their Power Over Obama.”

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Cross-posted from American Power.

Cross-posted from American Power.

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Mark Morford posted a simply pathetic essay this morning at the San Francisco Chronicle. How bad? Think of Frank Rich after a month-long drug-induced binge of Palin Derangement Syndrome, capped off with a smokin’ Texas-Sized Tequila Tea-Party Chaser. Morford’s piece is all-knowingly titled, “Letter to a Whiny Young Democrat.” No need for a quotation (if you’ve read Frank Rich you’ve already got a handle on boilerplate left-wing teabag bashing). The eye-roller is that Morford is in no freakin’ position to lecture the burnout-dropout youth cohort now copping a large share of the blame for Tuesday’s Democrat debacle. No, Morford was one of the biggest Obama worshippers in 2008. He came under intense fire for penning a June 2008 essay literally elevating Barack Obama to God-like status: “Is Obama An Enlightened Being?” Folks may remember it. Morford’s the one who popularized Obama as “The Lightworker.”

He wasn’t alone, by any means. I’m just rolling over here at Morford’s hypocrisy (not to mention mendacity, unorginality, and so forth and so on). There’s plenty of blame to go around — the collapse of youth participation, the enthusiasm gap, the backlash against socialism, and Obama’s epic failures themselves. But Morford’s bogus tutorial to the Coachella Cohort falls freakin’ flat. Democrat-Socialists had it coming. Hubris breeds humility, and the bill’s come due. Here’s another blast from the past, an all-hail comment at my first Pajamas Media essay in October 2008. My head hurts at the extreme creepiness:

2. Truth First

Very soon Barack Obama will be your new President. This is a reality you cannot alter or escape from. It is fact. It is history. It is justice for the world.

Many of you have seen the light and have accepted the truth. And we thank you for your support and aid in electing Barack Obama.

To those who have rejected the truth you have no reason to fear Barack Obama. He is wise and just and he will follow the principals followed by his African forefathers. Barack Obama is the son of Kings and Queens who started human civilization thousands of years ago. Barack Obama remembers his heritage and his obligations to the Truth, Justice and the Future.

Barack Obama understands what is wrong and what needs to be done. Barack Obama has intelligence and vision that has lasted for over a millennium. Barack Obama was born with the appropriate ways of thinking, speaking, and acting and this will inspire you to be liberated for now there is no shackle which can keep you enslaved.

An African Proverb tell us: “Then command the servant, thusly: Make an Elder’s staff causing my son to stand in my place I will instruct him through the speech of the listeners and the counsels of the first of the ancients who listened to the divinities. In so doing troubles will be removed from the people.”

Barck Obama is here now to listen, to instruct and will lead you to your new life.

America will have a new start. A change to right itself. A change to correct its wrongs and address its sins. If you support change that will bring forth social and economic justice, you will stand with Barack Obama. Those who have been denied justice in America will get justice. Those will have been denied opportunity will be given opportunity. Those will falsely imprisoned will be freed. Those who are guilty will be punished. America’s salvation is at hand.

Those who have profited in America will play a role helping others. Justice requires equality and fairness and those who have the means will now be fair and will contribute to equality.

Stand with Barack Obama and you will be honored you for your work, sacrifice, dedication and devotion on behalf of all oppressed peoples.

Stand with Barack Obama and you will be honored and celebrated and remembered in song and praise and by your children.

http://truthfirstnow.blogspot.com/

October 24, 2008 – 10:49 am…

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