by William S. Lind
Secession is in the air. In Texas, a Republican governor has dared breathe the word. Vermont has an active and growing secessionist movement. Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia already call themselves Cascadia. Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal led off with a piece on secession. The author, Paul Starobin, wrote that
The present-day American Goliath may turn out to be a freak of a waning age of politics and economics as conducted on a super-sized scale – too large to make any rational sense…
Is this all mere fancy, another amusing idea with which to wile away the summer? Fourth Generation theory suggests there is more to it than that. Continue reading →
Posted in: current events.
Jun 18th, 2009
by City Journal.
Twenty years after Tiananmen, China and some of its Asian neighbors still suffer under Marxist ideology.
by Guy Sorman
Two decades after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, everything in China has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Visible to all, China’s large cities have undoubtedly undergone great transformations. Largely invisible, China’s dirt-poor countryside seems unchanged, even immutable—as does the nation’s pervasive political repression. It is still forbidden to mention the Tiananmen massacre in China. Officially, nothing happened in the square on June 4, 1989. Government discourse and children’s schoolbooks mention some vague disorder that took place that year, immediately followed by the Beijing police’s restoring order. The Communist Party denies that there were any casualties. Even today, their number is unknown: according to the Red Cross’s estimate, the Chinese military killed about 3,000 students. Most of the bodies have disappeared, snatched away and burned by soldiers to destroy the evidence. Continue reading →
Posted in: current events.
Tagged: china · communism · tiananmen
Jun 18th, 2009
by The Hill.
by A.B. Stoddard
When President Obama warned physicians this week in a speech before the American Medical Association (AMA) that the U.S. could go the way of General Motors without healthcare reform, you could practically hear Republicans laughing. Obama’s description of how, without fixing healthcare, we will soon be “paying more, getting less and going broke” sounds precisely like the GOP’s description of the Democrats’ public healthcare plan. Continue reading →
Posted in: current events.
Tagged: ama · bailout · deficit spending · healthcare
Jun 17th, 2009
by Townhall.
by Thomas Sowell
Back when I was on the receiving end of racial discrimination, it was to me not simply a personal misfortune, or even the misfortune of a race, it was a moral outrage. But not everyone who went through such an experience sees it that way.
When it comes to subjecting other people to the same treatment in a later era, some have no real problem with that. They see it as pay-back.
One of the many problems of the pay-back approach is that many of the people who most deserve retribution are no longer alive. You can take symbolic revenge on people who look like them but this removes the whole moral element. If it is all right to discriminate today against individuals who have done you no harm, then why was it wrong to discriminate against you in the past? Continue reading →
Posted in: current events.
Tagged: racism · sonia sotomayor · supreme court
Jun 17th, 2009
by Glenn McCoy.
Posted in: cartoons.
Tagged: cartoon · healthcare
Jun 17th, 2009
by Wall Street Journal.
The constitutional right one journalist loves to hate.
by James Taranto
To hear U.S. News & World Report’s Bonnie Erbe tell it, the problem with politically motivated psycho killers is that they talk too much: Continue reading →
Posted in: current events.
Tagged: censorship · constitutional law · free speech · hate speech · media bias
9/11 and the McCain Amendment.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Two months after the 1998 bombers of the U.S. embassy in Kenya were convicted, al-Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, struck the Pentagon, and was foiled by the martyred patriots of Flight 93 in an attempt to attack the Capitol or the White House. Unlike its predecessor, the Bush administration deemed the attack an act of war, as did Congress, which overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force a week later. American officials were dispatched to foreign lands to conduct military and intelligence operations, not criminal investigations. Prosecution, which in the eight previous years had managed to neutralize fewer than three dozen jihadists, most of them low-level, was aptly judged to have been a provocatively weak response to a transnational terrorist network with global aims and frightful capabilities. Continue reading →
Posted in: current events.
Tagged: constitutional law · miranda · terrorism