The New Media Journal

US Senate

US House

Anti-Google

The ‘Fairness’ Fraud
Thomas Sowell
During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration's tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of "fairness." He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut. No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others? Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers -- which it will not -- the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.

It’s Time to Hold Obama Administration Accountable
Roger Aronoff
While the mainstream media are still overwhelmingly intent on seeing Barack Obama reelected as President, a number of journalists and news organizations are apparently having second thoughts. Or at least they are willing to examine the claims and representations that the Obama administration continues to put forth. This has been the surprising case regarding Obama’s State of the Union address in late January and the budget that he proposed in mid-February. Hopefully this may mark a turning point in how the media allow themselves to be used by the Obama administration, but don’t count on it. More likely it is isolated incidents of self-respect, and an acknowledgement that they can differentiate between normal political spin and outright lies. The double standard still could not be more clear.

Sanctions Against Iran: Not an Option
Amb. Yoram Ettinger
The term "effective sanctions” against Iran on the one hand and global political reality on the other hand, constitute an oxymoron, playing into the hands of Iran. Effective sanctions require the full cooperation of Russia and China, two strategic rivals of the US, as demonstrated by their UN Security Council double-veto of the October 2011 and February 2012 anti-Assad resolutions. They do not fully cooperate with sanctions invoked against Iran, and assist the Tehran regime, as do some European countries. Furthermore, Japan, India and Turkey have subordinated compliance with sanctions to their trade relations with Iran, as have some countries in Latin America and Europe. Each new sanction against Iran requires several months for effectiveness assessment. Thus, it extends the time available to Iran to develop its nuclear capabilities, as well as to acquire critical technologies and systems from North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or China.

Suicide Bombers Poised to Strike US, Iran Warns
Reza Kahlili
Iran has sleeper cells throughout the United States and the West that will unleash suicide bombings should Iranian nuclear facilities be attacked. The leaders of the Islamic regime have long prepared for a confrontation with the United States. Now, with tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, US Navy assets taking position in the Persian Gulf, Israel threatening strikes against Iranian nuclear sites and the decision by the regime in Tehran to pursue its goal of obtaining nuclear weapons, the Iranians are making it clear to America that US military bases around the world and sites inside the US will be attacked if Iranian nuclear facilities are attacked. In a recent Friday prayers sermon in Tehran, the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised that if America attacked Iran, Iran would respond by causing 10 times as much destruction to America as it had caused to Iran. Others in the regime have been more specific.

Guns, Butter, Jobs & Birth Control
Daniel Greenfield
The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter. The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn't big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn't want guns, but they didn't want butter either. They wanted a third thing. The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don't care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left.

Eugenics: The Skeleton That Rattles Loudest In the Progressive Closet
Jonathan Freedland
Does the past matter? When confronted by facts that are uncomfortable, but which relate to people long dead, should we put them aside and, to use a phrase very much of our time, move on? And there's a separate, but related, question: how should we treat the otherwise admirable thought or writings of people when we discover that those same people also held views we find repugnant? Those questions are triggered in part by the early responses to Pantheon, my new novel published this week under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. The book is a thriller, set in the Oxford and Yale of 1940, but it rests on several true stories. Among those is one of the grisliest skeletons in the cupboard of the British intellectual elite, a skeleton that rattles especially loudly inside the closet of the left. It is eugenics, the belief that society's fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and "moral worth" to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all.

As’ad Abu Khalil & The Angry Jew News Service
Gerald A. Honigman
Cinnamon Stillwell over at Professor Daniel Pipes's Campus Watch recently reported about a California State University Arab professor's reaction to Dr. Norman Finkelstein's apparent flip flop on some key Arab-Israeli issues. Best known for his own rabid, one-sided anti-Zionism, for some unknown reason, Norman seems to have suddenly received a revelation about the true nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- the genocidal nature of the Arabs, that is. Whatever...he's still not to be trusted. Well, Arabs don't take kindly to anyone who challenges their rights to what they routinely call their exclusive "purely Arab patrimony" (i.e., practically all of the Middle East -- despite scores of millions of native, non-Arab folks who also live there), so it's no shock that their venom is now being directed not only against any who challenge that notion, but especially towards former sycophants and banner wavers like Finkelstein as well.

On Birth Control, Obama Didn’t Comprimise At All
Jeff Jacoby
Much was made of the president’s supposed compromise on requiring religious institutions to pay for their employees’ contraceptives and sterilization drugs. “The new policy,’’ a White House fact sheet declared, “fully accommodates important concerns raised by religious groups.’’ But the administration hadn’t compromised at all: On the same day the White House announced its “full accommodation,’’ it formally adopted -- without change -- the very regulation that had triggered the backlash. The compromise turned out to be merely a promise to modify the new rule before it goes into effect next year. And the promised modification in any case is a distinction without a difference: Rather than require church-affiliated institutions to insure their employees for birth control, the feds will require church-affiliated institutions to provide their employees with health insurance that will pay for birth control. If you don’t like green eggs and ham, you can eat ham and green eggs. Some accommodation.

The Federal Reserve Rip-Off
Alan Caruba
I have not been kind to Ron Paul and his participation in the Republican primary campaigns and it has taken me a while to understand why he is doing this. It is clear that he wants to be around to influence the Republican platform and the issue about which he is abundantly correct is the Federal Reserve. Anyone taking notice of Obama’s latest budget has to conclude that his mission is to crash the nation’s economy and turn America into a Socialist worker’s paradise. The only problem is that Socialism has been a dismal failure everywhere it has been tried. One only has to look at the collapse of the Soviet Union for confirmation of that, the Chinese abandonment of Communist economic theory, and Obama’s odd notion that a nation can spend itself out of ever-increasing debt. I am not a fan of Paul’s isolationism, but he is absolutely right about getting rid of the Federal Reserve.

Rising Black Social Pathology
Walter E. Williams
Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process. They are permitted to make education impossible for other students. Their misbehavior and violence require schools to divert resources away from education and spend them on security, such as hiring school police and purchasing metal detectors, all of which does little for school safety. The violent school climate discourages the highest-skilled teachers from teaching at schools where they risk assaults, intimidation and theft. At a bare minimum, part of the solution to school violence and poor academic performance should be the expulsion of students who engage in assaults and disrespectful behavior. You say, "What's to be done for these students?" Even if we don't know what to do with them, how compassionate and intelligent is it to permit them to make education impossible for other students?