Archive for March 2011
Right to Bear Arms by Sam Francis
Sam Francis
Right to Bear Arms
Samuel Francis presents the importance of the Right to Bear Arms at the Costs of War Seminar.
Link to download here.
Australia carbon tax plans spark protests
Protesters are angry the prime minister appears to have gone back on an election promise
Hundreds of people have attended demonstrations in the national capital Canberra as well as in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.
Critics say without a binding global agreement the proposed levy will cost jobs and erode the competitiveness of Australian businesses.
The government says Australia needs the tax and an emissions trading scheme.
Protesters say they are just ordinary Australian workers and taxpayers who feel betrayed by the government’s plans to put a price on carbon.
They insist it would damage the economy and drive up the cost of living by making energy far more expensive.
“There is a groundswell of people that have finally had a gutful,” said one demonstrator.
“Since the Labor government has come into this country the union rules. We just cannot do it anymore. We have no more money left to pay the taxes,” another protester said.
The Failure of Multiculturalism and How to Turn the Tide by Geert Wilders
Signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Magna Carta Foundation, molte grazie. Thank you for inviting me to Rome. It is great to be here in this beautiful city which for many centuries was the capital and the centre of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture.
Together with Jerusalem and Athens, Rome is the cradle of our Western civilization – the most advanced and superior civilization the world has ever known.
As Westerners, we share the same Judeo-Christian culture. I am from the Netherlands and you are from Italy. Our national cultures are branches of the same tree. We do not belong to multiple cultures, but to different branches of one single culture. This is why when we come to Rome, we all come home in a sense. We belong here, as we also belong in Athens and in Jerusalem.
It is important that we know where our roots are. If we lose them we become deracinated. We become men and women without a culture.
I am here today to talk about multiculturalism. This term has a number of different meanings. I use the term to refer to a specific political ideology. It advocates that all cultures are equal. If they are equal it follows that the state is not allowed to promote any specific cultural values as central and dominant. In other words: multiculturalism holds that the state should not promote a leitkultur, which immigrants have to accept if they want to live in our midst.
Census: Lewiston more diverse
Maine is growing more diverse.
And Lewiston is now, officially, one of its most diverse cities.
U.S. Census numbers released Thursday show an explosion over the past 10 years in black or African-American residents, from 383 in 2000 to 3,174 in 2010, a nearly 730 percent increase. As a percentage of the overall city population, Lewiston’s black or African-American residents jumped from 1 percent to 8.7 percent, the sharpest increase of Maine’s five largest cities.
Experts say that change is largely due to the influx of Somali immigrants, who started arriving in Lewiston in 2001. The 2010 Census is the first official government count to include Somali residents.
What intervention in Libya tells us about the neocon-liberal alliance by Stephen M. Walt
Last Wednesday I spoke at an event at Hofstra University, on the subject of “Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.” The other panelists were former DNC chair and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean and longtime Republican campaign guru Ed Rollins. The organizers at Hofstra were efficient and friendly, the audience asked good questions, and I thought both Dean and Rollins were gracious and insightful in their comments. All in all, it was a very successful session.
During the Q & A, I talked about the narrowness of foreign policy debate in Washington and the close political kinship between the liberal interventionists of the Democratic Party and the neoconservatives that dominate the GOP. At one point, I said that “liberal inteventionists are just ‘kinder, gentler’ neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionsts on steroids.”
Dean challenged me rather forcefully on this point, declaring that there was simply no similarity whatsoever between a smart and sensible person like U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and a “crazy guy” like Paul Wolfowitz. (I didn’t write down Dean’s exact words, but I am certain that he portrayed Wolfowitz in more-or-less those terms). I responded by listing all the similarites between the two schools of thought, and the discussion went on from there.
Video: George J. Borjas - Costs of Immigration
George J. Borjas
Policeman sues over orders to attend Islamic prayer
Chief Charles Jordan
A Tulsa, Okla., police captain is suing his chief and the city after he was demoted and targeted by an internal investigation for refusing orders to attend an event featuring lessons in Islam, a tour and a prayer service at a mosque linked to an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror financing trial.
The legal action has been brought by attorneys with the Thomas More Law Center on behalf of Paul Fields.
Named as defendants are the city, police chief Charles W. Jordan and deputy chief Alvin Daryl Webster. WND requests for comment did not generate a response from the defendants.
The lawsuit focuses on the officer’s constitutional and civil rights, and besides a resolution of Fields’ concerns, it seeks an injunction preventing “enforcement of defendants’ unconstitutional acts, policies, practices, procedures and/or customs.”
A Nation of Dropouts Shakes Europe
Protesters in Porto, Portugal, on March 12 called for relief from the nation’s economic distress, which is made worse by poor education.
Isabel Fernandes, a cheery 22-year-old with a constellation of stars tattooed around her right eye, isn’t sure how many times she repeated fifth grade. Two, she says with a laugh. Or maybe three. She redid seventh grade as well. She quit school with an eighth-grade education at age 20.
Ms. Fernandes lives in a poor suburb near the airport. She doesn’t work. Employers, she says, “are asking for higher education.” Even cleaning jobs are hard to find.
Portugal is the poorest country in Western Europe. It is also the least educated, and that has emerged as a painful liability in its gathering economic crisis.
Wednesday night, the economic crisis became a political crisis. Portugal’s parliament rejected Prime Minister José Sócrates’s plan for spending cuts and tax increases. Mr. Sócrates handed in his resignation. He will hang on as a caretaker until a new government is formed.
Without the budget cuts, Portugal is almost certain to need an international bailout. It will run out of money this year without fresh cash, and markets are charging punitive rates for borrowing. Two firms downgraded Portugal’s credit rating Thursday.
Mike Lee: Guest-worker law is ‘not going to happen’
Sen. Mike Lee says there is not a chance the federal government will allow Utah’s new guest-worker immigration law to go into effect. “It’s just not going to happen,” he said Tuesday. Lee is pictured here making a speech during his successful election campaign last year.
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee said Tuesday there is no chance that a guest-worker program passed by the Utah Legislature will be allowed to take effect.
“It’s just not going to happen,” Lee said. “It would take a massive shift in federal law for that to even be considered, and there’s no appetite to transfer that authority over to the states.”
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, also denounced the law, calling it unconstitutional and saying he would have vetoed it if he were the governor.
The Legislature passed HB116, which was backed by the Salt Lake Chamber and other groups, and would create a first-of-its-kind, state-run guest-worker program, allowing immigrants to get permission from the state to legally work here.
But it hinges on the state being granted a waiver by the federal government, which has authority over immigration.
Critics: Iowa terror drill portrays immigration foes as killers
Foes of illegal immigration are up in arms over plans for a weekend disaster exercise in western Iowa with a fictitious scenario in which young white supremacists shoot dozens of people amid rising tensions involving racial minorities and illegal immigrants.
The exercise is planned for Saturday at Treynor High School in Pottawattamie County and will involve more than 300 people, confirmed Doug Reed, the lead exercise planner for the county’s emergency management agency. Some 30 to 40 “victims” will be transported to area hospitals. He said a terrorism scenario is required by federal officials for the exercise to be eligible for funding.
The exercise scenario describes shootings occurring after rising tensions in the community because of an influx of minorities, Reed said. The newcomers, some who are American citizens and some who are illegal immigrants, were to have moved into a rural area from urban areas in search of more-affordable living. The newcomers are not welcomed by racial extremists, and controversy sweeps the community, he said.
One of the fictional suspects involved in the shootings is described an 18-year-old white male with a quick-tempered father who is a firearms enthusiast with ties to an underground white supremacy group. A second fictional suspect is described as an isolated 17-year-old white male student who was befriended by the older student and who mimics his new friend.
