Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Do We Need Big Government?
Government has gotten so big that it sustains most of our activity.
By Michael Tanner
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 14, 2011
As Congress nears approval on a series of 2011 appropriations bills (only three months late, a near-record for recent history), Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.) told Fox News that he was encouraged by progress on the bills because “we’re dealing with the lives of people. Those appropriation bills relate to the daily lives of people in middle class of America, and that’s really what this is all about.”
Yet, if that is true, and so many Americans have become dependent on the decisions of federal appropriators in Washington, there seems to be something distinctly wrong.
During the 2011 debate over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama noted that the U.S. federal government sends out 70 million checks every month. Unfortunately, that is probably an underestimate. According to the Washington Post, the president’s estimate included Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors. But he did not include reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors, or electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps. (Nor did he include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and pays nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel-expense claims per month.) The actual number of monthly federal checks might be closer to 200 million.
Government payouts now account for more than a third of all wages and salaries in the United States. Worse, if one includes government employees’ salaries, more than half of Americans receive a substantial portion of their income from the government. The government provides welfare to the poor, of course — 126 separate anti-poverty programs. But it also provides corporate welfare to the rich. The Cato Institute estimates that the federal government provides at least $92 billion in direct grants and subsidies to businesses each year. It even provides regular welfare to the rich. According to a new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, 2,362 millionaires received unemployment benefits in 2009.
Our federal government taxes money from young people to provide for the retirement of old people. And then takes money from old people to provide for the education of young people. We pay subsidies to everyone from farmers to solar-panel manufacturers. People talk about America’s free-market health-care system, but government pays for more than half of all health-care spending in this country.
Federal-government spending now consumes roughly a quarter of all the goods and services produced in this country over the course of a year. Throw in state- and local-government spending, and it’s more than a third. And, according the Congressional Budget Office, unless there is a drastic change in our current policies, we are on course for government to consume nearly 60 percent of GDP by mid-century.
And President Obama believes that government is still too small?
Worse, all this is just on the spending side. It doesn’t even begin to look at how the federal government regulates our lives. Last year alone the federal government issued 3,573 new rules and regulations. The Federal Register now stands at an all time high of 81,405 pages. Nearly every product you buy and everything you do is regulated by the federal government in some way.
Increasingly, government is seen as the source of prosperity and the solution to all problems. Government creates jobs. Government provides medical care, food, shelter, even an income. Government regulates our morals and defines our virtues. Every good idea becomes a call for a new government program. Civil society, including business and private charity, is relegated to the sidelines, treated with suspicion at best, and often outright hostility.
But, at some point, one has to ask: Has our national character become so degraded that farmers cannot farm, businesses cannot innovate, doctors cannot treat you, and charities cannot care for those in need without some sort of government intervention? And at what point do we simply cease to be a society of free individuals and instead become little more than wards of the state?
Perhaps this is why, according to a Gallup poll taken earlier this month, 64 percent of Americans believe that big government is a bigger threat to the future of this country than big business (26 percent) or big labor (8 percent).
And it certainly is something that might be worth thinking about the next time a political candidate says that he or she has a great new idea for how the federal government can do something else for us.
— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution
By Michael Tanner
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 14, 2011
As Congress nears approval on a series of 2011 appropriations bills (only three months late, a near-record for recent history), Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.) told Fox News that he was encouraged by progress on the bills because “we’re dealing with the lives of people. Those appropriation bills relate to the daily lives of people in middle class of America, and that’s really what this is all about.”
Yet, if that is true, and so many Americans have become dependent on the decisions of federal appropriators in Washington, there seems to be something distinctly wrong.
During the 2011 debate over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama noted that the U.S. federal government sends out 70 million checks every month. Unfortunately, that is probably an underestimate. According to the Washington Post, the president’s estimate included Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors. But he did not include reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors, or electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps. (Nor did he include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and pays nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel-expense claims per month.) The actual number of monthly federal checks might be closer to 200 million.
Government payouts now account for more than a third of all wages and salaries in the United States. Worse, if one includes government employees’ salaries, more than half of Americans receive a substantial portion of their income from the government. The government provides welfare to the poor, of course — 126 separate anti-poverty programs. But it also provides corporate welfare to the rich. The Cato Institute estimates that the federal government provides at least $92 billion in direct grants and subsidies to businesses each year. It even provides regular welfare to the rich. According to a new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, 2,362 millionaires received unemployment benefits in 2009.
Our federal government taxes money from young people to provide for the retirement of old people. And then takes money from old people to provide for the education of young people. We pay subsidies to everyone from farmers to solar-panel manufacturers. People talk about America’s free-market health-care system, but government pays for more than half of all health-care spending in this country.
Federal-government spending now consumes roughly a quarter of all the goods and services produced in this country over the course of a year. Throw in state- and local-government spending, and it’s more than a third. And, according the Congressional Budget Office, unless there is a drastic change in our current policies, we are on course for government to consume nearly 60 percent of GDP by mid-century.
And President Obama believes that government is still too small?
Worse, all this is just on the spending side. It doesn’t even begin to look at how the federal government regulates our lives. Last year alone the federal government issued 3,573 new rules and regulations. The Federal Register now stands at an all time high of 81,405 pages. Nearly every product you buy and everything you do is regulated by the federal government in some way.
Increasingly, government is seen as the source of prosperity and the solution to all problems. Government creates jobs. Government provides medical care, food, shelter, even an income. Government regulates our morals and defines our virtues. Every good idea becomes a call for a new government program. Civil society, including business and private charity, is relegated to the sidelines, treated with suspicion at best, and often outright hostility.
But, at some point, one has to ask: Has our national character become so degraded that farmers cannot farm, businesses cannot innovate, doctors cannot treat you, and charities cannot care for those in need without some sort of government intervention? And at what point do we simply cease to be a society of free individuals and instead become little more than wards of the state?
Perhaps this is why, according to a Gallup poll taken earlier this month, 64 percent of Americans believe that big government is a bigger threat to the future of this country than big business (26 percent) or big labor (8 percent).
And it certainly is something that might be worth thinking about the next time a political candidate says that he or she has a great new idea for how the federal government can do something else for us.
— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The Volt Administration
Why are we spending millions on biofuels and ignoring America’s natural resources?
By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 13, 2011
The headline reads like something from The Onion: “U.S. Navy Paying $15 a Gallon for Green Fuel.” But it’s real enough.
It seems that, fresh from its success with Solyndra, the Obama administration is slated to spend $12 million to buy a biofuel/gasoline blend that runs $15 a gallon to power a portion of the Navy’s fleet in a demonstration project.
“We are doing this for one simple reason,” explained Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, “It makes us better fighters. Our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy ability to protect America and project power overseas.”
Really? As long as a fuel makes the ships, planes, and submarines go, how does using pricey biofuel mixtures improve the war fighting capacity of the Navy? Does it make the officer corps feel better about themselves as good stewards of the earth’s resources, which in turn makes them shoot straighter?
The investment will certainly brighten the day of T. J. Glauthier, a “strategic advisor” to Solazyme, one of the companies selling the environmentally correct fuel to the U.S. government. Glauthier, reports blogger J. E. Dyer, just happens to have worked on President Obama’s transition team. If the administration pattern holds, Gauthier will be paid off before the taxpayers when Solazyme files for bankruptcy.
The administration didn’t bother to offer the one rationale for investing in alternatives to fossil fuels that might have made a bit of sense: to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. It’s just as well they avoided that trap, because the mismanagement of America’s energy resources is among the greatest failures of imagination that the Obama administration has been guilty of.
The United States is an energy colossus. Just this week, the state of North Dakota announced that it had produced 488,068 barrels of oil per day in October, up 100,000 barrels from June of this year. State officials predict that by 2013/2014, North Dakota will be producing 900,000 barrels a day, putting it ahead of California and Alaska and behind only Texas (at 1.2 million barrels per day) in domestic oil production.
Though the Obama administration regards our energy wealth as a threat to the planet, the untapped resources could be a pillar of American economic resurgence. The Institute for Energy Research predicts that by tapping shale and other sources, the U.S. should be the world’s top oil and gas producer by 2020, outpacing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The development of domestic oil and gas would boost the economy, providing jobs that cannot be outsourced, as well as genuinely promoting our national security by ensuring a supply of energy that cannot be manipulated by hostile governments.
But the Obama administration, while promoting offshore drilling in Brazil (“We’ll be your best customers!”), placed a damaging moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP spill. Even after it was lifted, the administration delayed the issuance of permits, effectively prolonging the moratorium, while also placing new limits on drilling along the outer continental shelf and on land. The XL pipeline would have delivered an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 barrels of Canadian oil to the U.S. daily. But bowing to pressure from environmentalists, the president delayed the permit until at least 2013.
The administration has proposed $60 billion in tax increases on the energy sector, and knee-capped the nuclear industry by blocking uranium mining and pulling all funding for the Yucca Mountain waste disposal site. The Environmental Protection Agency has imposed regulations on coal plants that the agency acknowledges will raise electricity prices.
Perhaps the signature energy policy of the Obama administration was the Chevy Volt — the electric car that the Obama administration tried to bribe Americans (with their own tax money) to buy. These “green” cars, we were assured, were going to transform American industry and American energy use. Sucking huge subsidies from taxpayers, the Volts nevertheless sold (or rather, didn’t sell) for an eye-popping $41,000.
But in crash testing, it seems the Volts have a nasty habit of bursting into flames — taking all of those government subsidies, to say nothing of the passengers — down with them. The metaphor is irresistible.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc
By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 13, 2011
The headline reads like something from The Onion: “U.S. Navy Paying $15 a Gallon for Green Fuel.” But it’s real enough.
It seems that, fresh from its success with Solyndra, the Obama administration is slated to spend $12 million to buy a biofuel/gasoline blend that runs $15 a gallon to power a portion of the Navy’s fleet in a demonstration project.
“We are doing this for one simple reason,” explained Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, “It makes us better fighters. Our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy ability to protect America and project power overseas.”
Really? As long as a fuel makes the ships, planes, and submarines go, how does using pricey biofuel mixtures improve the war fighting capacity of the Navy? Does it make the officer corps feel better about themselves as good stewards of the earth’s resources, which in turn makes them shoot straighter?
The investment will certainly brighten the day of T. J. Glauthier, a “strategic advisor” to Solazyme, one of the companies selling the environmentally correct fuel to the U.S. government. Glauthier, reports blogger J. E. Dyer, just happens to have worked on President Obama’s transition team. If the administration pattern holds, Gauthier will be paid off before the taxpayers when Solazyme files for bankruptcy.
The administration didn’t bother to offer the one rationale for investing in alternatives to fossil fuels that might have made a bit of sense: to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. It’s just as well they avoided that trap, because the mismanagement of America’s energy resources is among the greatest failures of imagination that the Obama administration has been guilty of.
The United States is an energy colossus. Just this week, the state of North Dakota announced that it had produced 488,068 barrels of oil per day in October, up 100,000 barrels from June of this year. State officials predict that by 2013/2014, North Dakota will be producing 900,000 barrels a day, putting it ahead of California and Alaska and behind only Texas (at 1.2 million barrels per day) in domestic oil production.
Though the Obama administration regards our energy wealth as a threat to the planet, the untapped resources could be a pillar of American economic resurgence. The Institute for Energy Research predicts that by tapping shale and other sources, the U.S. should be the world’s top oil and gas producer by 2020, outpacing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The development of domestic oil and gas would boost the economy, providing jobs that cannot be outsourced, as well as genuinely promoting our national security by ensuring a supply of energy that cannot be manipulated by hostile governments.
But the Obama administration, while promoting offshore drilling in Brazil (“We’ll be your best customers!”), placed a damaging moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP spill. Even after it was lifted, the administration delayed the issuance of permits, effectively prolonging the moratorium, while also placing new limits on drilling along the outer continental shelf and on land. The XL pipeline would have delivered an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 barrels of Canadian oil to the U.S. daily. But bowing to pressure from environmentalists, the president delayed the permit until at least 2013.
The administration has proposed $60 billion in tax increases on the energy sector, and knee-capped the nuclear industry by blocking uranium mining and pulling all funding for the Yucca Mountain waste disposal site. The Environmental Protection Agency has imposed regulations on coal plants that the agency acknowledges will raise electricity prices.
Perhaps the signature energy policy of the Obama administration was the Chevy Volt — the electric car that the Obama administration tried to bribe Americans (with their own tax money) to buy. These “green” cars, we were assured, were going to transform American industry and American energy use. Sucking huge subsidies from taxpayers, the Volts nevertheless sold (or rather, didn’t sell) for an eye-popping $41,000.
But in crash testing, it seems the Volts have a nasty habit of bursting into flames — taking all of those government subsidies, to say nothing of the passengers — down with them. The metaphor is irresistible.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc
Monday, December 12, 2011
Newt Challenges the Myth of Palestinian Nationalism
By Bruce Thornton
http://frontpagemag.com/
December 12, 2011
Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinians
Newt Gingrich touched off a mini-firestorm when he told a Jewish television channel that the Palestinians are an “invented” people “who are in fact Arabs,” and “who were historically part of the Arab community.” This simple statement of historical fact was of course met with the usual bluster from the Palestinians, who called the statements “ignorant,” “despicable,” and of course “racist,” a meaningless charge. And what response from the Palestinians would be complete without the usual threat that the statement they don’t like will “increase the cycle of violence,” as Palestinian lead negotiator Saeb Erekat put it?
The truly “ignorant,” however, are those who have bought the “Palestinian homeland” propaganda. Where was all this talk about a homeland for the Palestinians in 1948, when the Arab armies invaded Israel? Their aim was not to create a Palestinian state, but rather to carve up the rest of British Mandatory Palestine, as the secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, confessed at the time: “Abdullah [ruler of Transjordan] was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine . . . The Egyptians would get the Negev. The Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.” Until 1967, the so-called “West Bank” was part of Jordan, but none of the Arab nations agitated for the creation of a Palestinian state. The “Palestinian homeland” became a tactical weapon after violence failed to achieve the real aim, the destruction of Israel.
In fact, the Palestinians themselves have admitted that the “Palestinian homeland” is a tactical weapon for the destruction of Israel. Listen to Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, from an interview with a Dutch newspaper given in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
Muhsein’s statement is consistent with the stated aims of the Palestinian leadership for the last half century: to destroy Israel in “stages.” In 1993, on the same day that the Oslo Accords handed over the West Bank to the PLO, Yasser Arafat told Jordanian television, “Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do it in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty [sic] there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.” Indeed, before 1967, Palestinians did speak of a homeland, but it was not to exist in the West Bank, but in Israel. The 1964 PLO Charter Article 24 explicitly said, “This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.” After 1967, this article was removed for strategic purposes. Thus any content to the notion of a “Palestinian homeland” is inextricably predicated on the destruction of Israel, as Article 2 of the 1968 Charter makes clear: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” Consistent with this principle, Arafat said in 1970, “We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed, peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.” In other words, the “two-state solution” that Westerners continue to chant like a mantra will not resolve the conflict between Israel and the Arabs.
Our failures in dealing with a dysfunctional Middle East in part result from a failure of imagination, our unwillingness to think beyond our own ideals and see beyond the duplicitous pretexts of our adversaries. The tactic of a “Palestinian homeland,” for example, exploits the Western ideal of the nation-state as forming the fundamental structure of a people and their collective identity. But nationalism is not an organic part of Islam, which recognizes no separation of church and state. A people are created by their adherence to Islam, by being members of the global umma or Muslim community. The PLO Charter makes this clear in Article 15: “The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Absolute responsibility for this falls upon the Arab nation––peoples and governments––with the Arab people of Palestine in the vanguard.” Palestinian nationalism is an expression of Arab nationalism, in a way unimaginable for any Western country, for the simple reason that Arab nationalism is in fact another expression of universal Muslim identity.
In fact, every Middle Eastern Muslim country that has shaken off its kleptocratic dictators writes its government charters to reflect the religious foundations of Muslim nationalism. Iraq’s constitution––purchased with American blood and treasure––reads at the start, “Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation,” and asserts, “No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.” The second article proclaims, “This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people.” In Afghanistan’s Constitution, Article 2 says, “The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam.” Article 3 adds, “In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” And these are the two states where the United States has provided billions of dollars, security, and a custodial presence all meant to create “freedom and democracy” in an Islamic state. We can imagine what will arise in Libya and Egypt, where Islamist parties dedicated to founding a state on shari’a law are driving events. Influential Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi––who appeared on stage with Muslim Brother “Spiritual Guide” Yusuf al-Qaradawi when the latter returned in triumph to Cairo after Mubarak’s fall––has given us a clear indication of what to expect: “I am convinced that Islam is imminent, the caliphate is imminent. One of these days, the United States of Islam will be established. Allah willing, it will be soon. Egypt will be one state in this [United States of Islam.] Morocco and Saudi Arabia will be states as well.”
National identity, then, means something very different to most Muslims from what it means to us. For most Muslims in the Middle East, being Muslim takes precedence over being an Egyptian, a Libyan, or a Palestinian. And being Muslim means endorsing shari’a law, which is incompatible with Western notions of universal human rights and tolerance. The obsession with Palestinian “national identity” or “national aspirations” blinds us to the religious foundations of Arab hatred of Israel and Jews evident throughout the Middle East and driving policy toward Israel.
http://frontpagemag.com/
December 12, 2011
Newt Gingrich touched off a mini-firestorm when he told a Jewish television channel that the Palestinians are an “invented” people “who are in fact Arabs,” and “who were historically part of the Arab community.” This simple statement of historical fact was of course met with the usual bluster from the Palestinians, who called the statements “ignorant,” “despicable,” and of course “racist,” a meaningless charge. And what response from the Palestinians would be complete without the usual threat that the statement they don’t like will “increase the cycle of violence,” as Palestinian lead negotiator Saeb Erekat put it?
The truly “ignorant,” however, are those who have bought the “Palestinian homeland” propaganda. Where was all this talk about a homeland for the Palestinians in 1948, when the Arab armies invaded Israel? Their aim was not to create a Palestinian state, but rather to carve up the rest of British Mandatory Palestine, as the secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, confessed at the time: “Abdullah [ruler of Transjordan] was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine . . . The Egyptians would get the Negev. The Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.” Until 1967, the so-called “West Bank” was part of Jordan, but none of the Arab nations agitated for the creation of a Palestinian state. The “Palestinian homeland” became a tactical weapon after violence failed to achieve the real aim, the destruction of Israel.
In fact, the Palestinians themselves have admitted that the “Palestinian homeland” is a tactical weapon for the destruction of Israel. Listen to Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, from an interview with a Dutch newspaper given in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
Muhsein’s statement is consistent with the stated aims of the Palestinian leadership for the last half century: to destroy Israel in “stages.” In 1993, on the same day that the Oslo Accords handed over the West Bank to the PLO, Yasser Arafat told Jordanian television, “Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do it in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty [sic] there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.” Indeed, before 1967, Palestinians did speak of a homeland, but it was not to exist in the West Bank, but in Israel. The 1964 PLO Charter Article 24 explicitly said, “This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.” After 1967, this article was removed for strategic purposes. Thus any content to the notion of a “Palestinian homeland” is inextricably predicated on the destruction of Israel, as Article 2 of the 1968 Charter makes clear: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” Consistent with this principle, Arafat said in 1970, “We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed, peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.” In other words, the “two-state solution” that Westerners continue to chant like a mantra will not resolve the conflict between Israel and the Arabs.
Our failures in dealing with a dysfunctional Middle East in part result from a failure of imagination, our unwillingness to think beyond our own ideals and see beyond the duplicitous pretexts of our adversaries. The tactic of a “Palestinian homeland,” for example, exploits the Western ideal of the nation-state as forming the fundamental structure of a people and their collective identity. But nationalism is not an organic part of Islam, which recognizes no separation of church and state. A people are created by their adherence to Islam, by being members of the global umma or Muslim community. The PLO Charter makes this clear in Article 15: “The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Absolute responsibility for this falls upon the Arab nation––peoples and governments––with the Arab people of Palestine in the vanguard.” Palestinian nationalism is an expression of Arab nationalism, in a way unimaginable for any Western country, for the simple reason that Arab nationalism is in fact another expression of universal Muslim identity.
In fact, every Middle Eastern Muslim country that has shaken off its kleptocratic dictators writes its government charters to reflect the religious foundations of Muslim nationalism. Iraq’s constitution––purchased with American blood and treasure––reads at the start, “Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation,” and asserts, “No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.” The second article proclaims, “This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people.” In Afghanistan’s Constitution, Article 2 says, “The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam.” Article 3 adds, “In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” And these are the two states where the United States has provided billions of dollars, security, and a custodial presence all meant to create “freedom and democracy” in an Islamic state. We can imagine what will arise in Libya and Egypt, where Islamist parties dedicated to founding a state on shari’a law are driving events. Influential Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi––who appeared on stage with Muslim Brother “Spiritual Guide” Yusuf al-Qaradawi when the latter returned in triumph to Cairo after Mubarak’s fall––has given us a clear indication of what to expect: “I am convinced that Islam is imminent, the caliphate is imminent. One of these days, the United States of Islam will be established. Allah willing, it will be soon. Egypt will be one state in this [United States of Islam.] Morocco and Saudi Arabia will be states as well.”
National identity, then, means something very different to most Muslims from what it means to us. For most Muslims in the Middle East, being Muslim takes precedence over being an Egyptian, a Libyan, or a Palestinian. And being Muslim means endorsing shari’a law, which is incompatible with Western notions of universal human rights and tolerance. The obsession with Palestinian “national identity” or “national aspirations” blinds us to the religious foundations of Arab hatred of Israel and Jews evident throughout the Middle East and driving policy toward Israel.
The algorithm of malice
By Melanie Phillips
http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
9 December 2011
Absortion transit camp Haifa ( ma'abarot) 1950 - Robert Capa, Jews of Yemen
Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, has just released the third of his little information videos setting out certain essential facts about Israel and the Arabs to counter the lies of the delegitimisation campaign. You can watch it here.Those who dismiss this as just more Israeli propaganda should think again. For it states truths which are absolutely fundamental to the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, but which have been turned on their heads and replaced by equally fundamental lies.
There are two big and connected points made by this little video. The first is that the widely-held belief that the Arabs were the only refugees from the Arab war against the newly reconstituted country of Israel (a war which started in 1948 and continues to this day) -- is totally untrue. There were many more Jewish refugees from Arab countries. As a result of the 1948 war, some 500,000 Arabs left Palestine – most of them as a result of having been told to do so by Arab regimes certain of destroying the new Jewish state. But some 850,000 Jews were then attacked, stripped of their citizenship and ethnically cleansed from their homes in Arab states -- causing the destruction of ancient Jewish communities in those countries which had well predated the arrival of Islam in the Middle East. And what happened to those refugees? They were absorbed without fuss into Israel (picture above, 1950), where they form around half of the population, and into other countries.
The second point which is crucial to an understanding of this conflict is that the Palestinian refugee issue is entirely artificial and bogus. Not only were the Arabs from Palestine deliberately refused access to other Arab countries in order to turn them – as a UN refugee official admitted – into an open sore as a weapon to be used against Israel. Even more astonishingly, the UN itself was a party to this malevolent strategy.
For it chose to treat the Palestinian Arabs differently from any other refugee group. All other refugees are dealt with by the UN Refugee Agency, whose goal is to re-settle them. But for the Palestinian Arabs, the UN set up the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – whose goal was to maintain the Palestinian Arabs as permanent refugees.
To that end, while in every other conflict refugees are defined merely as people who flee their homes, the UN decided that amongst the Palestinian Arabs refugee status would be transmitted from generation to generation. As a result, the number of Palestinian Arab ‘refugees’ has not diminished but risen over the years from 550,000 to 4.7 million. These are the people who are now said to deserve the ‘right of return’ to Israel.
Of course, the idea that 4.2 million of these people are actually refugees is totally absurd. If that standard was applied generally, the entire Jewish diaspora -- not to mention untold millions around the world who have been settled for generations - could suddenly claim refugee status. The UN bestowed this unique status upon the Palestinian Arabs for one reason only – to create an algorithm of malice that could be used as a weapon against the Jews.
Now at long last Israel has begun to realise that yes, incredible as it seems, sentient people do actually believe such lies -- – and that if the free world is to be restored to the axis of reason, they must be countered head-on by the true facts of history.
http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
9 December 2011
Absortion transit camp Haifa ( ma'abarot) 1950 - Robert Capa, Jews of Yemen
Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, has just released the third of his little information videos setting out certain essential facts about Israel and the Arabs to counter the lies of the delegitimisation campaign. You can watch it here.Those who dismiss this as just more Israeli propaganda should think again. For it states truths which are absolutely fundamental to the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, but which have been turned on their heads and replaced by equally fundamental lies.
There are two big and connected points made by this little video. The first is that the widely-held belief that the Arabs were the only refugees from the Arab war against the newly reconstituted country of Israel (a war which started in 1948 and continues to this day) -- is totally untrue. There were many more Jewish refugees from Arab countries. As a result of the 1948 war, some 500,000 Arabs left Palestine – most of them as a result of having been told to do so by Arab regimes certain of destroying the new Jewish state. But some 850,000 Jews were then attacked, stripped of their citizenship and ethnically cleansed from their homes in Arab states -- causing the destruction of ancient Jewish communities in those countries which had well predated the arrival of Islam in the Middle East. And what happened to those refugees? They were absorbed without fuss into Israel (picture above, 1950), where they form around half of the population, and into other countries.
The second point which is crucial to an understanding of this conflict is that the Palestinian refugee issue is entirely artificial and bogus. Not only were the Arabs from Palestine deliberately refused access to other Arab countries in order to turn them – as a UN refugee official admitted – into an open sore as a weapon to be used against Israel. Even more astonishingly, the UN itself was a party to this malevolent strategy.
For it chose to treat the Palestinian Arabs differently from any other refugee group. All other refugees are dealt with by the UN Refugee Agency, whose goal is to re-settle them. But for the Palestinian Arabs, the UN set up the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – whose goal was to maintain the Palestinian Arabs as permanent refugees.
To that end, while in every other conflict refugees are defined merely as people who flee their homes, the UN decided that amongst the Palestinian Arabs refugee status would be transmitted from generation to generation. As a result, the number of Palestinian Arab ‘refugees’ has not diminished but risen over the years from 550,000 to 4.7 million. These are the people who are now said to deserve the ‘right of return’ to Israel.
Of course, the idea that 4.2 million of these people are actually refugees is totally absurd. If that standard was applied generally, the entire Jewish diaspora -- not to mention untold millions around the world who have been settled for generations - could suddenly claim refugee status. The UN bestowed this unique status upon the Palestinian Arabs for one reason only – to create an algorithm of malice that could be used as a weapon against the Jews.
Now at long last Israel has begun to realise that yes, incredible as it seems, sentient people do actually believe such lies -- – and that if the free world is to be restored to the axis of reason, they must be countered head-on by the true facts of history.
A Shameful State Department Initiative
By Pamela Geller
http://www.americanthinker.com/
December 12, 2011
Today the Islamized State Department will be meeting with the Islamic supremacist Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss strategies and develop action plans in which to impose the restriction of free speech (or blasphemy, as truthful speech about Islam is considered in Islamic law) under the Sharia here in America.
Photos accompanying news reports about the upcoming meeting shows Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton with OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu at a meeting last summer in Istanbul. Such prominence is given to this totalitarian organization. That photo reminds me of Neville and Adolf.
The respect and deference that the United States is paying to the OIC amounts to surrender in installments. The very idea that the U.S. Secretary of State is meeting with the OIC to discuss "religious tolerance" is like having Himmler meeting with Jews to condemn Jew-hatred. Under Islam. there is a complete and utter absence of "religious tolerance" of non-Muslims living in Muslim countries under the Sharia.
The call for "respect and empathy and tolerance," coming from the most brutal and oppressive ideology on the face of the earth, reminds me of the "peace and equality" that was promised in Hitler's campaign posters for the Nationalist Socialist Workers (Nazi) party.
The OIC is comprised of 56 governments along with the Palestinian Authority. It also asserts authority over the Muslims living in non-Muslim lands, claiming that "Muslim immigrant communities in Europe are part of the Islamic nation." It also recommends, according to the renowned historian Bat Ye'or, "a series of steps to prevent the integration and assimilation of Muslims into European culture."
The OIC's foremost target is truthful dialogue about Islam, which it calls "Islamophobia" and claims hysterically is a "a crime against humanity" that must be criminalized. In line with that initiative, back in July, Obama's State Department reached a Sharia blasphemy agreement with OIC in Turkey. Hillary Clinton actually said this to the OIC:
Clinton went on to say:
Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition and James Lafferty, a Board member of my organization Stop Islamization Of America (SIOA), have been covering the preparations for Monday's meeting closely:
Pamela Geller is the publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and the author of the WND Books title Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.
http://www.americanthinker.com/
December 12, 2011
Today the Islamized State Department will be meeting with the Islamic supremacist Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss strategies and develop action plans in which to impose the restriction of free speech (or blasphemy, as truthful speech about Islam is considered in Islamic law) under the Sharia here in America.
Photos accompanying news reports about the upcoming meeting shows Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton with OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu at a meeting last summer in Istanbul. Such prominence is given to this totalitarian organization. That photo reminds me of Neville and Adolf.The respect and deference that the United States is paying to the OIC amounts to surrender in installments. The very idea that the U.S. Secretary of State is meeting with the OIC to discuss "religious tolerance" is like having Himmler meeting with Jews to condemn Jew-hatred. Under Islam. there is a complete and utter absence of "religious tolerance" of non-Muslims living in Muslim countries under the Sharia.
The call for "respect and empathy and tolerance," coming from the most brutal and oppressive ideology on the face of the earth, reminds me of the "peace and equality" that was promised in Hitler's campaign posters for the Nationalist Socialist Workers (Nazi) party.
The OIC is comprised of 56 governments along with the Palestinian Authority. It also asserts authority over the Muslims living in non-Muslim lands, claiming that "Muslim immigrant communities in Europe are part of the Islamic nation." It also recommends, according to the renowned historian Bat Ye'or, "a series of steps to prevent the integration and assimilation of Muslims into European culture."
The OIC's foremost target is truthful dialogue about Islam, which it calls "Islamophobia" and claims hysterically is a "a crime against humanity" that must be criminalized. In line with that initiative, back in July, Obama's State Department reached a Sharia blasphemy agreement with OIC in Turkey. Hillary Clinton actually said this to the OIC:
We each have to work to do more to promote respect for religious differences in our own countries. In the United States, I will admit, there are people who still feel vulnerable or marginalized as a result of their religious beliefs. And we have seen how the incendiary actions of just a very few people, a handful in a country of nearly 300 million, can create wide ripples of intolerance.She wasn't referring to Islamic jihadists. Clinton meant that the "ripples of intolerance" were those fighting against those jihadists.
Clinton went on to say:
We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promotinginterfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don't feel that they have the support to do what we abhor."Peer pressure and shaming." That is exactly what these useful idiots try to do with anyone and everyone who tells the truth about Islam and jihad: me, Robert Spencer, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, and more.
Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition and James Lafferty, a Board member of my organization Stop Islamization Of America (SIOA), have been covering the preparations for Monday's meeting closely:
"During a closed door meeting next week the U.S. State Department," they reported[T2] , "taking instruction from the United Nations, will host leaders from around the world in an effort to shame and pressure religious liberty and free speech organizations from engaging Islam."Said Andrea Lafferty:
What we are seeing here is a direct assault with the United Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and our own U.S. State Department in an effort to chill and curb religious liberties and free speech in America.Significantly, according to the Laffertys,
...the topics and the agenda -- and those meeting in Washington -- have not been released to the public. Several attempts to obtain this list by Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) have been refused or deferred. Additionally, two formal written requests to observe the proceedings as well as participation on an NGO conference call were dismissed.History will say we were the biggest fools the world ever knew, allowing our freedoms to be seized from under our noses by deceitful Islamic supremacists. This must not stand.
It is hypocritical for the State Department to insist that a meeting designed discussed best practices on protecting free speech is predicated on a closed-door meeting with foreign nationals[.] ... Americans are tired of being told that we are our own worst enemy. Terrorists attacked the United States, in the name of Islam, because they hate the freedoms that make us strong. What will history say if we allowed the diplomats and bureaucrats of the United Nations and State Department to accomplish what terrorists and planes could not?
Pamela Geller is the publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and the author of the WND Books title Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Proposed S. Korean Towers Resemble Exploding World Trade Center
Not coincidental.
By JOHN ROSENTHAL
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/
December 9, 2011
The unveiling of pictures of planned luxury residential towers scheduled to be built in Seoul, South Korea, has sparked instant controversy. The reason is obvious. The towers, which include a so-called “cloud” feature connecting them around the 27th floors, clearly resemble the World Trade Towers in the process of collapsing following the 9/11 attacks.
John Rosenthal writes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. You can follow his work at www.trans-int.com or on Facebook.
By JOHN ROSENTHAL
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/
December 9, 2011
The unveiling of pictures of planned luxury residential towers scheduled to be built in Seoul, South Korea, has sparked instant controversy. The reason is obvious. The towers, which include a so-called “cloud” feature connecting them around the 27th floors, clearly resemble the World Trade Towers in the process of collapsing following the 9/11 attacks.
The designers of the towers, Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, have responded to the controversy by quickly publishing an apology in English. “It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks,” the designers insist, “nor did we see the resemblance during the design process.”
They did not see the resemblance during the design process? The problem with this assertion – apart from its inherent implausibility – is that they have admitted the contrary in Dutch. Thus Jan Knikker of MVRDV told the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, “I have to admit that we also thought of the 9/11 attacks.”
Moreover, given the context, the MVRDV architects could hardly have not thought of the 9/11 attacks. The residential towers, after all, are supposed to be built at the entrance to the so-called Yongsan Dream Hub: a complex of business towers that has been designed by none other than Daniel Libeskind, the designer of the original “master plan” for the reconstruction of Ground Zero. Indeed, as the below image from Studio Daniel Libeskind makes clear, Libeskind’s Yongsan Dreamhub “master plan” closely resembles his original “master plan” for lower Manhattan.
John Rosenthal writes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. You can follow his work at www.trans-int.com or on Facebook.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Fast and Furious Victims' Voices Live On Through Their Families
By Ann Kane
http://www.americanthinker.com
December 10, 2011
Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata
Since the Obama administration took up residence in D.C., that world of law and order has slipped away. No other action by higher-ups has demonstrated this near-total breakdown of checks and balances more than Operation Fast and Furious.
Our representatives on Capitol Hill are so hopelessly flawed, our mainstream journalists so ethically challenged, and our citizens so desensitized to corruption that a government-initiated program transferring high-powered weapons to vicious Mexican drug cartels, who would in all likelihood use them to murder innocent human beings, seems like business as usual.
For months a hypnotized media has called the operation a "botched sting." When questioned about the scandal, a majority of Americans draw a blank. Only dedicated online alternative journalists and a few major outlets like Fox News keep on connecting the dots.
This tenacious bunch is determined not to let the story die along with the victims.
For them and most of us, it is the fierce and heroic goodness we see in the photos of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata that has left some mark on us.
Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was critically wounded in Tuscon only three weeks after Brian Terry's murder, wrote on December 15, 2010 of her own pain upon learning of Terry's death.
From Tuscon Weekly:
Banks had no way of knowing how much of a tragedy this would turn out to be. He could not know that Terry's murder might expose senior officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BAFTE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) as tacitly approving a potentially catastrophic operation. Two AK-47s linked to a U.S. government program known as Fast and Furious would be found at the scene of Terry's murder. E-mails and audio tapes also indicated that a third gun was recovered at the time and may have been tied to the gun-walking scandal.
Gabby Gifford's resolute determination "to bring to justice every person involved in this horrific crime" has prompted many outside the mainstream media to hold those at the center of Fast and Furious accountable. Terry's exemplary life of service demands it.
Michigan State Police Sergeant Dan Bowman eulogized 40-year-old Brian Terry at Terry's funeral in Detroit on December 23, 2010. He read from a note written by Terry when he was asked to describe himself during training.
On February 15, 2011, 32-year-old Zapata was killed in the line of duty in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Zapata was on assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City when his and fellow agent Victor Avila's SUV was ambushed by members of the Los Zetas drug cartel, according to Mexican and American authorities. Avila was wounded and Zapata killed after identifying themselves as U.S. diplomats. One of the guns used in the shooting was traced to the BAFTE gun-walking operation where weapons were bought in bulk and agents were told not to interdict them.
By all accounts, Zapata was an exceptional person, much like Brian Terry. An emotional John Morton, ICE director, expressed the feelings of over 1,000 mourners at the Brownsville Events Center on February 22.
In the beginning, Jaime's dad, Amador, a Vietnam War veteran, missed the daily telephone calls he received from his son. Mary missed her son firing up the barbecue at their home in Brownsville. Their sadness has since morphed into a primal need to know the facts behind their son's murder.
Whoever authorized the deadly program back in 2009 did not alert the Mexican government. Mexico Attorney General Marisela Morales said law enforcement officials were not told details of Fast and Furious until January 2011. More than 200 of the trafficked guns have shown up at crime scenes in Mexico. Morales called the secret gun-walking project an "attack on the safety of Mexicans."
One of those Mexican citizens was Mario González RodrÃguez, an attorney and brother of Chihuahua's former attorney general, Patricia González RodrÃguez. RodrÃguez was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by hooded gunmen from the Sinaloa drug cartel, who posted a video online with the captive denouncing his sister. When his body was found in October 2010, two AK-47s with serial numbers traced back to the Arizona gun-smuggling operation were found.
When Carlos Canino, an ATF officer attached to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, told Patricia González about the weapons found at the murder scene, the grieving sister expressed disbelief.
Sicilia echoed the Terry and Zapata families, saying, "I'm going to march ... because I don't want any other family to suffer the loss of a son as we are suffering due to a poorly planned, poorly executed, and poorly led war."
Sicilia blames politicians and criminals, who he believes are complicit in the violence. In a callous dismissal of empathy for victims and their family members, the Calderón administration stigmatized the casualties, arguing that "90% of drug war murder victims were linked to organized crime." According to activist organizations banding together in protest, "the murders weren't mourned, let alone investigated."
In a country that has lost 40,000 citizens since 2006 in a drug war, the addition of a couple of thousand "walked" weapons and hundreds of more victims might not elicit outrage in the United States. But Sicilia the poet, who was not content to let his son's murder become just a statistic, reminded the marchers of the sanctity of each individual life.
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report.
http://www.americanthinker.com
December 10, 2011
Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata
Since the Obama administration took up residence in D.C., that world of law and order has slipped away. No other action by higher-ups has demonstrated this near-total breakdown of checks and balances more than Operation Fast and Furious.
Our representatives on Capitol Hill are so hopelessly flawed, our mainstream journalists so ethically challenged, and our citizens so desensitized to corruption that a government-initiated program transferring high-powered weapons to vicious Mexican drug cartels, who would in all likelihood use them to murder innocent human beings, seems like business as usual.
For months a hypnotized media has called the operation a "botched sting." When questioned about the scandal, a majority of Americans draw a blank. Only dedicated online alternative journalists and a few major outlets like Fox News keep on connecting the dots.
This tenacious bunch is determined not to let the story die along with the victims.
For them and most of us, it is the fierce and heroic goodness we see in the photos of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata that has left some mark on us.
Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was critically wounded in Tuscon only three weeks after Brian Terry's murder, wrote on December 15, 2010 of her own pain upon learning of Terry's death.
From Tuscon Weekly:
I am deeply saddened by the senseless murder of Agent Brian Terry, who was killed in the line of duty while protecting our nation's border.A report released after Terry's death stated the agent was shot and killed after "encountering a group of suspects in a remote area of Peck Canyon northwest of Nogales, Arizona." Just weeks before the ambush, Tucson Weekly's Leo W. Banks chronicled the Peck Canyon corridor as a "smuggler's paradise." In the same article, Banks presciently asked, "What's going on? Can the violence be stopped before we have another borderlands tragedy involving an American citizen or a lawman?"
This is a tragedy that deserves nothing less than the swiftest and strongest response. It is a stark reminder that our borders are not yet secure. The full efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are focused on bringing to justice all those involved.
I salute the resolute work of the brave men and women of the Border Patrol and the other agencies that work every day to protect our borders. And I offer my heartfelt condolences to the Terry family for their profound personal loss. Our commitment to them must be evident in our determination to bring to justice every person involved in this horrific crime.
Banks had no way of knowing how much of a tragedy this would turn out to be. He could not know that Terry's murder might expose senior officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BAFTE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) as tacitly approving a potentially catastrophic operation. Two AK-47s linked to a U.S. government program known as Fast and Furious would be found at the scene of Terry's murder. E-mails and audio tapes also indicated that a third gun was recovered at the time and may have been tied to the gun-walking scandal.
Gabby Gifford's resolute determination "to bring to justice every person involved in this horrific crime" has prompted many outside the mainstream media to hold those at the center of Fast and Furious accountable. Terry's exemplary life of service demands it.
Michigan State Police Sergeant Dan Bowman eulogized 40-year-old Brian Terry at Terry's funeral in Detroit on December 23, 2010. He read from a note written by Terry when he was asked to describe himself during training.
If you seek to do battle with me this day, you'll receive the best I am capable of giving.The tears and emotion at Terry's funeral were matched months later at the funeral mass for slain U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agent Jaime Zapata in Brownsville, Texas.
It may not be enough, but it will be everything I have to give...You may defeat me, but you will be lucky to escape with your life. You may kill me, but I'm willing to die if necessary.
I do not fear death, for I have been close enough to it on enough occasions that it no longer concerns me. What I do fear is the loss of my honor, and would rather die fighting than to have it said that I was without courage.
On February 15, 2011, 32-year-old Zapata was killed in the line of duty in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Zapata was on assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City when his and fellow agent Victor Avila's SUV was ambushed by members of the Los Zetas drug cartel, according to Mexican and American authorities. Avila was wounded and Zapata killed after identifying themselves as U.S. diplomats. One of the guns used in the shooting was traced to the BAFTE gun-walking operation where weapons were bought in bulk and agents were told not to interdict them.
By all accounts, Zapata was an exceptional person, much like Brian Terry. An emotional John Morton, ICE director, expressed the feelings of over 1,000 mourners at the Brownsville Events Center on February 22.
I submit to you, however, that as dark as this moment is, Jaime's life is really all about light. Everyone in this room will eventually meet his or her Maker, and the real question on that day won't be how we died but how we lived. When it's my turn, I want to say that I lived like Jaime.The past nine months have been a mixture of raw grief and frustration for Mary Zapata-Munoz and Amador Zapata, Jaime's parents. They initially wanted to know what he was doing in Northern Mexico hundreds of miles from the U.S. Embassy on only the ninth day of his assignment; each asked questions about the weapons used in the ambush. Authorities reported that a Romanian-made semi-automatic pistol had been traced back to a Dallas-area arms-trafficking ring. In late October, the family stated that officials had not yet told them if the weapons used by Los Zetas were part of Operation Fast and Furious, based in Phoenix.
In the beginning, Jaime's dad, Amador, a Vietnam War veteran, missed the daily telephone calls he received from his son. Mary missed her son firing up the barbecue at their home in Brownsville. Their sadness has since morphed into a primal need to know the facts behind their son's murder.
I feel like I'm not getting the truth. I know nothing will bring my son back. No truth. No nothing. But I want to make sure that no other person has to go through what we went through, what Jaime went through. Can you imagine those last moments, trying to save your life and your buddy's life? What it must have been like?...We don't just want answers...You can always get an answer, but it's not always necessarily the truth. We want the truth."When it comes to Operation Fast and Furious the truth is hard to come by. American agents Zapata and Terry aren't the only victims, their families not the only ones demanding answers.
Whoever authorized the deadly program back in 2009 did not alert the Mexican government. Mexico Attorney General Marisela Morales said law enforcement officials were not told details of Fast and Furious until January 2011. More than 200 of the trafficked guns have shown up at crime scenes in Mexico. Morales called the secret gun-walking project an "attack on the safety of Mexicans."
One of those Mexican citizens was Mario González RodrÃguez, an attorney and brother of Chihuahua's former attorney general, Patricia González RodrÃguez. RodrÃguez was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by hooded gunmen from the Sinaloa drug cartel, who posted a video online with the captive denouncing his sister. When his body was found in October 2010, two AK-47s with serial numbers traced back to the Arizona gun-smuggling operation were found.
When Carlos Canino, an ATF officer attached to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, told Patricia González about the weapons found at the murder scene, the grieving sister expressed disbelief.
The basic ineptitude of these officials caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims.U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich listed a few of the places in Mexico where Fast and Furious guns were retrieved in a September 9, 2011 letter to Congressman Darrell Issa and Senator Chuck Grassley.
One AK-47 type assault rifle purchased by a Fast and Furious suspect was recovered Nov. 14, 2009 in Atoyac de Alvarez, Mexico after the Mexican military rescued a kidnap victim.One of Mexico's most revered poets , Javier Sicilia, grieving over the loss of his son, who was found murdered with six other people in a drug-related mêlée, organized a march in May declaring that he and the Mexican people are "hasta la madre" -- "fed up." One of the participants lamented, "Young people are no longer the country's future; we're this country's dead."
On July 1, 2010, two AK-47 type assault rifles purchased by Fast and Furious suspects were recovered in Sonora, Mexico after a shootout between cartels. Two murders were reported in the incident using the weapons.
On July 26, 2010, a giant .50 caliber Barrett rifle purchased by a Fast and Furious suspect was recovered in Durango, Mexico after apparently having been fired. No further details of the incident were given.
On Aug. 13, 2010, two AK-47 type assault rifles purchased by a Fast and Furious target were recovered in Durango, Mexico after a confrontation between the Mexican military and an "armed group."
On May 27, 2011, three AK-47 type assault rifles purchased by Fast and Furious targets were recovered in Jalisco, Mexico after having been fired. No other details of the incident were provided,
Sicilia echoed the Terry and Zapata families, saying, "I'm going to march ... because I don't want any other family to suffer the loss of a son as we are suffering due to a poorly planned, poorly executed, and poorly led war."
Sicilia blames politicians and criminals, who he believes are complicit in the violence. In a callous dismissal of empathy for victims and their family members, the Calderón administration stigmatized the casualties, arguing that "90% of drug war murder victims were linked to organized crime." According to activist organizations banding together in protest, "the murders weren't mourned, let alone investigated."
In a country that has lost 40,000 citizens since 2006 in a drug war, the addition of a couple of thousand "walked" weapons and hundreds of more victims might not elicit outrage in the United States. But Sicilia the poet, who was not content to let his son's murder become just a statistic, reminded the marchers of the sanctity of each individual life.
Many of the dead, maybe the majority of the dead, they have a story. They were innocent and they were killed stupidly for no reason ... They're human beings, and behind them there are families who are suffering very much.The victims of Operation Fast and Furious are speaking from their graves, through honest journalists, grief-stricken parents, and awakened Americans who have had enough of the cover-up.
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report.
‘Furious’ twisting
Eric Holder stonewalls on
By Michael A. Walsh
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
December 9, 2011
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. testifies on "Fast and Furious" at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. (Yuri Gripas / Reuters)
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that everything Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee yesterday was true.
That the answer to several questions about who ordered Fast and Furious — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ “deeply flawed, reckless, misguided and inexcusable” (Holder’s words) gun-trafficking operation — is: “We don’t know yet.”
That concerns over the program’s death toll (one, probably two American agents, hundreds of Mexicans) and demands for accountability — including for Holder’s resignation and that of his deputy, Lanny Breuer — are “inflammatory and inappropriate rhetoric to score political points.”
That the recently withdrawn letter from the Justice Department to Congress denying federal responsibility for the program was not a lie, “because it all has to do with your state of mind and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that would be considered perjury or a lie.”
That the push for something called “Demand Letter No. 3”— a new regulation to compel border-state gun dealers to report multiples sales of long guns to the ATF — had nothing to do with the fact that the feds had just allowed some 2,000 weapons to “walk” to Mexico and were using the blowback to justify more gun control.
That Holder doesn’t read the memos in his own in-box, instead relying on staffers to bring pertinent information to his attention.
And that, miraculously, of the thousands of pages of e-mails about F&F turned over to Congress last Friday night, not one is from or to Holder — that he was just an innocent bystander as the US Attorney’s office and ATF field headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz., cooked up the scheme.
Let’s believe all that; what are we left with? Let Holder sum it up:
“Although the department has taken steps to ensure that such tactics are never used again . . . we will continue to feel the effects of this flawed operation for years to come. Guns lost during this operation will continue to show up at crime scenes on both sides of the border.”
There you have it: One of the most incompetent (at best) and murderous operations ever undertaken in the name of the Justice Department, and all the attorney general can do is say they’ve closed the barn door now that the horses have fled, taking the guns and ammo with them.
Oh, and promise to get to the bottom of things . . . someday.
Watching Holder dodge, twist and weave under intense questioning by his nemesis, Rep. Darrell Issa (R- Calif.) and other Republicans yesterday was to observe a true turf-defending Washington apparatchik. Holder repeatedly hid behind the excuse that acting Inspector General Cynthia Schnedar is doing her own probe. “That,” said Holder, “will take time.”
And still heads have not rolled.
Sure, Dennis Burke, the former US Attorney in Arizona, has stepped down. Kenneth Melson, the former acting head of the ATF, on whose watch Fast and Furious got started, has been protectively shuffled off into a do-nothing job elsewhere.
But both Holder and Breuer remain behind their desks, finger-pointing down the chain of command.
No wonder Issa tried to get Holder declared a hostile witness and have him put under oath.
Issa says his committee has been “systematically lied to” by Holder & Co.
“We believe you’re withholding documents,” said Issa, threatening Holder with contempt of Congress as well as a subpoena for an appearance before his Oversight Committee in January and comparing him to disgraced Nixon AG, John Mitchell.
“Have you no shame?” retorted Holder, to which Issa replied: “Have you no shame?”
Holder angrily rejected the implication that Justice deliberately concocted Fast and Furious to justify the increased gun control that is a clear priority of the Obama administration. Committee Democrats, meanwhile, did their best to change the subject, cheer him on and support his irrelevant calls for tighter gun laws.
But just last week, we learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration, another Justice Department division involved in F&F, has laundered and smuggled millions of dollars in drug money, ostensibly to help the Mexican government track drug money and identify cartel leaders.
“I have no intention of resigning,” said a defiant Holder yesterday, nor, he said, should anyone else quit. But if the drip, drip, drip of revelations continues, that might soon change.
By Michael A. Walsh
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
December 9, 2011
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that everything Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee yesterday was true.
That the answer to several questions about who ordered Fast and Furious — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ “deeply flawed, reckless, misguided and inexcusable” (Holder’s words) gun-trafficking operation — is: “We don’t know yet.”
That concerns over the program’s death toll (one, probably two American agents, hundreds of Mexicans) and demands for accountability — including for Holder’s resignation and that of his deputy, Lanny Breuer — are “inflammatory and inappropriate rhetoric to score political points.”
That the recently withdrawn letter from the Justice Department to Congress denying federal responsibility for the program was not a lie, “because it all has to do with your state of mind and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that would be considered perjury or a lie.”
That the push for something called “Demand Letter No. 3”— a new regulation to compel border-state gun dealers to report multiples sales of long guns to the ATF — had nothing to do with the fact that the feds had just allowed some 2,000 weapons to “walk” to Mexico and were using the blowback to justify more gun control.
That Holder doesn’t read the memos in his own in-box, instead relying on staffers to bring pertinent information to his attention.
And that, miraculously, of the thousands of pages of e-mails about F&F turned over to Congress last Friday night, not one is from or to Holder — that he was just an innocent bystander as the US Attorney’s office and ATF field headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz., cooked up the scheme.
Let’s believe all that; what are we left with? Let Holder sum it up:
“Although the department has taken steps to ensure that such tactics are never used again . . . we will continue to feel the effects of this flawed operation for years to come. Guns lost during this operation will continue to show up at crime scenes on both sides of the border.”
There you have it: One of the most incompetent (at best) and murderous operations ever undertaken in the name of the Justice Department, and all the attorney general can do is say they’ve closed the barn door now that the horses have fled, taking the guns and ammo with them.
Oh, and promise to get to the bottom of things . . . someday.
Watching Holder dodge, twist and weave under intense questioning by his nemesis, Rep. Darrell Issa (R- Calif.) and other Republicans yesterday was to observe a true turf-defending Washington apparatchik. Holder repeatedly hid behind the excuse that acting Inspector General Cynthia Schnedar is doing her own probe. “That,” said Holder, “will take time.”
And still heads have not rolled.
Sure, Dennis Burke, the former US Attorney in Arizona, has stepped down. Kenneth Melson, the former acting head of the ATF, on whose watch Fast and Furious got started, has been protectively shuffled off into a do-nothing job elsewhere.
But both Holder and Breuer remain behind their desks, finger-pointing down the chain of command.
No wonder Issa tried to get Holder declared a hostile witness and have him put under oath.
Issa says his committee has been “systematically lied to” by Holder & Co.
“We believe you’re withholding documents,” said Issa, threatening Holder with contempt of Congress as well as a subpoena for an appearance before his Oversight Committee in January and comparing him to disgraced Nixon AG, John Mitchell.
“Have you no shame?” retorted Holder, to which Issa replied: “Have you no shame?”
Holder angrily rejected the implication that Justice deliberately concocted Fast and Furious to justify the increased gun control that is a clear priority of the Obama administration. Committee Democrats, meanwhile, did their best to change the subject, cheer him on and support his irrelevant calls for tighter gun laws.
But just last week, we learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration, another Justice Department division involved in F&F, has laundered and smuggled millions of dollars in drug money, ostensibly to help the Mexican government track drug money and identify cartel leaders.
“I have no intention of resigning,” said a defiant Holder yesterday, nor, he said, should anyone else quit. But if the drip, drip, drip of revelations continues, that might soon change.
Friday, December 09, 2011
A future looted to bribe the present
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
December 9, 2011
The President of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kansas, last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness that archeologists of the future, sifting through the rubble of our civilization, will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.
"This isn't about class warfare," declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, "When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about sex,' it's about sex." The president understands that "Wall Street," "banks," "fat cats," etc., remain the most inviting target, and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to re-election and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, "want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. ... And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. ... It doesn't work. It has never worked." He blamed our present fix on "this brand of 'you're on your own' economics."
This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now "on their own"? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the "subprime" mortgage was an invention of government. America's collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a "private" system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less "on their own" in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life – and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.
It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of "you're not on your own" economics – the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game "Pass the Parcel," in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops, and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.
The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day," says Macbeth. "To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow," said the political class, like Macbeth with a heavy cold (to reprise a rare joke from Mrs. Thatcher). And they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, John Corzine, former U.S. senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama's Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Joe Biden described as the fellow who's always "the smartest guy in the room," explained his affairs thus: "I simply do not know where the money is." Does that apply only to his private business or to his years in the Senate, too?
When Corzine took over the two-and-a-quarter-century-old firm, he moved it big-time into sovereign debt – because you can't lose with sovereign debt, right? Because a nation, even one that is, in any objective sense, bankrupt as Mediterranean Europe basically is, is not bankrupt in the sense that a homeowner or small business is: Corzine figured, reasonably enough, that no matter the balance sheets of Portugal, Spain, Italy and the rest, they'd somehow be propped up unto the end of time. As their credit ratings hit the express elevator to Sub-Basement Level Four, Corzine was taken down with them. The smart guy made a bet on government and lost. That's where the rest of us are headed: The "you're not on your own" societal model of Western Europe has run out of people to stick it to.
In Kansas, in his latest reincarnation, the president channeled Theodore Roosevelt in trust-busting mode. "He busted up monopolies," cooed Obama approvingly, "forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices." But who wields monopoly power today? Washington dominates ever more areas of life, from government-backed mortgages to the government takeover of education loans to Obamacare's governmentalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. In my most recent book, which makes an attractive and thoughtful Christmas gift for the apocalyptically minded loved one in your family, I quote an old joke about the British equivalent of the U.S. anti-trust division: "Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" This is a profound insight into the nature of statism: By definition, there can only be one government – which is why, when it's "monopolizing", it should do so only in very limited areas.
Yet, after hymning the virtues of "better services and better prices," the president went on to issue the latest brain-dead call for increased "investment" in education. America "invests" more per student than any other nation except Switzerland, and it has nothing to show for it other than a vast swamp of mediocrity presided over by a hideous educrat monopoly. Might this fetid maw not benefit from exposure to "better services and better prices"? Perish the thought! Instead, Obama is demanding increased "investment" in "education" in order to "give people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines and semiconductors."
I am not a trained economist, but it is not obvious to me that the United States of America is crying out for more wind turbines, and, if it is, I'm sure many of those colleges' tenured Race and Social Justice Studies professors could be redeployed to serve as such. In Europe, the political class is beginning to understand that the social democratic state created to guarantee permanent stability risks plunging the Continent into the worst instability since those happy-go-lucky days of the 1930s. By contrast, in Kansas, the president of the United States is still riding the tie-dyed wind turbine and promising to waft you to Oz. These are dangerous times – and, as many will discover, whatever assurances the statists give, in the end you'll be on your own.
©MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
December 9, 2011
"This isn't about class warfare," declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, "When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about sex,' it's about sex." The president understands that "Wall Street," "banks," "fat cats," etc., remain the most inviting target, and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to re-election and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, "want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. ... And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. ... It doesn't work. It has never worked." He blamed our present fix on "this brand of 'you're on your own' economics."
This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now "on their own"? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the "subprime" mortgage was an invention of government. America's collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a "private" system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less "on their own" in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life – and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.
It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of "you're not on your own" economics – the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game "Pass the Parcel," in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops, and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.
The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day," says Macbeth. "To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow," said the political class, like Macbeth with a heavy cold (to reprise a rare joke from Mrs. Thatcher). And they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, John Corzine, former U.S. senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama's Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Joe Biden described as the fellow who's always "the smartest guy in the room," explained his affairs thus: "I simply do not know where the money is." Does that apply only to his private business or to his years in the Senate, too?
When Corzine took over the two-and-a-quarter-century-old firm, he moved it big-time into sovereign debt – because you can't lose with sovereign debt, right? Because a nation, even one that is, in any objective sense, bankrupt as Mediterranean Europe basically is, is not bankrupt in the sense that a homeowner or small business is: Corzine figured, reasonably enough, that no matter the balance sheets of Portugal, Spain, Italy and the rest, they'd somehow be propped up unto the end of time. As their credit ratings hit the express elevator to Sub-Basement Level Four, Corzine was taken down with them. The smart guy made a bet on government and lost. That's where the rest of us are headed: The "you're not on your own" societal model of Western Europe has run out of people to stick it to.
In Kansas, in his latest reincarnation, the president channeled Theodore Roosevelt in trust-busting mode. "He busted up monopolies," cooed Obama approvingly, "forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices." But who wields monopoly power today? Washington dominates ever more areas of life, from government-backed mortgages to the government takeover of education loans to Obamacare's governmentalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. In my most recent book, which makes an attractive and thoughtful Christmas gift for the apocalyptically minded loved one in your family, I quote an old joke about the British equivalent of the U.S. anti-trust division: "Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" This is a profound insight into the nature of statism: By definition, there can only be one government – which is why, when it's "monopolizing", it should do so only in very limited areas.
Yet, after hymning the virtues of "better services and better prices," the president went on to issue the latest brain-dead call for increased "investment" in education. America "invests" more per student than any other nation except Switzerland, and it has nothing to show for it other than a vast swamp of mediocrity presided over by a hideous educrat monopoly. Might this fetid maw not benefit from exposure to "better services and better prices"? Perish the thought! Instead, Obama is demanding increased "investment" in "education" in order to "give people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines and semiconductors."
I am not a trained economist, but it is not obvious to me that the United States of America is crying out for more wind turbines, and, if it is, I'm sure many of those colleges' tenured Race and Social Justice Studies professors could be redeployed to serve as such. In Europe, the political class is beginning to understand that the social democratic state created to guarantee permanent stability risks plunging the Continent into the worst instability since those happy-go-lucky days of the 1930s. By contrast, in Kansas, the president of the United States is still riding the tie-dyed wind turbine and promising to waft you to Oz. These are dangerous times – and, as many will discover, whatever assurances the statists give, in the end you'll be on your own.
©MARK STEYN
Mumia: 30 Years Later
by Daniel Flynn
http://frontpagemag.com
December 9, 2011
Daniel Faulkner and Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal shot Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner in the back and then shot the wounded cop in the face thirty years ago today. As an anniversary present, the former Black Panther learned this week that prosecutors will not seek to reinstate the death penalty imposed by a jury selected by the defendant.
Abu-Jamal wasn’t just guilty. He was late. It’s not that radicals had tired of violence by his 1981 arrest. Weatherman remnants had helped murder two policemen and a security guard in a Nanuet, New York robbery of a Brink’s truck a few weeks earlier, and subsequently bombed numerous locations in and around Washington, DC. But the public, as stiff sentences suggested, had clearly tired of violent radicals. Huey Newton could murder an Oakland policeman in 1967 and find freedom a few years later. When a former Black Panther tried that in Philadelphia in 1981, a jury sentenced him to death. Despite evading that sentence, Abu-Jamal did not get away with murder. He has been incarcerated every day for the past three decades. The sixties had a bad eighties.
The times, but not the tactics, had changed. Mumia Abu-Jamal showed himself to be the identikit radical defendant.
He initially acted as own lawyer. He refused to enter a plea, refused to rise at the outset of courtroom proceedings, and demanded, more than one-hundred times, the presence of incarcerated Philadelphia cult leader John Africa, whom the defendant described as the best lawyer in the world. He called one judge a “bastard” and another a “black-robed conspirator.” Unsurprisingly, he found himself kicked out of courtrooms at least a half-dozen times during the duration of his trial. Following the determination of his guilt, he melodramatically proclaimed: “This decision today proves neither my guilt nor my innocence. It proves merely that the system is finished. Babylon is falling! Long live MOVE! Long live John Africa!” The jury sentenced him to death, anyhow. Welcome to 1982.
From that first trial, Mumia attracted a “cult” following, as in small but passionate. They protested outside the courthouse and partook in a fracas within it. The “cult” following took on different connotations, as in mindless, when the death-row inmate became a delayed cause célèbre upon hiring a media-savvy defense team led by the late Leonard Weinglass in the mid-1990s. The Mumiacs insisted the police had faked the death of one witness to prevent her from recanting and that a .44 caliber round, inconsistent with Abu-Jamal’s .38 caliber revolver, had really caused Faulkner’s death—despite the appellant’s own ballistics expert rebutting this conspiracy theory on the witness stand.
A mythology engulfed Abu-Jamal that projected a persona not resembling the person. The back-cover copy of his Live from Death Row bestowed upon him a Peabody Award that he had never won. A common yarn spun by his admirers holds that police framed Abu-Jamal because of his explosive journalism. But he worked as a cab driver when he was arrested, and his stringer work on the A.M. dial had all but dried up. If the government had really conspired to silence a man who had been fired from a series of radio reporting jobs, they might have left him alone in his taxi. Charging the down-and-out driver with murder provided a megaphone, not a muzzle.
The inmate’s leftist politics overrode the evidence. Numerous eyewitnesses identified Mumia as the killer. He was found at the scene with a return round from Faulkner’s service weapon in his chest and a gun registered in his name by his side. The five spent shell casings in his gun were of the same unique variant as the “Plus P” bullets that killed the officer. Witnesses reported a hospital boast: “I shot the mother—er and I hope the mother—er dies.” In 1999, prison outreach activist Phillip Bloch recounted a 1991 conversation in which Abu-Jamal had acknowledged killing Faulkner. On the other hand, the commentator/killer compared George W. Bush to Hitler and eulogized Howard Zinn as a “brilliant” “master historian.” This surely made him innocent, or at least entitled him to a “get out of jail free” card. Right?
Abu-Jamal’s fortunes improved in the 1990s. Pacifica Radio aired Abu-Jamal’s commentaries after National Public Radio rethought an earlier decision to do so. Evergreen State College and Antioch College, among others, hosted the convicted murderer as a commencement speaker via audiotape. A Law & Order episode namedropped Abu-Jamal, with a character noting that the “Philadelphia journalist” was “framed for murder.” Rage Against the Machine played an infamous benefit concert for him. The subject of numerous cable documentaries, and the author of books, spoken-word CDs, and a periodic Internet column, Mumia became a cottage, nay, a prison-cell industry.
Never outside of the ranks of hit men had murder been so beneficial to one’s career. But then a federal judge had to ruin it by vacating Abu-Jamal’s death sentence in 2001. Although the rallying cry had been “Free Mumia,” the urgency of his followers stemmed from the threat that the state would “Fry Mumia.” But Pennsylvania, which employed lethal injection anyhow, had executed just three people in the last thirty-five years. Wednesday’s announcement by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams that he would forgo pursuing a reinstatement of the death sentence merely affirmed what all but the blindly passionate on both sides had already foreseen: Pennsylvania would never execute its most famous inmate.
A murderer facing life behind bars makes for a less compelling cause célèbre than one facing capital punishment. The throngs that had once shouted “Free Mumia” in Paris, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have long since reoriented their shouts toward other injustices.
The Mumiacs have moved on. Mumia remains in the same place.
- Daniel J. Flynn is the author of numerous books, including "Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America," forthcoming from ISI Books this fall. He writes a Monday column for HumanEvents.com and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
http://frontpagemag.com
December 9, 2011
Mumia Abu-Jamal shot Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner in the back and then shot the wounded cop in the face thirty years ago today. As an anniversary present, the former Black Panther learned this week that prosecutors will not seek to reinstate the death penalty imposed by a jury selected by the defendant.
Abu-Jamal wasn’t just guilty. He was late. It’s not that radicals had tired of violence by his 1981 arrest. Weatherman remnants had helped murder two policemen and a security guard in a Nanuet, New York robbery of a Brink’s truck a few weeks earlier, and subsequently bombed numerous locations in and around Washington, DC. But the public, as stiff sentences suggested, had clearly tired of violent radicals. Huey Newton could murder an Oakland policeman in 1967 and find freedom a few years later. When a former Black Panther tried that in Philadelphia in 1981, a jury sentenced him to death. Despite evading that sentence, Abu-Jamal did not get away with murder. He has been incarcerated every day for the past three decades. The sixties had a bad eighties.
The times, but not the tactics, had changed. Mumia Abu-Jamal showed himself to be the identikit radical defendant.
He initially acted as own lawyer. He refused to enter a plea, refused to rise at the outset of courtroom proceedings, and demanded, more than one-hundred times, the presence of incarcerated Philadelphia cult leader John Africa, whom the defendant described as the best lawyer in the world. He called one judge a “bastard” and another a “black-robed conspirator.” Unsurprisingly, he found himself kicked out of courtrooms at least a half-dozen times during the duration of his trial. Following the determination of his guilt, he melodramatically proclaimed: “This decision today proves neither my guilt nor my innocence. It proves merely that the system is finished. Babylon is falling! Long live MOVE! Long live John Africa!” The jury sentenced him to death, anyhow. Welcome to 1982.
From that first trial, Mumia attracted a “cult” following, as in small but passionate. They protested outside the courthouse and partook in a fracas within it. The “cult” following took on different connotations, as in mindless, when the death-row inmate became a delayed cause célèbre upon hiring a media-savvy defense team led by the late Leonard Weinglass in the mid-1990s. The Mumiacs insisted the police had faked the death of one witness to prevent her from recanting and that a .44 caliber round, inconsistent with Abu-Jamal’s .38 caliber revolver, had really caused Faulkner’s death—despite the appellant’s own ballistics expert rebutting this conspiracy theory on the witness stand.
A mythology engulfed Abu-Jamal that projected a persona not resembling the person. The back-cover copy of his Live from Death Row bestowed upon him a Peabody Award that he had never won. A common yarn spun by his admirers holds that police framed Abu-Jamal because of his explosive journalism. But he worked as a cab driver when he was arrested, and his stringer work on the A.M. dial had all but dried up. If the government had really conspired to silence a man who had been fired from a series of radio reporting jobs, they might have left him alone in his taxi. Charging the down-and-out driver with murder provided a megaphone, not a muzzle.
The inmate’s leftist politics overrode the evidence. Numerous eyewitnesses identified Mumia as the killer. He was found at the scene with a return round from Faulkner’s service weapon in his chest and a gun registered in his name by his side. The five spent shell casings in his gun were of the same unique variant as the “Plus P” bullets that killed the officer. Witnesses reported a hospital boast: “I shot the mother—er and I hope the mother—er dies.” In 1999, prison outreach activist Phillip Bloch recounted a 1991 conversation in which Abu-Jamal had acknowledged killing Faulkner. On the other hand, the commentator/killer compared George W. Bush to Hitler and eulogized Howard Zinn as a “brilliant” “master historian.” This surely made him innocent, or at least entitled him to a “get out of jail free” card. Right?
Abu-Jamal’s fortunes improved in the 1990s. Pacifica Radio aired Abu-Jamal’s commentaries after National Public Radio rethought an earlier decision to do so. Evergreen State College and Antioch College, among others, hosted the convicted murderer as a commencement speaker via audiotape. A Law & Order episode namedropped Abu-Jamal, with a character noting that the “Philadelphia journalist” was “framed for murder.” Rage Against the Machine played an infamous benefit concert for him. The subject of numerous cable documentaries, and the author of books, spoken-word CDs, and a periodic Internet column, Mumia became a cottage, nay, a prison-cell industry.
Never outside of the ranks of hit men had murder been so beneficial to one’s career. But then a federal judge had to ruin it by vacating Abu-Jamal’s death sentence in 2001. Although the rallying cry had been “Free Mumia,” the urgency of his followers stemmed from the threat that the state would “Fry Mumia.” But Pennsylvania, which employed lethal injection anyhow, had executed just three people in the last thirty-five years. Wednesday’s announcement by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams that he would forgo pursuing a reinstatement of the death sentence merely affirmed what all but the blindly passionate on both sides had already foreseen: Pennsylvania would never execute its most famous inmate.
A murderer facing life behind bars makes for a less compelling cause célèbre than one facing capital punishment. The throngs that had once shouted “Free Mumia” in Paris, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have long since reoriented their shouts toward other injustices.
The Mumiacs have moved on. Mumia remains in the same place.
- Daniel J. Flynn is the author of numerous books, including "Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America," forthcoming from ISI Books this fall. He writes a Monday column for HumanEvents.com and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
Obama’s campaign for class resentment
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
December 9, 2011
In the first month of his presidency, Barack Obama averred that if in three years he hadn’t alleviated the nation’s economic pain, he’d be a “one-term proposition.”
When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track” and even Bill Clinton calls the economy “lousy,” how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.
It seems that he and his policies have nothing to do with the current state of things. Sure, presidents are ordinarily held accountable for economic growth, unemployment, national indebtedness (see Obama, above). But not this time. Responsibility, you see, lies with the rich.
Or, as the philosophers of Zuccotti Park call them, the 1 percent. For Obama, these rich are the ones holding back the 99 percent. The “breathtaking greed of a few” is crushing the middle class. If only the rich paid their “fair share,” the middle class would have a chance. Otherwise, government won’t have enough funds to “invest” in education and innovation, the golden path to the sunny uplands of economic growth and opportunity.
Where to begin? A country spending twice as much per capita on education as it did in 1970 with zero effect on test scores is not underinvesting in education. It’s mis-investing. As for federally directed spending on innovation — like Solyndra? Ethanol? The preposterously subsidized, flammable Chevy Volt?
Our current economic distress is attributable to myriad causes: globalization, expensive high-tech medicine, a huge debt burden, a burst housing bubble largely driven by precisely the egalitarian impulse that Obama is promoting (government aggressively pushing “affordable housing” that turned out to be disastrously unaffordable), an aging population straining the social safety net. Yes, growing inequality is a problem throughout the Western world. But Obama’s pretense that it is the root cause of this sick economy is ridiculous.
As is his solution, that old perennial: selective abolition of the Bush tax cuts. As if all that ails us, all that keeps the economy from humming and the middle class from advancing, is a 4.6-point hike in marginal tax rates for the rich.
This, in a country $15 trillion in debt with out-of-control entitlements systematically starving every other national need. This obsession with a sock-it-to-the-rich tax hike that, at most, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion is the classic reflex of reactionary liberalism — anything to avoid addressing the underlying structural problems, which would require modernizing the totemic programs of the New Deal and Great Society.
As for those structural problems, Obama has spent three years on signature policies that either ignore or aggravate them:
●A massive stimulus, a gigantic payoff to Democratic interest groups (such as teachers, public-sector unions) that will add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt.
●A sweeping federally run reorganization of health care that (a) cost Congress a year, (b) created an entirely new entitlement in a nation hemorrhaging from unsustainable entitlements, (c) introduced new levels of uncertainty into an already stagnant economy.
●High-handed regulation, best exemplified by Obama’s failed cap-and-trade legislation, promptly followed by the Environmental Protection Agency trying to impose the same conventional-energy-killing agenda by administrative means.
Moreover, on the one issue that already enjoys a bipartisan consensus — the need for fundamental reform of a corrosive, corrupted tax code that misdirects capital and promotes unfairness — Obama did nothing, ignoring the recommendations of several bipartisan commissions, including his own.
In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!
Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.
This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?
He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.
What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
December 9, 2011
When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track” and even Bill Clinton calls the economy “lousy,” how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.
It seems that he and his policies have nothing to do with the current state of things. Sure, presidents are ordinarily held accountable for economic growth, unemployment, national indebtedness (see Obama, above). But not this time. Responsibility, you see, lies with the rich.
Or, as the philosophers of Zuccotti Park call them, the 1 percent. For Obama, these rich are the ones holding back the 99 percent. The “breathtaking greed of a few” is crushing the middle class. If only the rich paid their “fair share,” the middle class would have a chance. Otherwise, government won’t have enough funds to “invest” in education and innovation, the golden path to the sunny uplands of economic growth and opportunity.
Where to begin? A country spending twice as much per capita on education as it did in 1970 with zero effect on test scores is not underinvesting in education. It’s mis-investing. As for federally directed spending on innovation — like Solyndra? Ethanol? The preposterously subsidized, flammable Chevy Volt?
Our current economic distress is attributable to myriad causes: globalization, expensive high-tech medicine, a huge debt burden, a burst housing bubble largely driven by precisely the egalitarian impulse that Obama is promoting (government aggressively pushing “affordable housing” that turned out to be disastrously unaffordable), an aging population straining the social safety net. Yes, growing inequality is a problem throughout the Western world. But Obama’s pretense that it is the root cause of this sick economy is ridiculous.
As is his solution, that old perennial: selective abolition of the Bush tax cuts. As if all that ails us, all that keeps the economy from humming and the middle class from advancing, is a 4.6-point hike in marginal tax rates for the rich.
This, in a country $15 trillion in debt with out-of-control entitlements systematically starving every other national need. This obsession with a sock-it-to-the-rich tax hike that, at most, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion is the classic reflex of reactionary liberalism — anything to avoid addressing the underlying structural problems, which would require modernizing the totemic programs of the New Deal and Great Society.
As for those structural problems, Obama has spent three years on signature policies that either ignore or aggravate them:
●A massive stimulus, a gigantic payoff to Democratic interest groups (such as teachers, public-sector unions) that will add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt.
●A sweeping federally run reorganization of health care that (a) cost Congress a year, (b) created an entirely new entitlement in a nation hemorrhaging from unsustainable entitlements, (c) introduced new levels of uncertainty into an already stagnant economy.
●High-handed regulation, best exemplified by Obama’s failed cap-and-trade legislation, promptly followed by the Environmental Protection Agency trying to impose the same conventional-energy-killing agenda by administrative means.
Moreover, on the one issue that already enjoys a bipartisan consensus — the need for fundamental reform of a corrosive, corrupted tax code that misdirects capital and promotes unfairness — Obama did nothing, ignoring the recommendations of several bipartisan commissions, including his own.
In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!
Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.
This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?
He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.
What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Going 'One On One' With Sports' Greatest Stars
[Click on the article title to hear an interview with John Feinstein about his latest book. - jtf]
http://www.npr.org/
December 1, 2011
Some of the most talented and temperamental athletes and coaches in the world have opened up to John Feinstein.
The acclaimed sportswriter's latest book One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats of the Game details his conversations over the years with notoriously difficult coaches like Bobby Knight and star athletes like Tiger Woods and John McEnroe.
On today's Fresh Air, Feinstein talks about some of his favorite encounters with athletes throughout his career. He also explains how the business of sports journalism has changed over the 30 years he's spent covering the pros. Now, he says, teams are banning reporters from locker rooms and shuttling them to interview rooms — where athletes aren't likely to be as candid.
"If you think the answers in a locker room are rehearsed and canned and cliched ... it's 50 times worse in an interview room," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "At least in a locker room, if you have the time or the patience and outwait the hoards and get can get with a guy one-on-one, you might be able to get a better answer."
Feinstein says he does some of his best reporting without his notebook, when he's simply talking to athletes one-on-one.
"[I do better] when I ask about their family or about last night's ball game and then eventually work my way towards last night's ball game or a real question, rather than just walking up with a notebook or a tape recorder in my hands," he says. "You establish common ground and become a person and not just a reporter."
In 1985, Feinstein was given an all-access pass to the Indiana Hoosiers and their legendary coach Bob Knight. Feinstein's resulting book, A Season on the Brink, chronicled a rebuilding year for the Hoosiers and explained the methods behind Knight's madness.
"There were moments when I saw a side of him — because I was allowed to be up close — that you couldn't possibly see without having total access," says Feinstein.
In one instance, Knight berated his basketball team after two straight losses, telling them that they couldn't be good basketball players if they were selfish people, says Feinstein. But Knight wasn't simply talking about basketball. He looked at his players and asked if they had written thank-you notes to a family who had hosted them for Thanksgiving. No one had.
"Knight then repeated, 'You are selfish people and as long as you are selfish people you can't be good basketball players,'" says Feinstein. "That told me that he knew his team. He knew his players. It was one of the great teaching meetings that I've seen and it wasn't even about basketball. ... I remember one of the assistants looking at me and saying, 'Now that was coaching.' And that's a moment you can't see, you can't report, unless you have the type of access that I have."
Feinstein is a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition and a regular on ESPNs The Sports Reporters. He is also the author of Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember and A Good Walk Spoiled: Days & Nights on the PGA Tour.
He blogs at: http://www.feinsteinonthebrink.com/
http://www.npr.org/
December 1, 2011
The acclaimed sportswriter's latest book One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats of the Game details his conversations over the years with notoriously difficult coaches like Bobby Knight and star athletes like Tiger Woods and John McEnroe.
On today's Fresh Air, Feinstein talks about some of his favorite encounters with athletes throughout his career. He also explains how the business of sports journalism has changed over the 30 years he's spent covering the pros. Now, he says, teams are banning reporters from locker rooms and shuttling them to interview rooms — where athletes aren't likely to be as candid.
"If you think the answers in a locker room are rehearsed and canned and cliched ... it's 50 times worse in an interview room," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "At least in a locker room, if you have the time or the patience and outwait the hoards and get can get with a guy one-on-one, you might be able to get a better answer."
Feinstein says he does some of his best reporting without his notebook, when he's simply talking to athletes one-on-one.
"[I do better] when I ask about their family or about last night's ball game and then eventually work my way towards last night's ball game or a real question, rather than just walking up with a notebook or a tape recorder in my hands," he says. "You establish common ground and become a person and not just a reporter."
In 1985, Feinstein was given an all-access pass to the Indiana Hoosiers and their legendary coach Bob Knight. Feinstein's resulting book, A Season on the Brink, chronicled a rebuilding year for the Hoosiers and explained the methods behind Knight's madness.
"There were moments when I saw a side of him — because I was allowed to be up close — that you couldn't possibly see without having total access," says Feinstein.
In one instance, Knight berated his basketball team after two straight losses, telling them that they couldn't be good basketball players if they were selfish people, says Feinstein. But Knight wasn't simply talking about basketball. He looked at his players and asked if they had written thank-you notes to a family who had hosted them for Thanksgiving. No one had.
"Knight then repeated, 'You are selfish people and as long as you are selfish people you can't be good basketball players,'" says Feinstein. "That told me that he knew his team. He knew his players. It was one of the great teaching meetings that I've seen and it wasn't even about basketball. ... I remember one of the assistants looking at me and saying, 'Now that was coaching.' And that's a moment you can't see, you can't report, unless you have the type of access that I have."
Feinstein is a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition and a regular on ESPNs The Sports Reporters. He is also the author of Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember and A Good Walk Spoiled: Days & Nights on the PGA Tour.
He blogs at: http://www.feinsteinonthebrink.com/
Save the blame game — it's just business
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/
December 9, 2011
Albert Pujols is an Angel now, and it doesn't make him the devil. Sorry, but I don't have it in me to rage and rant against Pujols, the Angels or the Cardinals.
I'm sure others are working up a good sweat while delivering angry sermons that vilify Pujols for being disloyal, ridicule the Cardinals for being cheap or savage the Angels for overpaying an aging star.
Have at it. Pick your preferred villain and foam at the mouth. I can't join you. I've been temporarily overtaken by common sense.
I'm genuinely saddened by Pujols' departure because I wanted to believe that he'd be different, that he would stay, that he would fully appreciate what he had here. Cardinals fans and Pujols simply adored each other for the last 11 years.
I sincerely wanted to trust Pujols when he offered this testimony during a 2009 interview: "Do I want to be in St. Louis forever? Of course. People from other teams want to play in St. Louis, and they're jealous that we're in St. Louis because the fans are unbelievable. So why would you want to leave a place like St. Louis to go somewhere else and make $3 million or $4 more million a year? It's not about the money. I already got my money. It's about winning, and that's it."
In the end, Pujols went for the money.
Pujols got upset at the Cardinals for slow-playing the negotiations, for declining to give him Alex Rodriguez money, for refusing to make early offers that his agent could use as leverage in trying to lure other teams into the poker game.
We should have seen it coming, and not because Pujols is a bad guy. It's just the reality of the business. With most athletes, it's always about the money. And that's fine. We should have stopped taking this stuff personally a long time ago.
This was Pujols' opportunity of a lifetime, his one true golden shot at free agency. Pujols and his agent, Dan Lozano, didn't realize their ultimate goal of surpassing the A-Rod haul of 10 years and $275 million from the Yankees. But give them credit for coming close. The Angels made Pujols an offer he couldn't refuse.
Financially, Pujols is a winner. I think he's lost something special, the chance to retire as the second-greatest Cardinal of all time, just behind Stan Musial and slightly ahead of Bob Gibson. That's all gone now. And maybe that's the way it should be. Now that Pujols has gone to Cali, Musial will permanently own all of the important franchise records. Pujols can't touch them now.
Pujols willingly gave up his spot as one of history's inner circle Cardinals and will be viewed as just another athlete.
Angels fans will go crazy for Pujols, but he'll never be loved the way he was loved in St. Louis. When he gets old and breaks down, he'll never receive the level of empathy that would have come his way in St. Louis.
One day Pujols will realize this. (Not that it matters.) If the Angels wanted to give Pujols $254 million over 10 years, I can't blame Pujols for jumping. This is the second-richest player contract in MLB history, and he's earned that status as long as a team was willing to grant it.
Pujols can never be Musial, but he isn't LeBron James, either. Pujols gave this city, the franchise and the fans the best 11 years of his career. We were able to see Pujols in his peak form over 11 summers. He played a leading role in winning 40 postseason games, three NL pennants and two World Series. With Pujols as a Cardinal from 2001 through 2011, only the Yankees and Red Sox won more games than St. Louis.
It was an impressive, historical run. The Angels and their fans will witness the classic Pujols for a while, maybe get three to five years of the elite-level Pujols. But LA will also see the diminishing-returns phase of Pujols' career, and the Angels will pay the tab.
That's why I can't condemn the Cardinals for holding the line after going as far as they could. They stretched their budget beyond the set limits to offer Pujols a guaranteed 10-year contract worth $210 million.
I'll say it again: This franchise doesn't have to be ashamed of that offer. It wasn't the best, but it was generous. The Cardinals' offer was also insane.
Pujols will be 32 next month. His numbers are slipping. He has a partially torn ligament in his right (throwing) elbow. He limps on wheels that feel the strain of carrying an increasingly thicker body.
The decline phase is already under way. Unlike the Cardinals, the Angels have the luxury of easing Pujols into his downside years by using him as a designated hitter. But can he sustain his level of offensive production? For a while, yes. But it won't last.
Brian Kenny hosts "Clubhouse Confidential," an analysis-based show on the MLB Network. The program recently did a segment on Pujols' likely value over a long-term contract. And this was the conclusion, which is generally echoed by other sabermetric-minded evaluators:
"Albert Pujols is an all-time great, and we have him just below Lou Gehrig as the greatest first baseman of all time," Kenny said. "That's high praise. But if you study why big-money deals go bad, he fits the criteria of a deal that will be disappointing. A big slugger on the other side of 30 getting a long-term deal and his underlying components of production are trending down. You can say he'll be the exception, and maybe he will. But the evidence says something different."
The Angels are in better position to absorb the cost of paying Pujols for the inevitable downturn. The Angels already generate more cash than the Cardinals, have a higher payroll than St. Louis and are negotiating a new local TV contract that will lead to a huge spike in revenue.
The Angels are also poised to tap into a potentially lucrative demographic: the large Hispanic population in Southern California. At this stage, Pujols is a better investment for the Angels than he'd be for the Cardinals.
It made little sense for Cardinals Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. to offer a 10-year contract to Pujols, but he did it anyway. If Pujols' true goal was to be a lifetime Cardinal, the franchise gave him that chance. He declined.
The Cardinals will be a lesser team for a while as they transition to life without Pujols. But they'll ultimately benefit from avoiding the repercussions created by the enormous bulk of Pujols' contract.
The Cardinals and their fans were privileged to get the best of Pujols. It truly was an honor. And now the Cardinals and their fans don't have to worry about paying for the worst of Pujols.
If that seems cynical, you shouldn't be shocked. As we learned again on Thursday morning, this is modern baseball. And it can be an awfully cold business.
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