In light of some recent (although hardly surprising) reporting by the NY Times, my father had these particularly insightful comments to make, ending with a pair of questions that I challenge any honest person to answer:

According to the “paper of record”, Israel’s killing of terrorists responsible for killing Israeli civilians (including children) ignited cross-border clashes between Israel and Hamas after months of relative silence.

Of course, according to NYT’s warped values, the killing of Israeli civilians isn’t enough to “ignite cross-border clashes”.  It takes something really disgusting, such as killing the terrorists that killed the civilians to ignite cross-border clashes.  After all, what right does a “vermin country” like Israel have to kill people who kill their civilians?  Only every other country in the world has that right.  But, of course, not Israel.

And, of course, according to the NYT, the scores of bomb that were sent into Israel prior to this current flare-up, is called “relative silence”.  If scores of bombs were sent into any other country, that would be cause for declaring war.  But for Israel, it’s “relative silence”.

In my opinion, this reporting is so biased, it borders on anti-Semitism.

By the way, there was an article recently in the Jewish Week written by a former NYT reporter who was assigned to cover the 1991 Crown Heights riots.  The riots were the result of a Hasidic Jew accidentally killing a Black child with his car.  The reporter, who was in the field, sent reports to the NYT home office describing the riots as a pogrom against the Jews and the writer at the home office deliberately altered the report in the final article to make it seem like the pogrom was really merely a clash between Blacks and Jews.

The NYT couldn’t accept the fact that Blacks were attacking Jews (and even killed Yankel Rosenbaum) and that Jews weren’t fighting back.  The NYT, with its warped values, believed it would be racist to report that Blacks were attacking Jews.  So it just changed the facts to make it seem like Blacks and Jews were clashing.

Those of you who read this garbage newspaper should ask yourselves whether the twisting of the facts occurs only in relation to Jews or does they twist their facts in all of their reporting.  If the answer is that they do this in all of their reporting, why do you read a paper that can’t be trusted to report the facts?  If they only do it in regard to issues dealing with Jews, why do you read an anti-Semitic paper?

With all this talk lately of Warren Buffet calling for “millionaires” to pay higher taxes (somehow that term includes not only the 237,000 people who actually DO make over a million dollars, but also another 3.92 million people who make more than $200K, calling the actual sneakily-used term severely into question), we should all take a step back and look at exactly what Buffet is talking about, is he telling the truth, is his proposal lucrative, and, finally, why the hell doesn’t that big mouth just cut a check to the IRS himself if he’s so damn rich and solve some of our problems???

Well, thankfully an editorial in the WSJ saves us all the legwork involved in that and has served up those answers on a nice little platter:

Barney Kilgore, the man who made the Wall Street Journal into a national publication, was once asked why so many rich people favored higher taxes. That’s easy, he replied. They already have their money.

That insight is worth recalling amid the latest political duet from President Obama and Warren Buffett demanding higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” Mr. Buffett is repeating his now familiar argument this week, coinciding with Mr. Obama’s Midwestern road trip on the economy. Since the media are treating Mr. Buffett as a tax oracle, let’s take a closer look at some of the billionaire’s intellectual tax dodges.

• The double tax oversight. The Berkshire Hathaway magnate makes much of the fact that he paid only 17.4% of his income in taxes, which he considers unfair when salaried workers often pay more. But Mr. Buffett makes most of his income from his investments, in particular from dividends and capital gains that are taxed at a rate of 15%.

What he doesn’t say is that much of his income was already taxed once as corporate income, which is assessed at a 35% rate (less deductions). The 15% levy on capital gains and dividends to individuals is thus a double tax that takes the overall tax rate on that corporate income closer to 45%.

This onerous tax on capital is a U.S. competitive disadvantage in the global economy, which is why Congress agreed in 2003 to cut the rates on dividends and capital gains. Even as the rest of the world is cutting tax rates on corporate income, Mr. Buffett wants to raise U.S. rates in a way that would make America less attractive for investment. Under a sensible tax reform, the feds would impose either a corporate tax or a dividend and capital gains tax, but not both.

• The middle-class bait-and-switch. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Buffett speaks about raising taxes only on the rich. But somehow he ignores that the President’s tax increase starts at $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Mr. Obama ought to call them “thousandaires,” but that probably doesn’t poll as well.

The President needs to levy his tax increase at such a lower income level because that’s where the money is. In 2009, 237,000 taxpayers reported income above $1 million and they paid $178 billion in taxes. A mere 8,274 filers reported income above $10 million, and they paid only $54 billion in taxes.

But 3.92 million reported income above $200,000 in 2009, and they paid $434 billion in taxes. To put it another way, roughly 90% of the tax filers who would pay more under Mr. Obama’s plan aren’t millionaires, and 99.99% aren’t billionaires.

Mr. Buffett says it’s only “fair” to raise his taxes, but he’s lending his credibility to raising taxes on millions of middle-class earners for whom a few extra thousand dollars in after-tax income is a big deal. Unlike Mr. Buffett, those middle-class earners aren’t rich and may earn $250,000 for only a few years of their working lives. How is that fair?

• The charity loophole. For billionaires like Mr. Buffett, the single most important deduction in the tax code is for charitable giving. Middle-class earners can’t give nearly as much money away to reduce their overall tax burden. Yet we don’t hear Mr. Buffett calling for the elimination of that deduction in the name of fairness.

Mr. Buffett has also already sheltered the bulk of his fortune from federal taxes by putting them into a foundation that will give the money away. That’s an act of generosity, but if the government’s purposes are so vital, why doesn’t he simply give the money to the IRS?

Rebecca Quick of CNBC put that question to Mr. Buffett in 2007. His answer: “Well, that’s a choice and it’s an option . . . If I had to give it to a single individual, or make some young Buffett a multibillionaire, or give it to the government, I’d absolutely give it to the government. I think that on balance the Gates Foundation, my daughter’s foundation, my two sons’ foundations will do a better job with lower administrative costs and better selection of beneficiaries than the government.”

Mr. Buffett is no doubt right about the relative efficiency of private donors, but should billionaire philanthropists get such a large tax preference? Another case of fairness?

Mr. Buffett is one of the great stock-pickers of his time, and we don’t begrudge him a single dollar of his wealth. We only wish that, having already made himself rich, he weren’t so intent on making it harder for others to become rich too. If he’s worried about being undertaxed, we’d suggest he simply write a big check to Uncle Sam and go back to his day job of picking investments.

Here’s a great clip of “some common sense” from your average taxpayer:

In the midst of all this speculation regarding Anthony Weiner’s potential resignation decision and his wife’s role in it, the WSJ’s James Taranto is the only commentator who actually makes sense by pointing out the absurdity of expecting his wife to “talk him into resigning”.

He writes:

House Democrats are anxious to be rid of Anthony Weiner the Tumid Tweeter, National Journal reported yesterday:

They conceded that their best strategy for getting to that point is hoping that Weiner’s wife will persuade him to go.

“We’re hearing he might resign in a couple of days,” said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y. “He’s waiting for his wife to come home. That’s what we’re hearing from his friends.” . . .

A senior Democratic aide said there was much anticipation expressed by members–if not desperation–that Weiner might be talked into resigning by his wife, Huma Abedin, later this week.

Right, just like Mrs. Weiner’s boss, Hillary Clinton, persuaded her husband to quit politics amid a sex scandal.

Why in the world would the Dems expect Mrs. Weiner to press her husband to resign, thereby cutting the household income in half? Even if the marriage fell apart, the prospect of collecting alimony and child support would leave her with a continuing interest in his gainful employment.

Is Mrs. Clinton threatening Mrs. Weiner’s employment or advancement in order to pressure Mr. Weiner to resign? That’s the only way in which this plan would make sense. Though as the Democratic aide suggested, it could just be a desperate hope. And hope is not a plan.

 

James Taranto posted this great piece in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Administration officials and sympathizers have continued to fire back against the argument that the Osama bin Laden raid vindicates the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. As we noted Friday, the counterarguments have been notably weak, and that continues to be the case.

Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace asked him: “Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits–why is that over the line?”

Donlon tried to evade the question by giving a long justification for the shooting of bin Laden, but Wallace pressed the matter:

Wallace: Mr. Donilon, let me just make my point. I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs. What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? Why can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?

Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.

Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Donilon: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action–for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.

Wallace: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

Donilon: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Wallace: You said it was against our values.

Donilon: I think that the techniques are something that there’s been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that.

Writing in The Daily, the usually sensible Judith Miller offers this bit of sophistry:

Effectiveness should not be the sole standard in determining how America treats terrorist suspects [sic] in detention.

Terrorism, after all, was an effective tool for bin Laden, at least for a while. That made it neither moral nor politically justifiable.

This analogy is completely empty. Not only are bin Laden’s means (murdering civilians en masse) not comparable to America’s (frightening mass murderers in ways that pose no actual threat of physical harm), but the ends are not comparable either. The objective of an al Qaeda attack is not to save civilians.

The atrociously poor quality of the arguments against enhanced interrogation are all the more reason to think the bin Laden raid vindicates it.

 

Marilyn Penn, blogging at Political Mavens, had this great piece last week:

When it comes to provocateurs who are anti-American, the bastions of liberalism march in lockstep to defend whatever freedom is at stake.  Refusing to say the pledge of allegiance?  Freedom of speech.  Nazi march through a community of survivors?  Same and warum nicht? Building a mosque at Ground Zero?  Freedom of religion.  Defacing Christian or Jewish symbols in artwork?  Art trumps religion so long as it’s not Danish cartoons or a South Park show lampooning Mohammed.  Publishing the Pentagon Papers or Wiki-Leaks?  Freedom of the press.  Strangely, when the provocation comes from the right in the person of Terry Jones, now labeled the Koran-burning pastor, the civil liberties guardians are silent.  Where is Michael Bloomberg to declaim that if we don’t continue in our tradition of free expression, the terrorists will have won?  Where are the cadre of celebrities usually trotted out to protest censorship of any kind?  We know how many times Americans have burned flags and draft cards and used patriotic symbols as objects of degradation – all part of our unrivalled liberty.  What, besides kowardice, makes the Koran eligible for exception from the rule?

The New York Times, publisher of both the Pentagon Papers and Assange’s Wiki-Leaks, refused to print even one of the Danish cartoons though it’s a newspaper that goes out of its way to illustrate its articles in dramatic and confrontational ways.  The Sunday Times of April 3rd features an oversized photo of Palestinians attending the funeral of three Hamas terrorists;  the size of the image would be appropriate for the funeral of an assassinated head of state.  There is no commensurate photo for the 19 non-Muslim people killed and the 81 injured in Afghanistan in the brutal murders of UN workers ordered as retaliation for the Koran burning.  The headline calls these murders deadly protests as if they were the unintended consequence of an unruly mob rather than the deliberate acts of violence which also extended to torching a girl’s high school in a part of the world that insists on keeping its women veiled and uneducated.

One need not sympathize with Terry Jones who certainly intended that his act create a firestorm far beyond the limited book-burning.  Whether from the left or the right, people who burn books are not examples of America’s most rational voices of objection – we can do better than that and should.  We should however, also be mindful of the hypocrisy in our civil libertarians when they ignore the bill of rights they summon to justify the same behavior  from their own political spectrum.  Let’s not pretend that jihadi murder requires incitement to be turned against us.  The press in particular should recall that Daniel Pearl was decapitated on camera to the jubilation of the Muslim world for no reason other than his being an American Jewish journalist.  For radical Islam, provocation requires nothing more than our existence.

 

I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army…

Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting:  yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, picked up on it… but, yet, somehow still found a most bizarre way to “link” one of the perpetrators to none other than Sarah Palin, the liberals’ favorite scapegoat for everything.

The caption for one of their photos of Cpl. Jeremy Morlock reads, “Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track.”

What makes this entirely shameful and inexcusable is the sheer transparency of the stunt; any intelligent person reading this can clearly see that this insane soldier has absolutely nothing to do with Palin other than his geographic proximity to her, and ends up wondering what in the world the editors at Rolling Stone could be thinking? Are they deliberately trying to smear the reputation of their own publication?

This is so bizarre for so many reasons. First of all, is Rolling Stone implying that Sarah Palin has anything to do with this sadist simply because they come from the same town?  Is Rolling Stone therefore implying that Wasilla is a town of sadistic, crazy people?

Next is the fact that Wasilla is a very small town with a population of about 7,000 people.  So, the fact that they grew up “not far” from each other pretty much goes without saying in a town that small. So, too, is the high probability that they might have relatives who are friends with each other, or who might have played hockey against each other. I’m surprised that Rolling Stone had nothing to say about the church they might have attended growing up…

So, ultimately, not only is there no link to Obama in the same way the media was so quick to pin Abu Ghraib on Bush… but, they actually go so blatantly and outrageously far out of their way to somehow find some cockamamie way to connect someone involved to anyone on the right!

That this “news” is already popular on some foaming-at-the-mouth, lunatic left blogs is not too surprising. But, for Rolling Stone to join their rabid ranks is just a disgrace.

A disgrace not just for Rolling Stone, but—if left unaddressed and un-reproached—for journalism itself.

Here’s a little comic relief: President Obama ended up getting locked out of the White House when he returned unexpectedly from a trip.

(Now if only we could make it a permanent thing…)

The video on Youtube generated some great comments:

the ghost of lincoln was tired of obama’s crap.

Classic! Come 2013, the American people will change the locks so he will never get back in.

Lock him out for good!

It’s always a nice surprise to find out that a Senator with twelve years under his belt in the Senate (and in Congress since 1981!) actually doesn’t even know what the three branches of government are in this country.

Is he smarter than a fifth grader? Apparently not. But, then, most of us already knew that.

(Note: for those of you who, like me, have problems sitting through a full minute of Schumer’s blathering, you can skip to the 1:08 mark for the main sound bite.)

James Taranto of the WSJ’s Best of the Web Today is reporting on three new partisan commentators taking up the cause for the release of Obama’s archival birth certificate.

He writes:

Three partisan commentators are calling on the state of Hawaii to release President Obama’s archival birth certificate, Mediaite reports. What makes this worthy of note is that all three are liberal Democrats: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page and Mother Jones’s David Corn.

On “Hardball” yesterday, host Matthews noted the report that new governor Neil Abercrombie was looking to “end this nonsense” (we also noted it). Matthews asked his two guests: “I don’t understand why the governor doesn’t just say, ‘Snap it up, who’s ever over there in the department of records, send me a copy right now’? And why doesn’t the president just say, ‘Send me a copy right now?’ Why doesn’t [press secretary Robert] Gibbs and [White Obama aide David] Axelrod say, ‘Let’s just get this crappy story dead’?”

They resisted at first, but eventually Matthews brought them around:

Matthews: I’m just asking the obvious question. Why not–will there be any harm done by releasing the original document?

Page: No.

Corn: I will take the brave position of saying that if they can find it, they should put it out there, and then we can make even more fun of the birthers.

Page: I’ll take the brave position of saying, yes, put it out there, and the birthers are still not going to believe it. They’re going to say, “Well, that governor is part of the conspiracy, too, because he’s a Democrat.”

So we now have three or four liberal Democrats–the “Hardball” trio and possibly the Aloha governor–taking what had been a birtherian position in favor of releasing the archival certificate.

Our view has long been that the birthers are playing a sucker’s game–that they are aiding Obama by making it easier for his supporters to depict his critics as wackos and divert attention from real questions about his political character. This change in liberal attitudes may be a sign that the game is no longer working to Obama’s advantage. It could be that his baneful policies have led more Americans to harbor doubts about his very legitimacy.

Granted, many people are skeptical of the skeptics—and sometimes even embarrassed by their incessant demand for the birth certificate. But, even a broken clock like Chris Matthews is right twice a day, and let’s face it: all this stubbornness by Obama, his administration, and the Hawaiian authorities starts to look… well, a little guilty… after a while. After all, when it’s that easy to end the debate and leave the birthers with egg on their faces, why wouldn’t they do it?? Unless they… can’t?

The Director of Hawaii’s Department of Health at the time this all started, Chiyome Fukino, issued a statement saying she had “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii state Department of Health has Senator Obama’s original birth certificate on record.” Okay, if it’s that accessible that she has seen it with her naked eyes, then how much harder is it to take it and bring it to the same press conference at which she issued that statement?

Not that I’m ready to start beating the drum myself on a full-time basis, but like many Americans at this point, I can’t help but wonder why all the suspicious diversions and “he saw, she saw” when there’s an easy way to end the speculation?

Come on, Obama, prove us all wrong and make us all look foolish. Show us your birth certificate!

If Helen Thomas has any family members who care at all about her, now is the time for them to step in and get her away from any public appearances. It seems that she can’t stop running her mouth about the evil Jews who secretly run the world.

It seems that the Elders of Zion is something very real to this insane woman. So real, that she has so far allowed her hatred to bring her career to a screeching halt, destroy her reputation, and now erase her name from awards named for her previous accomplishments in journalism.

One such award, the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in the Media Award, awarded by Wayne State University, is now kaput in light of her latest acrid verbal explosion. At a diversity conference in Dearborn, Michigan, Thomas couldn’t resist spouting that “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question.”

Wayne State University released a statement shortly thereafter, stating that “Wayne State encourages free speech and open dialogue, and respects diverse viewpoints… However, the university strongly condemns the anti-Semitic remarks made by Helen Thomas during a conference yesterday.”

See the full story here, and read more about her previous bouts of verbal diarrhea here and here.

That’s exactly what I think of Henry Kissinger: traitorous scum. This is a person who would sell his people down the river apparently just to kiss Nixon’s ass. He would have been the perfect sonderkommando in Hitler’s concentration camps.

Arutz 7 reports on newly released tapes from the Nixon library:

White House adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once told President Richard Nixon, “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern,” according to newly-released tapes from the Nixon library…

Kissinger also advised Nixon when he was president during the campaign to free the Jews from the Soviet Union, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy…

Nixon and Kissinger were seen as heroes in 1973 for staging a military airlift to help Israel fight Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, which inflicted heavy casualties on the IDF. However, the airlift did not begin until the second week of the war, while the Soviet Union was resupplying Egypt and Syria with weapons throughout. More cynical observers said that the United States could not let the Soviet Union’s allies win the war.

The New York Times reported three years afterwards that Kissinger delayed the airlift because he wanted to see Israel “bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning.”

As a side note: at least Nixon wasn’t particular about who he hated:

Nixon’s disgust with minorities was not restricted to Jews. He labeled Irishmen as drinkers and Italians as “wonderful” people but who “don’t have their heads screwed on tight.”

As if Obama’s response to this year’s election blowout wasn’t enough proof that he’s completely out of touch with reality, the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol serves up the icing on the cake, with Obama at a press conference following his global spanking in South Korea:

At his November 12 press conference in Seoul, President Obama was asked the following question by CBS’s Chip Reid: “What was the number-one complaint, concern, or piece of advice that you got from foreign leaders about the U.S. economy and your stewardship of the economy?”

Whereupon the president began his response with a complaint: “What about compliments?” he asked. “You didn’t put that in the list.”

Well, soorrrrrry, Mr. President.

Poor President Obama. He’s (allegedly) getting all these compliments from his fellow world leaders—and the press just isn’t interested in having him tell us about them. True, President Obama became accustomed, as a candidate, to having a compliant press corps. But even so. After a contentious economic summit where the president was forced to defend the Fed’s ill-advised monetary policies, a summit that followed on the heels of the biggest midterm electoral defeat ever suffered by an elected first-term president, a defeat partly due to his ill-advised fiscal policies, did Obama really expect a reporter to stand up at the end of last week and ask, “Mr. President, what compliments did you receive from foreign leaders?”

That is, apparently, exactly what the president expected.

And that has us worried. We’ve assumed the president would learn from the voters’ repudiation of his party on November 2. We’ve assumed he would learn from reality’s refutation of his policies over the last two years. But the vanity that Jonathan V. Last elaborates on elsewhere in this issue seems to be standing in the way of such learning. President Obama has been mugged both by the voters and by reality—but he thinks that he’s still looking good, that he deserves plaudits, and that the only problem is people don’t know about all the compliments he’s been getting.

It may be true, as Mark Twain observed, that “an occasional compliment is necessary to keep up one’s self-respect.” So let’s hope the compliments the president claims he was getting from his fellow leaders have done the job of bolstering his self-respect. Perhaps now he can get on with doing what’s right for the country.

It’s not that hard. The president can compromise with Republicans in Congress to extend current tax rates for the next few years, which would give the economy a boost. He can—with the support of most economists—urge the Fed to stop the quantitative easing before we really destroy the role of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. He can engage in a healthy competition with the Republican House in cutting unnecessary domestic discretionary spending. He can stand up to the false and dangerous allure of cutting defense when our military is stretched thin, and when our defense R&D and procurement are underfunded. As commander in chief, he can—with Republican support—lead us to success in Afghanistan.

All the president has to do is abandon some foolish ideological presuppositions, get down to work, and stop fishing for compliments. If he did so, he’d end up getting genuine compliments—from us and, we dare say, from the American people. And then his self-respect would have a firmer ground than vanity.

Listen to the mainstream media long enough and you’ll take it for granted that the right-wing fringe is replete with dangerous lunatics and psychos—the counterpart of which you’ll almost never hear about on the left.  The Weekly Standard’s Scrapbook cleared up that serious misconception, pointing out how it’s the complete opposite that is closer to reality:

The sweeping Republican victories in the midterm elections have yielded the customary progressive analysis: Americans are not just fearful and irrational, they are angry and downright dangerous as well. And as everybody knows, when non-progressives get mad—when they suffer a mass temper tantrum, or vote their hatreds, or lash out against some unidentified “other”—the long dark night of national shame ensues. Already, responsible observers, recognized experts, and prominent newspaper columnists are publicly worried about being targeted by right-wing crazies, whipped into an ideological frenzy by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Fox News, Rep. Michele Bachmann, or the Wall Street Journal(take your pick).

The trouble with this scenario is that it is not only patently untrue, but it has never been true. Yes, The Scrapbook is aware that the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, harbored grievances against the federal government; and to some progressive minds, the pro-life movement is indistinguishable from the handful of terrorists who have attacked abortion clinics or shot physicians. But the sad truth is that most political violence in the United States—from the campus bombings, burnings, and killings of the 1960s and ’70s to the European-style rioting at IMF/World Bank meetings—has its origins on the left. Lest we forget, the man who shot John F. Kennedy was a committed Marxist and an -officer of his local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The man who shot Robert Kennedy was a Palestinian exile who targeted Kennedy because of his support for Israel.

This basic fact of modern political life is nowhere more evident at the moment than in Europe. Two countries are enduring political violence at the moment—France and Great Britain—and it is not being perpetrated by conservatives, free-marketers, or supporters of the war on terror. In France, students and labor unions have sought to shut down the country and paralyze Paris because the center-right Sarkozy government has proposed to raise the French retirement age from 60 to 62. And London was the scene last week of a mob attack on an office block that contains the headquarters of the Conservative party. The grievance? A government proposal to lower teaching budgets as part of its austerity program, and to raise tuition fees for university students to about $14,000 per year.

The student march in London was largely peaceful and, we are told, not intended to be violent. But a radical element within the company of marchers was determined to be violent—and were they ever: The glass front of the Millbank Tower was shattered, hundreds of rioters swarmed into the building, vandalized the interior, and held sway on the roof, dropping heavy projectiles onto a knot of outnumbered policemen. The rioters, in the aftermath, were pleased with what they had accomplished: Government policies justify violence, several explained, and one Cambridge undergraduate commented that since nobody had been killed, and only property was stolen or destroyed, no real harm was done.

Let us hope that this will concentrate minds on the left in Britain—and perhaps in France—and cause them to worry less about their democratically elected governments’ attempts to put their fiscal house in order and more about what’s brewing within their own ranks. And the same goes for their progressive brethren in America.

I find it shocking how there can be complaint after complaint of the TSA—with several new stories surfacing daily—and, yet, still nothing is being done about this outrage. The media is reporting on this daily, the news sites and blogs are blazing with these stories, and the government and civil liberties organizations are receiving complaints around the clock.

So, how is it that still nothing is being done? Why is there no “state of emergency” being declared?

TSA officials still insist in the face of hundreds of accusations that they’re doing nothing wrong. Janet Napolitano is quickly becoming the wicked witch of the west (does she get groped by her TSA officials before mounting her broomstick?). Congress is buzzing about this, but still hasn’t done anything. The same goes for the suddenly-impotent ACLU.

Finally, Obama—who is clearly a disaster when it comes to our economic situation, our foreign policy situation, our health care situation, and virtually ever other aspect of American life—also has nothing to say about this. Come on, this item should be a slam-dunk on anyone’s agenda! Here’s his golden opportunity to finally do something that will endear him (even if only temporarily and reluctantly) to the people! Of course, though, he’s too dense to recognize the opportunity.

And, so, the stories continue to pile up and American liberties continue to swirl down the toilet bowl of Obama’s new era of big government.

I can’t help but think with so many people taking a pass on standing up for something that is pissing off so many Americans, this is one more cause that the Tea Party can and should take on in its effort to continue growing stronger and even more relevant in the political environment.

And, for the morbidly curious, here is this morning’s roundup of new horror stories:

• KMOV-4, St. Louis, reports on a woman who had a TSA agent’s hands literally in her panties, as well as strongly groping her breasts and her genitals.
• WZZM-13, and ABC affiliate, reports on a woman who had a TSA agent’s hand go up inside her skirt between her legs with such force that she was lifted off of her heels and was still in pain for an hour after the incident.
• WBTV-3, a CBS affiliate, reports on a cancer surviving flight attendant who was traumatized when she was forced to take off her breast prosthesis for a demanding TSA agent, despite already having gone through the full body scanner and an “enhanced” pat-down.