Both Hitler’s infamous Gestapo and Mussolini’s OVRA (Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism) were secret-police organizations that had as their aim the control and prevention of political dissent.
Though Heinrich Himmler modeled his Gestapo force after OVRA, it became much more violent than its Italian counterpart. A German law, passed in 1936, exempted the Gestapo from judicial oversight, which in turn exempted its henchmen from answering to administrative courts. Read Full Article
If you watch Glenn Beck regularly, you probably find yourself shaking your head in amazement and wondering why a vast majority of Americans aren’t demanding that the president, most of his cabinet, all of his czars, and a significant percentage of House and Senate members be criminally investigated.
Beck is overly generous when he insists that he’s not a journalist, that most of what he says is simply his opinion. There’s no question that he offers strong (and courageous) opinions, but I would argue that most of what he says is fact. I know, because I check out a lot of the information he serves up, and, almost without fail, his words are backed up by legitimate sources. Read Full Article
After all these years, I’m throwing in the towel and complimenting Greta. When it comes to actions that I believe to be unconscionable, I’m not one who easily forgets. I didn’t mind Greta being a philosophical liberal — that’s her right. But her nightly defenses of the 21st century’s most infamous murderer, O.J., were hard to swallow.
Now that I’ve finally put aside the O.J. stuff (well, almost), I’m able to view Greta more objectively. When she finally broke free from CNN and made the transition to Fox News back in 2002, it took her a few years, but she began moving ever so slowly toward the middle. And the last year or so — I suspect as a result of her buddy-buddy relationship with Sean Hannity — Greta may have actually started leaning a tad … just a tad … to the right. Read Full Article
As I expected would be the case, my interview with David Horowitz yesterday was fascinating. As many of you undoubtedly know, Horowitz, like Thomas Sowell, is one of the lucky ones who had the intellect to figure out the sham of communism and evolve into a committed conservative.
Horowitz is not your everyday case of a naive youth gone astray under the tutelage of Marxist professors. Hard as it is to believe, he got his communist training at home — from his own parents! He was one of those rare “red-diaper babies” with a mother and father totally committed to the worldwide communist cause. Read Full Article
As I watch the White House and its henchmen — the Pelosi-Reid-Frank-Schumer crowd, ACORN, SEIU, youth pawns, and miscellaneous thugs and goons (loons?) — engage in childish name calling in an effort to discredit anyone who disagrees with Obama’s vision of two Americas (political-elite class and taxpaying serfs), it brings back memories of being in grade school.
I’ve written extensively about teacher and student bullying (The Cho Factor, Parts I-XXXIV), so what the Obamaviks are now doing rings a familiar bell with me. Almost without fail, the schoolyard bully, when confronted, accuses his victim of doing precisely what he himself is guilty of. And, sadly, all too often it works. Read Full Article
Amidst all the insanity and meaningless chatter that overwhelms us each day, every so often the Conscious Universal Power Source cuts us a break and hooks us up to nature’s Sanity-Support System. We have little control over when the blessed intervention will take place, how often it will occur, or what its components may be.
In my book Action! Nothing Happens Until Something Moves, I describe one such experience I had on a beautiful sunny day in November, when I was still in my mid-twenties. I was driving on the Grand Central Parkway on my way to JFK International Airport, and my mind was exploding with a thousand and one thoughts about all aspects of my life. Read Full Article
In Erich Fromm’s 1956 classic The Art of Loving, he provides some unique insights into the subject of faith that have given me a lot to think about. Fromm did not believe faith is in opposition to reason or rational thinking. On the contrary, he simply made a distinction between rational faith and irrational faith.
He believed that irrational faith is based on submission to irrational authority, while rational faith is based on one’s own convictions. Rational faith is a character trait that involves one’s whole personality rather than a specific belief. Read Full Article
I’ve often been asked if I think Mike Huckabee will run for president in 2012 and, if so, do I believe he can win the Republican nomination — and the presidency. These are three interesting questions, and, until recently, my answers were (1) I’m not sure, (2) no, and (3) no.
The reason I’ve never been certain whether Governor Huckabee would run or not is because if I were in his shoes, it would be a monumental decision for me to make. Overnight, he’s become a TV star and is in a position to make untold millions of dollars in the coming five-to-ten years. He’s incredibly talented, and began his stint as a TV host as though he had been doing it all his life. Read Full Article
Well, here’s one for the books: Dr. David L. Scheiner, who was BHO’s general physician for twenty-two years, is more extreme on the issue of healthcare than Obama himself! I’m not kidding. Scheiner believes that Obama’s healthcare plan doesn’t go far enough.
The good doctor says we that the U.S. should have “Medicare for all,” a single–payer system in which the government would pay all medical costs for everyone. Let the good times — and the printing presses — roll! Scheiner would put a limit on what doctors could charge patients for various kinds of services and operations. Sounds so … you know … progressive. Read Full Article
What a horrific tragedy last Saturday when a small plane crashed into a helicopter and nine people plunged to their death in the Hudson River — the same river, ironically, where 155 people walked away unscathed from the crash landing of a US Airways commercial jet less than seven months ago. Whether an atheist, religionist, spiritualist, or agnostic, a person can go mad trying to make sense out of life.
Seemingly random deaths from airplane crashes, train wrecks, automobile accidents, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis … and endless freak accidents … leave a person scratching his head and resigning himself to the reality that, despite man’s best efforts to protect himself and his family, he cannot do much about the seemingly inevitable. Read Full Article
Now that citizens who show up at town-hall meetings officially have been labeled “angry mobs” by their employees (i.e., the people they elect to represent them), Saul Alinsky (“the founder of community organizing in America”) must be smiling from below. An individual’s voice of dissent is no longer seen as such, because he is simply part of an unruly mob. In other words, he’s not a real person.
Dehumanization is a favorite trick of progressives. When the Supreme Court, in a landmark case in 1857, ruled against Dred Scott, a slave who had lived for long periods of time in free states with his master, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney explained the court’s decision by simply proclaiming that Scott was nothing more than the property of his owner — and property, of course, had no right to file a lawsuit. Read Full Article
I’ve always thought that Frank Luntz seemed like a nice young man with an interesting shtick — measuring people’s reactions to words via some kind of electronic gizmo he puts in their hands. I have no idea how valid his measurements are, but it’s worked well enough to make him a regular on Fox News.
And I say more power to him; I love to see people succeed. Luntz’s day job is acting as a political consultant and pollster for the Republican Party, and he also is one of the principals of the Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research firm. Read Full Article
The bloggers (and media) are still saturating the planet with stories of Sarah Palin’s stupidity. So much so that she should start demanding royalties. So, are they right? Is Sarah Palin just plain stupid? Or is she smart but ignorant (uninformed)?
Here’s an interesting question: If Sarah Palin really is stupid or ignorant — or both — does that necessarily mean that she’s not a good, or even great, leader? Going back to the days of Henry Ford, we’ve heard tale after tale of people who lacked intelligence but were great leaders. Read Full Article
Obama’s “Beer Summit” was yet another stupid distraction from the reality that his czars, thugocrats, and progressive supporters in Congress are moving quickly to shove us into the socialist cage and slam the door shut before another election can take place. Thankfully, most people didn’t buy into this sideshow, seeing it as just another asinine, arrogant attempt to bolster his good-guy image.
Francis Reilly, president of Reilly Communications Inc., described Obama’s cheap theatrics this way: “Roosevelt had his Malta, Obama has his Malt.” If BHO didn’t have bad intentions, you’d be tempted to dismissively chuckle at his childish antics. Read Full Article
