Tag: WND

WND column

Occupy Washington and Wall Street

Seeing the so-called “conservative” media wax indignant about the Occupy Wall Street protesters is almost exactly like watching the mainstream media attack the Tea Party three years ago. In the process of purportedly criticizing the protesters they reveal both their ignorance and their ideological bias, and they completely manage to miss the point of the very justifiable protests.

It is true that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are incoherent and advocate inherently contradictory policies. For example, they wish to turn to Washington to limit the havoc that Wall Street has wreaked, and continues to wreak, on the American economy and the American people, little realizing that Washington has been knowingly enabling Wall Street’s capacity to do so from the start.

But it is equally true that the Tea Party activists are incoherent and advocate inherently contradictory policies.

WND column

The Magic Negro, Part II: Republican edition

It is completely understandable why Republicans are increasingly enthusiastic about Herman Cain. First and foremost, he isn’t Mitt Romney. The Republican Party elite has been trying to force the mercurial Mormon down the throats of the party’s grass roots for two election cycles, but despite his elegant coiffure and vast money-raising capacity, the average Republican voter wants nothing to do with the man. They quite rightly regard him as less trustworthy and more slippery than Bill Clinton.

UPDATE: I note that Cain’s comments, as highlighted on the Drudge Report, are particularly ironic in light of the government bailouts of Wall Street and General Motors.

Republican presidential contender Herman Cain amplified his criticism Sunday of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, calling the protesters “jealous’ Americans who “play the victim card” and want to “take somebody else’s” Cadillac.

WND column

Immigration is the Issue

The mainstream media are desperately attempting to gloss over the real reason that Rick Perry self-imploded at the Florida straw poll. It wasn’t that his debate performance was poor, although it certainly was. The reason Rick Perry is imitating Fred Thompson’s rapid decline from favored frontrunner to candidate-in-crisis is because the debate revealed the depths to which his pro-immigration position runs counter to that of most Republicans.

WND column

Helicopter Ben’s Last Roll

For the first year after the publication of “The Return of the Great Depression,” there were numerous critics who gleefully cited the media reports of economic recovery. The green shoots that Ben Bernanke’s eagle eye had spotted appeared to have blossomed into genuine economic growth and the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the recession to be officially over in 2009. However, the persistence of high unemployment rates despite the best efforts of the statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to hide the decline and the growing number of defaulting homeowners tended to belie all of the good news.

WND column

Ten Years Later

Almost exactly 10 years ago today, I wrote my first opinion piece for WorldNetDaily. Since that time, many things have changed, but one thing remains the same. The liberties of the American people are under ever-increasing assault by their government and their political elite.

NB: In related news, later this year I’m going to be publishing an ebook with 100 annotated columns from the first 10 years. I encourage you to let me know in the comments which past columns you would like to see included.

WND column

The Christian Nation

“While I was in America, a witness, who happened to be called at the assizes of the county of Chester (state of New York), declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say. The newspapers related the fact without any farther comment. The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, “American Institutions and Their Influence,” 1851

One of the repetitive themes that developed in The Irrational Atheist over the course of its writing is the profound historical unreliability of atheists. Atheists, particularly the aggressive variety, tend to repeat the same talking points over and over with such assurance that the average historically illiterate individual, regardless of his religious faith, has a tendency to accept them at face value. But this is foolish, as historical arguments presented by atheists almost invariably rely upon taking one small piece of historical evidence and twisting it beyond all recognition while simultaneously ignoring the larger part of the historical record.

WND column

Breaking Windows in New York City

I was deeply disturbed to read that the erstwhile hurricane which has inspired such panic on the East Coast has apparently been degraded to the status of a tropical storm, and a minor one at that. The winds that had been reported at 85 mph by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were being reported in the 25-35 mph range by various land stations. As we have seen repeatedly in the case of anthropogenic global warming/climate change, the disasters predicted by the scientific experts reliably turn out to be significantly less disastrous when they finally arrive.

Real life is not like the movies. In the world of Hollywood, the dire warnings of scientists are ignored by the authorities. In the real world, the dire warnings of scientists cause the authorities to overreact and throw billions of dollars at the experts in an attempt to find a solution to a nonexistent problem. Given this perverse incentive system, it should be no surprise that scientists across many disciplines spend so much more time prophesying doom than they do actually performing any science.

WND column

The Summer of our Discontent

This has been a most peculiar summer. In the U.S. it has been blazing hot, while across Europe the weather has been unseasonably cool. Despite an increasing number of momentary flashes of societal breakdown, from Athens and London to Philadelphia and Vancouver, the social mood has been relatively calm. In fact, it has been almost too calm, as if the usual instigators of unrest are concerned that creating the usual sparks might set off a conflagration that would threaten to engulf them as well.

The markets are in a precarious state, too. The Dow is behaving erratically, with giant movements both upward and downward, but predominantly down, in much the same way that it was behaving in the bear market that ran from October 2007 to March 2009. That downward slide took more than 50 percent off the Dow, and a repetition of similar magnitude would be expected to bottom around 5,000. Should that happen, we can reasonably anticipate that gold, which has risen from $320 in 2002 to $1,850, will be approaching the 1:1 ratio that Robert Prechter predicted back when the ratio was 50:1.

WND column

Corporations are not people

“Corporations are people, my friend. Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?”
– Mitt Romney

It is no wonder that Mitt Romney thinks corporations are wonderful. Corporations have provided him with most of the $18.4 million he has raised for his 2012 campaign for president, which is more than the nine other Republican candidates combined. Seventy percent of the contributions to the Romney campaign are the maximum $2,500, 10 times more than the seven percent of the maximum contributions to his chief rival for the party nomination, Michele Bachmann.

To Mitt Romney, corporations are not only people, they are his best friends.

WND column

Downgrading America

Over the last two months, numerous political commentators, as well as leading Democrats and Republicans, have vehemently insisted that a deal on the debt ceiling was necessary to avoid debt default and credit downgrades. Unsurprisingly, these happened to be the same commentators and politicians who did not see the crisis of 2008 coming and who have swallowed whole the ludicrous claim of “economic recovery” still being pushed by the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

And once more, all of these public Panglosses have been proven wrong by events. This time, however, it took only three days to demonstrate their observable incompetence. The downgrade of U.S. credit was inevitable because the salient issue was never the debt ceiling or the inability of the federal government to borrow more money, but rather, the fact that it was already borrowing too much.