Capitalism Magazine site generates over 3 million page views for October 2003
These are the statistics for October 2003 for capmag.com:| Total Sessions | 201,041 |
| Total Pageviews | 3,096,053 |
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[Corrected Nov. 10 2003]
[Corrected Nov. 10 2003]
Poking Fun at Democratic ‘Multilateralism’
Mark Steyn, again:[S]o eager is Kerry to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to Saddam's patrons that his attacks on America's real allies have become increasingly obnoxious. In the last presidential debate, Kerry said:
''This president has done it wrong every step of the way. He promised that he would have a real coalition. He has a fraudulent coalition.''
... It's taken as a given among Democrats that somehow this administration has needlessly offended the French and Germans. But insulting Britain, Australia and Poland as a cheap way to get at Bush demonstrates your superior sense of the subtleties of foreign policy? I'd say it's going to be very difficult for President Kerry to work with these chaps after his election victory--or I would say it if I could type that sentence without collapsing in giggles.
The really ''fraudulent'' coalition is the one Kerry wants: one that gives the Belgians and Syrians a veto over U.S. action for nothing in return. The ''fraudulent'' coalition is Clark's from the Kosovo war, where all ''allies'' were entitled to advance operational information regardless of whether they were actually contributing to any of the operations, and where, as Clark himself noted in his memoir, ''one of the French officers working at NATO headquarters had given key portions of the operations plans to the Serbs.'' [Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 11/2/03]
Oppressive Taxes and Respect for Law
More Signs That Taxes Are Oppressive:The number of Americans who believe it's OK to cheat "a little here and there" on their taxes has risen 50 percent in the past four years, a government survey says -- a trend that new IRS Commissioner Mark Everson promises to reverse by going after scofflaws at all income levels.... The percentage of people who agreed with the statement that it was every American's civic duty to pay his fair share of taxes decreased from 81 percent in 1999 to 68 percent in 2003. [Yahoo News]
“Because Saddam is gone, now I’m getting married!”
From the Washington Post:Freed of an onerous Baath Party bureaucracy that sought to regulate even the most fundamental aspects of Iraqi life -- such as who married whom -- Iraqis lately are tying the knot in numbers not seen in recent memory. Before President Saddam Hussein was toppled, the ruling party imposed a complex and strict set of matrimonial rules on Iraqis, particularly on members of the military.... "Because Saddam is gone, now I'm getting married!" said Wasim Adel, 27, beaming beside his bride, Sheelan Shafeeq, 18, in a crowded corridor at Karrada city hall, which serves a neighborhood in central Baghdad. The hallway was jammed with couples making their way from the office of the registration clerk to the office of the judge who would perform a civil ceremony.
Impotence in the Arab World
The incomparable Mark Steyn:Last month mass hysteria apparently swept the [Sudanese] capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear....
"Another victim, who refused to give his name, said that while he was at the market, a man approached him, gave him a comb, and asked him to comb his hair. When he did so, within seconds, he said, he felt a strange sensation and discovered that he had lost his penis."
Tales of the vanishing penises ran rampant round the city, spread by cell phones and text messages...
...it's useful to be reminded that the International Jewish Conspiracy is comparatively one of the less loopy conspiracies in the Islamic world. That said, they'll probably figure out a way to pin the disappearing penises on some or other agent of Zionism. After all, according to reports in Middle East newspapers, Israel laces Arab chewing gum with secret hormones to make Muslim men hot for Jewish babes who turn out to be Mossad agents....
It is, in that sense, the perfect emblematic tale of Islamic victimhood: The foreigners have made us impotent! It doesn't matter that the foreigners didn't do anything except shake hands. It doesn't matter whether you are, in fact, impotent. You feel impotent, just as -- so we're told -- millions of Muslims from Algerian Islamists to the Bali bombers feel "humiliated" by the Palestinian situation. Whether or not there is a rational basis for their sense of humiliation is irrelevant.
...There's something pathetic about a culture so ignorant even its pathologies have to be imported. But what do you expect? The telling detail of the vanishing penis hysteria is that it was spread by text messaging. You can own a cell phone, yet still believe that foreigners are able with a mere handshake to cause your penis to melt away. [SunTimes]
Hillary Clinton, Chutzpah
Hillary Clinton adduces the Founding Fathers in her defense of second-handedness:"Our Declaration of Independence calls for a deepened respect for the opinions of mankind, but this administration simply doesn't listen. From our most important allies in Europe to our relations with neighbors in this hemisphere this administration has spanned the range of emotions from dismissive to indifferent," [Sen. Clinton] added. [NYSun]
Airheads and Worse Against the Occupation
From an interesting article by Michelle Goldberg about the impotence of the antiwar movement:Allan Johnson, a high school English teacher and debate coach from Fairfax, Va., held a sign saying "U.S. Troops Out of Iraq. Bring Them Home Now!" at Saturday's "End the Occupation" rally in Washington. In fact, though, Johnson isn't sure he wants to bring the troops home now, or to end the American occupation of Iraq. At least, not yet.
"We've made a giant mess," said Johnson, a handsome man who wore his long snowy hair in a ponytail and had a sparkling stud in one ear. "I would hate for the Bush administration to halfway fix things and then leave, and then blame the Iraqis if things go wrong. Once you go to somebody's house and break all the windows, don't you owe them new windows?"
Why, then, was he marching at an End the Occupation rally? "I don't agree with all the people here, believe you me," he said. But his own sign? He glanced at it, startled, and explained that someone had handed it to him. "I didn't even look at it," he said. "I was just waving it."
...According to an ANSWER pamphlet, "Counter-revolution & Resistance in Iraq," "The anti-war movement here and around the world must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance." [Salon, Hat Tip: Taranto]
Power Grab in Russia
On the power grab in Russia:The arrest of Russia's richest man has prompted warnings from politicians and commentators that President Vladimir Putin's old comrades in the KGB are staging a creeping takeover of the Kremlin....Mr Khodorkovsky's error, analysts say, was to renege on an informal pact sealed by Mr Putin and Russia's tycoons in 2000, under which he agreed not to investigate the murky sources of their wealth as long as they steered clear of big-time politics....But Mr Khodorkovsky, head of Russia's biggest oil firm, Yukos, has openly financed opposition parties campaigning for December's parliamentary elections, and even hinted at a possible run for the presidency in 2008. [UK Telegraph]
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed an order relieving chief of staff Alexander Voloshin from duty.... Voloshin reportedly tendered his resignation after Saturday's arrest and jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Russian oil giant Yukos. [Yahoo News]
Sharpton vs. Jackson: Racial Unity in Action
From the Washington Post:Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton launched a blistering attack on Howard Dean yesterday, accusing his rival of promoting an "anti-black agenda."
"Howard Dean's opposition to affirmative action, his current support for the death penalty and historic support of the NRA's [National Rifle Association's] agenda amounts to an anti-black agenda that will not sell in communities of color in this country," Sharpton said in a statement. He said his comments were in response to a news report yesterday that Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) plans to endorse Dean....
The Twilight of the Democrats
From the lead editorial in Friday's New York Sun:The 7.2% growth rate that the Commerce Department has measured for the American economy in the third quarter of 2003 is stronger than anything ever achieved under President Clinton's boom...The tax reductions on capital gains and dividends, along with the accelerated reductions in personal income tax rates, were signed by President Bush on May 28, 2003. These were pushed through by President Bush and the Republican Congress over the objection of Democrats like Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton, who voted against them. Every major Democratic presidential candidate wants to roll back these tax cuts. [NYSun]
Jerry Bowyer comments:
...some of President Bush's most prominent bashers were claiming that we were in "the worst economy since Herbert Hoover." That's a little difficult, even for them, to say with a straight face when we've just finished our best quarter since the fourth year of President Reagan....Some have suggested that this growth rate is somehow related to the president's "record high deficits." Aside from the fact that they're not record-high when you account for inflation and the size of the economy, this latest growth number owes nothing to the deficit, because it owes nothing to government spending. Government spending for the third quarter went up only 1.3%. Nor is this a war boom; defense spending was flat.... Some may also say that this is driven by inventory.... This does happen, but not today: inventories actually fell during the third quarter, as they have been falling during all of 2003. Yet sales remain strong.
...it's the application of new technology to inventory management to the effect that companies no longer have to pile up a lot of inventory in times of recovery...To some degree, it's an increase in retail consumption, up 6.6%. But to a much larger degree, this recovery is being driven by increases in investment, both business, up sharply at 14%, and residential, up double sharply at 20.4%. Now the reason this has happened is that Mr. Bush cut taxes. And when that didn't work, he cut taxes again.... [NySun]
And as if that weren't bad enough for the Democrats, they're also getting killed by their own campaign finance legislation:
[F]inding people who will fork over, say, $25, $50, or $100 has became critical with the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, or McCain-Feingold, as it is more commonly known.... And even Democrats admit that Republicans have had a decades-long head start in getting small donors to write checks....[A]ccording to the FEC, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have collected a total of $133,861,490 in small hard-money contributions so far in the 2004 election cycle, while the corresponding Democratic committees have collected a total of $45,662,730. [NYSun]
Why The Left Hates Justice Brown
From Ann Coulter:Liberals are hysterical about Justice Brown principally because she is black. Nothing enrages them so much as a minority who does not spend her days saying hosannas to liberals.
Related reading:
A Lynch Mob Gathers Around Justice Janice Rogers Brown: Part 3 by Thomas Sowell (October 23, 2003)
A Lynch Mob Gathers Around Justice Janice Rogers Brown: Part 2 by Thomas Sowell (October 22, 2003)
A Lynch Mob Gathers Around Justice Janice Rogers Brown: Part 1 by Thomas Sowell (October 21, 2003)
Cheating Teachers
Now It's the Teachers Who Cheat:High-stakes standardized testing has led to high-level cheating -- by teachers trying to gain an advantage for their students...Teachers have read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test, according to records obtained by The Associated Press. [Yahoo News]
Beware of Moderate Islam
Hillel Halkin writes in the NY Sun:If [such as Mahathir] are Islam's moderates, then Islamic moderation needs to be feared every bit as much as Islamic militancy. Or are the two simply different tactical expressions of the same mind-set? It has been a near-universal shibboleth, especially since the September 11 terrorist attacks, that Western democracies are not at war with Islam but only with violent Islamic fundamentalism....
Islam is not a particularly "peaceful religion." In fact, historically, it is the world's only major religion that has been spread mainly by the sword....
The only significant parts of the world that can be said to have been Islamized peacefully are Indonesia and areas of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
...not only has war been a legitimate way of spreading Islam; for them, military victory has been the ultimate proof of the truth and validity of Islam....
Until modern times, nearly always the winner in its encounters with other cultures and religions, Islam never has learned the art of losing, which is why military and political defeat is so humiliating to it. And of all its modern defeats, none has been as shaming as its defeat by Israel and the Jews, who are seen as a small and contemptible people that Islam had always subjugated.
Is Bush Financing Hatred Against America?
Writes Edwin A. Locke from the Ayn Rand Institute:President Bush recently announced that he would supply $157 million to help Indonesia's school system. The Indonesians will apparently accept the donation but have made it very clear that they would have total control over how the money would be spent and that they would not teach American values.
Given that Indonesia is a hotbed of Muslim terrorism, it is obvious that this money will be spent, in part or in whole, to teach hatred of America and everything she stands for: reason, freedom, individual rights, capitalism, technology, and progress.
In short, this money will be used to subsidize the teaching of ideas aimed at bringing about our own destruction. Karl Marx said that capitalists would sell communists the rope with which the Marxists would hang them. But what President Bush is doing is much worse. Rope is simply a material object, but Bush's subsidy will help spread the ideas that encourage others to kill us--with rope or any other weapon at their disposal.
Giving this subsidy to Indonesia is simply suicidal; it would be like giving educational subsidies to the Nazis or Communists. It would be the most shameful act of President Bush's career. Let us hope that more rational members of the administration will change the President's mind.
Education in the New Century
The DailySun on Education in the New Century:Under the guise of reforming public education, [New York City schools'] Chancellor Joel Klein has been sending down directives covering everything from the arrangement of chairs in the classroom to the number of minutes teachers can spend on extracurricular activities. One controversial order insists that teachers sit in rocking chairs while reading aloud to the class. Just to punctuate the point, a middleschool math teacher told the story of being reprimanded in front of the class by her new math "coach" for giving too much praise to her students for doing their homework right. [DailySun]
Assad’s Contribution to Peace in the Middle East
From Cox and Forkum:
From Reuters (beware of their scare quotes): Syria: Red Cross Attack Harmed Iraqi Interests.
DAMASCUS (Reuters) -- Syria condemned as "terrorism" Wednesday a deadly suicide attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Baghdad this week, saying such attacks harmed the Iraqi people's interests."Syria strongly condemns the destructive attack on the ICRC offices in Baghdad," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Bushra Kanafani said in remarks run by the official SANA news agency.
"Such operations that target innocent life and humanitarian and international organizations, severely harm the interests of the Iraqi people. They are terrorist acts," she said.
The attack on the ICRC was one of four suicide missions that killed 35 people and wounded 230 Monday in Baghdad's bloodiest day since Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
A U.S. general has said one attacker captured alive in an attempted suicide bombing on a police station on that day was carrying a Syrian passport.
President Bush has blamed violence in Iraq on members of Saddam's ousted Baath party and foreign "terrorists," and has said he expects Syria and Iran to enforce border controls to stop infiltrators.
Washington has accused the Damascus government of turning a blind eye to militants crossing into Iraq. Syria has also long been on the State Department's list of states that support terrorism.
Greens vs. Humanity
From David Holcberg at the Ayn Rand Institute:After closing off 12 million acres of California land to human use and enjoyment in the last 30 years--allegedly to protect desert tortoises, horned lizards and scarab beetles-- environmentalists are now actively seeking to close California's Imperial Sand Dunes to bikers and off-road drivers. The alleged reason this time: to protect milk vetches. Once again, environmentalists are showing their desire to sacrifice man's needs and happiness for the sake of animals, plants and wilderness. Once again, they are showing whose side they are on, and it is not humanity's.
Bold Moves to End Terror
From Cox and Forkum:
From FoxNews last week: Rumsfeld Memo to Inner Circle
[In the War of Terrorism] My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
We agree with the Secretary of Defense. Bold moves are needed, namely a focus on stopping Iran's sponsorship of Islamic terrorism. We're grateful that there is someone in the administration who is willing to say so.