Events This Week

This Monday the 30th I'll be introducing Charles Murray at the Freedom Center's Wednesday Morning Club luncheon at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Murray is the author of the new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Tuesday evening, May 1st, I'll be participating in a "Town Hall on Terror" in Sherman Oaks hosted by FrontPage Mag editor Jamie Glazov. The panel features ex-Muslim author Nonie Darwish, artist Bosch Fawstin, actor Dwight Schultz, and myself.

Then Wednesday evening I'll be speaking before the Hollywood Congress of Republicans in North Hollywood.

No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed

In his television specials and in books like Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel - Why Everything You Know is Wrong and Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media, reporter John Stossel has built an award-winning reputation as a tenacious debunker of commonly-held assumptions, and as a thorn in the side of business-as-usual bureaucrats. Now, as a welcome antidote to President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” big-government campaign mantra, comes Stossel’s latest book, No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed.

The libertarian Stossel hosts his own show and a series of specials on the Fox Business Network, and appears frequently on other Fox News shows. His consumer reporting has made him a nineteen-time Emmy winner and a five-time honoree for excellence by the National Press Club. Those familiar with Stossel’s laidback, plainspoken, eminently reasonable TV persona (and who isn’t?) will find it in full evidence here in No They Can’t as well.

The book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to a wide range of the biggest issues facing our government today, such as health care, the war on drugs, education, military spending, and the “budget insanity.” Stossel points out that our instinct is to believe that government can and should step in and resolve such problems. In a rhetorical device which he returns to frequently throughout the book, he posits “What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: When there’s a problem, government should act.” He answers that with “What Reality Taught Me: Individuals should act, not government.”

Olbermann Versus Gore

Prior to falling off the radar of cultural relevance when he left MSNBC, political commentator Keith Olbermann featured a segment on his nightly Countdown with Keith Olbermann called “The Worst Person in the World.” This was a mean-spirited label he invariably awarded to targets on the right, such as his Fox News ratings nemesis Bill O’Reilly, with whom he had a longstanding feud, or such formidable political threats as Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol. Now his latest boss, Current TV’s Al Gore, may be considering applying the label to Olbermann himself.

Olbermann was once MSNBC’s point man for the spewing of progressive lies and hate speech. Even among that network’s stable of leftist attack dogs like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, the silver-haired Olbermann was notable for his angry, hyperbolic partisanship. Journalist and former Nightline host Ted Koppel called him “the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts,” who “draws more than one million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan.”

That was then. Olbermann left MSNBC at the end of 2010 for reasons that have never been made clear. Less than 24 hours later, his friend Al Gore reached out to him, and the next February Olbermann brought his – at the time – star power to the Current TV network, run by founders Joel Hyatt and Gore, former U.S. Vice President and tireless promoter of his lucrative An Inconvenient Truth book and documentary. Current envisioned the new Countdown as a valuable primetime “tentpole” program. Olbermann was appointed chief news officer and given an equity stake in the progressive channel that was originally launched in 2005.

The Devil We Don’t Know, Part II

Bestselling writer and speaker Nonie Darwish is the author of the compelling autobiography Now They Call Me Infidel, about growing up in Egypt and her break from Islam, and Cruel and Usual Punishment, an exposé of the stark reality of sharia. Her new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, explains what really lies behind the Arab Spring movement, and it exposes Islam as the belief system that will inevitably doom those revolutions.

Mark Tapson:         You write that “liberty and equality for women in the Middle East are closely linked to defeating sharia.” But you note that “Islamic feminism is a twisted kind of feminism that champions pride in Islamic bondage.” Can you elaborate on that?

Nonie Darwish:     It is a fact that there is hardly any Islamic feminist movement. How could it be that female citizens of the most oppressive anti-women system on Earth fail to take the opportunity of the Arab Spring to change their destiny and the destiny of their daughters and granddaughters? The answer to this question is very complex and part of the larger problem of Islam itself. Muslim women are at a much greater disadvantage if compared to Western feminists who did not have to overcome death penalties, humiliation, flogging and societal rejection and isolation if they violate religious laws.

Rachel Maddow and Michigan’s Poor Blacks

On her MSNBC show last week, progressive commentator Rachel Maddow once again aimed her snarky, facts-be-damned, rhetorical flamethrower at the ongoing controversy of emergency legislation designed to rescue the economically devastated town of Benton Harbor.

Michigan cities from tiny Benton Harbor to Flint to Pontiac all the way up to Detroit are in the death grip of a financial crisis in the wake of the housing crash and near collapse of the auto industry. In a desperate move to turn things around, Republican Governor Rick Snyder invoked Public Act 4, legislation that allows him to appoint city managers to take over cities in dire financial circumstances and enact drastic austerity measures. These managers are empowered to renegotiate union contracts, amend budgets, eliminate departments, even overrule or remove mayors and other elected officials if necessary.

The law's supporters say it allows for a more effective response to the state’s budget crisis. Even ABC acknowledged that these emergency measures are rescuing a growing number of cities from bankruptcy and thus preserving vital services for the citizens, including the same blacks that Maddow claims are being victimized by the procedure.

The Devil We Don’t Know: An Interview with Nonie Darwish, Part I

The “Arab Spring.” The mainstream media clung to this phrase last year in their giddy haste to promote what they saw as a flowering of freedom-loving, democratic uprisings across the Arab world, for which they were eager to credit President Obama’s famed Cairo speech as partial inspiration. Instead, it unfolded with freedom-hating Islamic fundamentalists seizing political dominance, and the Arab Spring came to look more like a Muslim Winter. What went wrong?

Bestselling writer and speaker Nonie Darwish is author of the compelling autobiography Now They Call Me Infidel, about growing up in Egypt and her break from Islam, and Cruel and Usual Punishment, an exposé of the stark reality of sharia. Her new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, explains what really lies behind the Arab Spring movement, and it exposes Islam as the belief system that will inevitably doom those revolutions.

This is the first of a two-part interview. Part two will appear tomorrow on FrontPage Magazine.

Mark Tapson:         Nonie, you note in your introduction that you have written The Devil We Don’t Know not merely to criticize Islam but as a challenge, a plea to Muslims. What are you asking of them with this book?

Ayers Keeps the Dream Alive

To paraphrase the old saying: Old unrepentant terrorists never die, nor do they even fade away; they just pass the torch of their nihilistic, anti-American dream to the next generation.

President Obama’s former associate Bill Ayers and his partner-in-crime Bernardine Dohrn, ex-leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group, addressed a small group of the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City last week. They dispensed the usual shrill, tired old leftist laments about AmeriKKKa being the modern equivalent of the militaristic city-state Sparta. After declaring the United States to be “a declining economic and political power” but “a virulent and expanding military power,” Dohrn complained:

Yes, in many ways, national security… it’s all the United States seems to have to offer. It isn’t jobs or healthcare or public education or public parks or public libraries, it’s security, security, security. So, we don’t want that kind of a future. Occupy doesn’t want that kind of a future. We want a future for the 99%.

Well, if it’s insecurity they want, Ayers’ protégé Obama is certainly moving things in that direction. Dohrn has a valid point about our declining economic and political power, since Obama has steered us toward a post-American future of crushing debt and geopolitical impotence, as well as slashing the military budget. Insecurity indeed.

Tomorrow Belongs to Me

 

A few months ago I attended a private screening in Pasadena of the 1972 film Cabaret, which lost the Academy Award for Best Film to The Godfather, and yet still put an Oscar on the mantel of director Cabaret, not to mention ones for Liza Minelli, Joel Gray, and five others. The screening was hosted by film buff Alex Kozinski, whose day job is Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and whose parents are both Holocaust survivors. His friend, Cabaret producer Manny Wolf, was on hand to treat us with cinematic anecdotes and to answer questions afterward.

The first time I saw Cabaret I was too young to really appreciate the dark undercurrent of the story’s historical context. In the film, based on Christopher Isherwood’s book The Berlin Stories, the performers and patrons of a 1930s Berlin nightclub indulge in a raucous, desperately carefree decadence against the ominous backdrop of a growing National Socialist Party presence and increasing hostility directed at Jews.

In perhaps its most infamous scene, a fresh-faced young man captivates the patrons of a biergarten with a beautiful tenor rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” The song is bursting with youthful idealism for a radiant future. But when the camera pans down to reveal the swastika armband on his Hitler Youth uniform, the scene’s tone suddenly turns chilling. The song gathers disturbing momentum as the Aryan patrons leap to their feet to sing along fervently:

One Feminist Condemns Another’s Military Empowerment

Radical feminist Naomi Wolf is calling for a boycott of pop superstar Katy Perry in the wake of the latter’s latest music video, in which she transforms herself a là “G.I. Jane” into a U.S. Marine.

In the storyline of the video for her power-pop single “Part of Me,” Perry is seen ditching an unfaithful boyfriend, then being inspired to enlist by a bumper sticker reading, “All women are created equal. Then some become Marines.” This is just the sort of female empowerment Perry’s emotionally wounded character needs. We follow her through hellish basic training: scaling rope ladders, hiking in full gear, jogging with a cadet on her shoulders, crawling through barbed wire in rainy darkness, linking arms with fellow cadets on the beach as the waves roll over them, and finally storming a beach. The video closes with her dancing and singing triumphantly in camouflaged fatigues under a starry, billowing canopy that seems to suggest a waving Stars-and-Stripes:

Throw your sticks and stones

Throw your bombs and your blows

But you're not gonna break my soul

This is the part of me that you're never gonna ever take away from me, no

Lets Get Small

The manmade global warming alarmists now suspect that all our efforts to reverse imminent planetary disaster may be inadequate and ultimately futile. Always thinking outside the box, they’re suggesting more radical sacrifices than simply upgrading light blubs and trading in gas-guzzlers for Priuses. Forget badgering people to be more energy-efficient, some global warming strategists are asking; why not genetically alter them to be so? “Let’s get small” doesn’t refer just to Steve Martin’s old comedy routine anymore; now it’s a call to bio-engineer smaller humans for a reduced carbon footprint.

In an online interview for The Atlantic, S. Matthew Liao, professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University, expresses skepticism about the efficacy of our current attempts to mitigate climate change, and theorizes that “voluntary” human engineering is one possible solution. He is the principal author of the new paper “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” in the scholarly journal Ethics, Policy & Environment. In it, he and his co-authors propose possible bio-medical modifications to ensure that humans tread less heavily on Mother Gaia.