Bill Gates, bloviating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is issuing a clarion call for a “kinder capitalism” to aid the world’s poor. Mr. Gates says he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it’s failing much of the world. This, of course, from a guy who’s worth around $35 billion (give or take a billion). Don’t you just love it?A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn’t work. What chutzpah.
Next: Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, explains why the GOP: might be "out on their earmarks".
As House Republicans escape to the Greenbrier resort for a working retreat, the biggest item on Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) menu is pork. The GOP, once the party of fiscal responsibility, has rivaled its Democratic counterparts in spending over the past 12 years, losing its credibility--and majority--in the process. At the heart of this weekend's retreat is determining just how committed members are to restoring their reputation and "kicking the spending habit." Our frugal friends Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) are proposing a year-long moratorium on congressional earmarks, a bold move that faces serious resistance from many who use pork projects to secure hometown re-election support. The other option for infusing some discipline into the process is appointing an outspoken earmark-loather like Rep. Flake to the vacant seat on the House Appropriations Committee. Flake, revered among fiscal conservatives, embodies the type of staunch, passionate gatekeeper needed to eliminate congressional waste. Unfortunately, Minority Leader Boehner, who has never requested an earmark since entering Congress in 1993, is under tremendous pressure to support Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), a social liberal, for the seat. A Republican Reichert may be, but a conservative he is not. In the last year alone, he voted against the Mexico City policy, which bans the United States from funding overseas organizations that promote abortions, and in favor of taxpayer-funded embryonic stem cell research and expanding federal "hate crimes." His record shows no particular affinity for fiscal restraint, and, as Robert Novak pointed out in his Washington Post editorial today, "his sole qualification appears to be that he is the most endangered Republican House member in 2008 and needs to bring home the bacon." Join us in reminding Congress that what it needs to bring home are some genuine standards for eliminating pork when so many American families are trying to make ends "meet." Call your congressman's office today at 202-224-3121 and give him or her plenty of incentive to follow through and zero out earmarks.Now: the former LIBERAL explains it all by describing his own experience. By David Horowitz.
It is not for nothing that George Orwell had to invent terms like “double-think” and “double-speak” to describe the universe totalitarians created. Those who have watched the left as long as I have, understand the impossible task that progressives confront in conducting their crusades. Rhetorically, they are passionate proponents of “equality” but in practice they are committed enthusiasts of a hierarchy of privilege in which the highest ranks are reserved for themselves as the guardians of righteousness, and then for those they designate “victims” and “oppressed,” who are thus worthy of their redemption. Rhetorically they are secularists and avatars of tolerance, but in fact they are religious fanatics who regard their opponents as sinners and miscreants and agents of civil darkness. Therefore, when they engage an opponent it is rarely to examine and refute his argument but rather to destroy the bearer of the argument and remove him from the plain of battle.
Consequently, misrepresentation of facts, distortion of motives and general acts of character assassination are the preferred modes of progressive discourse, as any conservative who has acquired a public persona can attest. The raw material for this verbal malice is stored on data sites with titles like RightwingWatch, SourceWatch, MediaMatters and MediaTransparency, which provide a reservoir of abuse for use by progressive activists in their engagements. Efforts by the targets of this malevolence to correct fabrications and mis-statements of fact are guaranteed to fail nearly every time, in part because progressives don’t regard their judgments as opinions but as a received moral (and therefore incontrovertible) truth. Eventually an alternative reality is created by this process which no one would even think to check.
Of course not all leftists are ideological zealots or totalitarians, and even many progressives are offended by such company. Last week we posted an interview that was conducted by an intelligent and reasonable young progressive at Campus Progress named Jesse Singal. Before agreeing to be interviewed by Singal, I asked him to correct a malicious “profile” of me, which Campus Progress had posted as one of the guides it provides to its student activists under a general heading “Know Your Right-Wing Speakers.” In its grotesque distortions of my statements and positions, the profile is typical of what passes for “David Horowitz” in the progressive world and is an obvious product of the collective misrepresentations that underpin its general perspective.
When Singal offered to correct any errors in the Campus Progress profile, I made myself available for the interview. A month later, the original profile still stands, although Singal assures me it’s just a matter of fact-checking and I have no reason to doubt that he was and is sincere. I will wait to be surprised. In the meantime, the profile which was last updated March 30, 2007 can be read here I have provided an annotated rebuttal of the profile below. At the end are the comments of readers on their site. What is striking is the good sense expressed in these comments, although this does not seem to have shaken Campus Progress’s confidence in their error-ridden profile.
... the article continues - worth the read!
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