Glenn Beck said, “It’s time to take the power from them and the right way to do it is through a Convention of States.”

David Barton called the Convention of States Project, the “proper solution.”

While the nation isn’t currently battling a monarch, it sure feels like we are. Between the NSA spying on American citizens, the IRS targeting political enemies, and Benghazi lies, the abuses of power just keep coming. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said, “[President Barack Obama] is acting as if he’s both the executive and the legislator. That’s a recipe for tyranny …”

Citizens for Self-Governance is doing something about the government’s outlandish abuse of power. Their Convention of the States Project urges state legislatures to properly use Article V of the Constitution to call a convention to reduce the power of Washington, D.C.  If you liked the original American Revolution, you’ll love the Convention of States Project, which is going back to the founders’ original “emergency cord.”  They gave it to us in Article V in case the government grew too large or abusive.  The time to pull it is now!  

Join this historic movement today and let your voice be heard.

“The purpose of the convention is to limit the scope, power and jurisdiction of the federal government,” Mark Meckler of Citizens for Self-Governance said. “That’s a debate we should be having during a presidential year.”

“My background is in the Tea Party movement, and so we know how to organize. We have citizens in every state, and we’re organizing literally at the state legislative level in all 50 states right now,” he said.

America is still a nation of patriots.

Let’s resolve, at once, to save her.

Those interested in getting involved or learning more about the topic can visit the Convention of States website. To learn how you can support the Convention of States, download the FREE handbook today! 

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Asked about the effect of alterations to the overtime pay rules during the exchange, Carney noted that “there is a macroeconomic benefit…to making sure that private sector to public sector…the rules of the road when it comes to our economy work for women, because doing that is not just the right thing to do, it is economically beneficial. It helps the bottom line…This is good for the economy, I promise you.”

In his response, Carney asserted that despite not being an economist, by dint of familiarity with his wife’s book, Carney “happens to know…a little bit about this subject.”

Carney noted that “Womenomics” was “available on Amazon…came out in 2009…it might have been on the New York Times’ bestseller list.”

“Womenomics,” co-authored by Shipman and BBC journalist Katty Kay provide advice for professional women on how they can capitalize on new economic trends to better balance their professional and personal lives in the corporate world.

Check out the clip from the White House press briefing below.

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Enjoy:

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Then check out this conversation at Harvard at 6PM EST this evening being hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics between Charles Murray and Bill Kristol, the subject of which is “Is America Really ‘Coming Apart?’”

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Murray’s book, and presumably the conversation itself covers the social trends among white Americans (and only amplified among minorities) over the last 50 years, reflecting a growing cultural divide between the elites, comprised of intellectuals, business executives, lawyers, media professionals and others, who tend to cluster in so-called “superbubble” towns with like-minded individuals, and the rest of America.

With this growing split, Murray analyzes the major divergences among white Americans in areas such as education, wealth, crime, marriage and faith.

Ultimately, Murray argues that there may in fact be irreconcilable cultural fragmentation with devastating consequences for the country.

In order to remedy this situation, he feels that the elites need to fearlessly impart their cultural values to the rest of society — disavowing their non-judgmentalism and asserting the bedrock values on which the country was built — if we are to have any chance of coming together as a nation and reversing the alarming trends he analyzes.

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Read one way – glass half-full – this Reuters profile from Sunday is a glowing homage to an expert pilot. 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah has been flying since 1981 and accrued 18,360 hours. “Airline staff who worked with the pilot said Zaharie knew the ins and outs of the Boeing 777 extremely well, as he was always practicing with the simulator” that was in his home, the article reveals.

A co-pilot is quoted as saying “he was an aviation tech geek. You could ask him anything and he would help you.”

It sounds like the perfect pilot you’d want to have around if something goes wrong. But clearly something did go wrong – and what we know (or what we seem to know) is there were no distress signals sent, no indications from the cockpit that anything was wrong.

The last thing anyone heard was detailed here: “According to Malaysia’s civil aviation officials, the captain’s last words were made after Malaysian air traffic controllers told the cockpit that they were entering Vietnamese airspace and that air traffic controllers from Ho Chi Minh City were taking over.”

When you look at it glass half-empty, questions start popping up. An experienced captain, with a flight simulator in his house, exits Malaysian airspace and immediately goes off the radar, transponder shut off, nothing else heard from passenger or crew. And yet, reports today indicate the plane may have flown for hours after. Where was it going?

On “Piers Morgan Live” last night, aviation expert Jim Tilmon was asked about the simulator. “If this pilot really had some plan in mind,” said Tilmon. “He would need to practice, and he’s got the equipment to do that.”

Yesterday I laid out plausible theories, and one was “pilot intent.” If the captain was intent on taking this plane and its passengers, essentially, hostage, and bringing it intact to another location while avoiding detection, he would seem to have just the skillset to accomplish this odd and dangerous task.

There are lots of great reporters investigating the story on the ground – let’s find out more about the captain. He may be totally faultless here, but as questions persist, this is one angle to explore.

Have a theory about what happened to the missing plane? Tell me at @SteveKrak

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The below article entitled “The Age of Envy” was published in Newsweek on December 29, 1952 on the pervasive feeling of envy that lay at the core of numerous policies being put forth under the guise of “inequality of income and wealth.”

It was written by free-market journalist Henry Hazlitt, best known for his classic “Economics in One Lesson,” and excerpted from a collection of his Newsweek articles from 1946 to 1966. All emphasis is ours.

(AP File Photo) 

…Envy has been an attribute of human nature from the dawn of history. But it has always hitherto been regarded as a sin. Ovid thought it “the meanest of the vices.” The Bible calls it a “rottenness of the bones.” “From envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,” says the Book of Common Prayer, “Good Lord deliver us.”

Yet today envy is glorified as a virtue. Politicians advocate measures, not because they will bring any material benefit to anyone, but on the ground that they may assuage the public envy which they themselves have helped to inflame. Hitler promised that nobody would be permitted to have an income of more than 1,000 marks a month or be allowed to live on the income from investments. Franklin D. Roosevelt once proposed a limit of $25,000 a year on incomes.

This is envy masquerading as a passion for justice.

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People sometimes become Socialists or Communists through a desire to abolish poverty, but when their ill-conceived schemes fail to bring this result, their feeling too often degenerates into mere hatred and envy of the rich. The success of Marx sprang from his contemptuous dismissal as “utopianism” of all peaceable or constructive attempts to relieve poverty, and from his naked appeal to hatred, envy, and class warfare against the well-to-do and successful.

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The prevailing ideology today is a diluted form of Marxism, even on the part of many of those who think themselves anti-Marxist or anti-Communist. The emphasis of most “welfare state” proposals today is on hurting or impoverishing the rich rather than on helping or enriching the poor. Most of these measures surely accomplish the former, and usually the opposite of the latter. They level down, not up.

Envy is the main drive behind the present fantastic tax rates on the upper-income brackets. “It should be remembered,” writes David McCord Wright, “that these high progressive rates have almost no revenue significance. They yield only a pittance compared with other taxes and the size of the government budgets. They are merely the reflection of ‘ethical’ prejudice.” It may be added that these rates, by choking incentives and draining savings, do incalculable harm to workers and to the poor. They retard the very growth of capital upon which the growth of productivity and real wages depends.

All this is even truer of the present rates of death and inheritance taxes. Even belligerently New Deal economists admit that such taxes “are unimportant as revenue producers, having as justification only our desire for less inequality of income and wealth”—in other words, the present passion for leveling down.

The main drive behind the so-called excess-profits tax is also to appease envy. The tax ignores the vital function of profits as the chief incentive to efficiency and economy and the regulator of production. It promotes waste and reduces war output. It is defended by such high-sounding slogans as: “No one must be allowed to profit from war.” It would be just as logical to say that no one must be allowed to profit from sickness, or from death, or from arson, or from crime, and for that reason to refuse to pay doctors or undertakers or firemen or policemen. This is envy masquerading as a passion for justice. The general rule of free enterprise is not unjust. It is “to each in accordance with what he contributes; to each what he creates.” The way to achieve maximum output for war is to reward each in proportion to the value of his output.

“To each in accordance with what he contributes; to each what he creates.”

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In the Christmas season, above all, we should remind ourselves that this modern glorification of envy is not part of the Christian ethic. That ethic teaches not envy, but charity and compassion. It advocates individual voluntary help to the less fortunate, not forcible seizure.

“Charity suffereth long and is kind, charity envieth not.”

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—

Follow Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) on Twitter

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This got us to thinking about another book on the subject that you likely have not heard of but that may be equally notable, not only for its valuable content but for its exorbitant cost, and whose author is an outspoken critic of U.S. monetary policy who recently made some dire comments on the state of financial markets.

One of the acolytes of the value investing strategy that Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett pioneered, hedge fund manager Seth Klarman of the Baupost Group not only served as a contributor to a recent edition of Graham’s other classic book on investing, “Security Analysis,” but also authored his own book (the one in question) on value investing, which is perhaps the most expensive such title in the world.

The book, published in 1991, is titled “Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor.”

Long ago out of print, likely due to its limited availability and Klarman’s incredible success–Klarman rose from a fresh out of Harvard business school graduate helping manage $27 million to the manager of a now-$27 billion hedge fund–you can find the book, originally listed for $25, on Amazon for prices ranging from $1,600.00 to $3,575.96.

“Margin of Safety” is a comprehensive yet concise book consisting of three parts: (i) where most investors make mistakes, (ii) the philosophy of value investing and (iii) how to apply the value investing philosophy successfully. It is a readily accessible introduction to investing, not only for those interested in financial markets but anyone evaluating any kind of investment opportunity–at least if you can find it at a library or afford to fork over in excess of $1,600.00 for it.

Klarman, known for his contrarian and often bearish views on financial markets, and willingness to hold a significant percentage of cash in his fund’s portfolio when he deems investing conditions unfavorable (unlike most fund managers who remain heavily invested in markets at all times in the hopes of reaping greater returns) wrote in a recent investor letter that:

“A skeptic would have to be blind not to see bubbles inflating in junk bond issuance, credit quality, and yields, not to mention the nosebleed stock market valuations of fashionable companies like Netflix and Tesla. The overall picture is one of growing risk and inadequate potential return almost everywhere one looks.”

He also referred to the stock market as being a “Truman Show” market, referring to the 1998 movie:

Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi, as in the movie, are the “creators” who have manufactured a similarly idyllic, if artificial, environment for today’s investors. They were the executive producers of “The Truman Show” of 2013. A global audience sat in rapt attention before this wildly popular production. Given the U.S. stock market’s continuing upsurge, Bernanke is almost certain to snag yet another People’s Choice Award for this psychological “thriller.” Even in “The Truman Show,” life was not as good as this for investors.

But there is one fly in the ointment: in Bernanke’s production, all the Trumans – the economists, fund managers, traders, market pundits – know at some level that the environment in which they operate is not what it seems on the surface.

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We’re on day five since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, and there have been zero public leads as to what happened – just a lot of conflicting information and speculation. Which is ok – everyone seems to have a theory, and with the mystery deepening by the day, let’s look at where we stand.

I’ve tried to consume as much information as possible, and am stuck on three plausible theories for what happened:

1. The “Flight 93″ Theory: This blog post has been circulating on social media and I think it checks off some of the odd boxes of what we know so far. It posits a hijacking took place, with the hijackers (or flight crew turning off the transponders). The hijackers wanted the captain to fly to a major city to inflict some massive, 9/11-like damage, but instead the pilot at some point crashes in order to save the lives of others. The caveat here is this would have to happen without alerting passengers, since no 9/11-like phone calls were made. But this theory does explain why the change in direction, as well as why no terrorist organization has claimed credit – because it failed.

2. The “Pilot Intent” Theory: People have speculated about pilot error or some sort of accident – what if the captain, co-pilot and possibly the flight crew purposely crashed the plane? This was a theory floated by Alex Berenson, formerly of the New York Times. In his case, he raised the possibility of pilot suicide, followed by a locked cockpit and passengers unable to do anything. But that ignores the lack of phone calls like in the first theory. To broaden this theory out, let’s say it’s pilot intent – whether crashing on purpose or committing suicide. (This was a very experienced captain though). Even in these two theories there are lots of unanswered questions and unexplained occurrences. Which brings us to theory 3…

3. The “Anything Is Possible” Theory: All day yesterday we operated under the assumption the flight changed direction from Northeast to West and ended up last being tracked in the Straits of Malacca. Then, that went from fact to a possibility. We’re getting severely mixed signals from Malaysian authorities – so what if they know more than they’re letting on? What if the facts we’re operating under aren’t true at all? Obviously, every possibility would then be on the table. Maybe passengers did make phone calls, but those calls are being suppressed. Maybe there was some sort of embarrassing incident being covered up. Maybe they’ve already found the plane. If the facts, as we know them right now, aren’t the facts at all, truly anything is possible.

Have a theory? Tell me about it on Twitter at @SteveKrak

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Paul Kengor on Wilkow, 11 March, 2014. (Image Source: BlazeTV Screenshot)

Kengor and Wilkow partook in a conversation on a variety of topics from what a Reagan conservative truly is, to President Reagan’s faith and what Reagan’s policy would be today.

On this last point, Kengor neatly summarized Reagan’s overarching policy:

“The best poverty program is a job. And the way that you do that [create jobs] is you cut taxes, you deregulate, you put your faith not in the government but in the individual — in the entrepreneur…you allow people to keep  their money in the first place which they’ll invest more shrewdly, more smartly, more wisely than the government.”

Check out a clip from their timely discussion in light of the ongoing battle between the establishment and conservatives, and this past week’s events at CPAC.

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In her book, Glick puts forth a controversial plan that calls for the complete abandonment of the so-called two-state solution, to be replaced by the so-called one-state “Israeli solution,” involving Israel asserting its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and absorbing all citizens therein.

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post speaks with Glenn Beck on Feb. 5, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV) 

Below are ten quotes from our interview with Ms. Glick that provide expert insight into the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how it might be solved. All emphasis is ours.

1. U.S. foreign policy based on a two-state solution is a farce

“The United States has been pushing this idea of a two-state solution for over a generation. It was first pushed by the Nixon Administration in 1970 and it’s based on this totally false understanding of the Middle East which places Israel at the center of everything. It says that the size of Israel is really responsible for all the bad things in the Arab world, and if we can make Israel smaller than the problems will be smaller…The problem with this paradigm is that it’s totally false. Israel doesn’t dictate events in the Arab world. Those are dictated by internal issues in each Arab state…They all have to do with the internal dynamics and pathologies of Arab societies. But because the U.S. has been pushing this idea for so long, what has happened is that U.S. policymakers are fundamentally incapable of understanding the Middle East, because they’re basing everything on this false assumption of Israeli culpability.”

2. The U.S. is supporting a terrorist state

“…there’s something fundamentally wrong when the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is to push for the establishment of a terrorist state that is dedicated to destroying Israel but can’t figure out what to do about it because they’ve been told all of this time that Israel is the problem, or the absence of a Palestinian State is the problem; that if they care about Israel they should support America financing a Palestinian terrorist army and spending upwards of $500 million a year bankrolling Palestinian terrorists. It’s always been crazy, but that’s what people have been told and they’ve come to believe it over time.”

3. On Palestinian statehood

“…at base the Palestinian national movement since its inception in 1920 has not been about the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state but rather the destruction of the Jewish state or earlier the prevention of the establishment of a Jewish state and so it remains to this day which is why the PLO has consistently refused statehood every time it has been offered them since 1993.”

4. President Obama is pushing a false statistic to fear-monger on demographics

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“The demographic argument that President Obama made most recently in his interview with Jeff Goldberg is based on a complete falsification of demographic data by the PLO in 1997 that inflated the base Palestinian population by 50% and then asserted birth rates that had no equal throughout the world for the Palestinians, when in fact there’d been a collapse of Palestinian fertility rates over the past 15 years along with the rest of the Muslim world, and on the other hand, at the same time, there’s been a steep rise in Jewish fertility rates in Israel. Israeli women moved from 2 to 3 children per woman, and the Palestinians are down to below 3 children per woman, which means that Israel has already outpaced the Palestinians on fertility. The base population of Jews is twice the base population for Arabs to begin with and they’re hemorrhaging immigrants. And Israel has high and rising immigration rights…so demography is actually Israel’s strongest suit and I would just add to that that the concept if you establish a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria that this is going to avert a demographic disaster even based on the false demographic numbers that people like President Obama are pushing is completely wrong because they’re saying that a sovereign Palestinian state in those areas will have the right to absorb millions of foreign-born hostile Arabs who live today in Palestinian and UN-administered refugee camps in places like Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and these are terrorists. These are camps that are terrorist bases, run by terrorists, and so you’re talking about bringing in up to several million foreign Arabs into the Palestinian state. They will not be at peace with Israel and they will be using that area (even if local Palestinians didn’t want it to happen)…to make war against a shrunken Israel that would lack the basic capacity to defend itself because its borders would be so porous and indefensible. That would be the demographic disaster.”

5. The Palestinians are oppressed…by their fellow Arabs

“…they’ve [Palestinians have] been oppressed by Palestinian leaders and they’ve been oppressed by Arab leaders. The people who reside in those camps that I mentioned in places like Syria and Jordan and Lebanon have been denied the basic rights of citizenship that all other refugee populations are supposed to receive. They’ve been shunted from one place to another–in Lebanon they have no civil rights to speak of–they live under an apartheid regime where they’re not allowed entry into almost any profession in Lebanon and are therefore doomed to massive poverty – intergenerational poverty – as a consequence of this discriminatory policy against them. And they live in squalor and that is horrible. Under the PLO jackboot for the past 20 years the Palestinians of these areas have lived in an area ruled by the law of the jungle, by kleptomaniacs who have stolen billions of dollars in international aid funds that were supposed to go to building a state which their leaders of course were not interested in.

And they’ve suffered torture and of mass privation. As a result of that the Christians for instance have been targeted. Bethlehem was majority Christian when Israel handed it over to the PLO in 1996 and today I think only 12% of Bethlehem is now Christian. Their property has been stolen, their stores have been taken over by people who have forced them to immigrate to other lands. So they have been oppressed. But just not by Israel. Israel is the only force in the area that has actually provided them with a good life, with rights, with the protections of a liberal legal code, with universal education. Israel built all of the Palestinian universities. During the years they lived under Israeli military rule from 1967 through 1996 the Palestinian growth rate – their economy was consistently one point above Israel’s growth rate. They were fully integrated into Israeli society. The big problem for the Palestinians began with the PLO’s entrée into the areas under the guise of the so-called peace process of 1994.

6. Palestinians in the West Bank actually OPPOSE Israeli withdrawal

Palestinians wave national and PFLP flags during a protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah Sunday, July 28, 2013. Some two hundred supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine protested against the resuming of the peace talks with Israel. Despite such sentiments, Glick argues that Palestinians oppose Israeli withdrawal. (Credit: AP) 

“…the more PLO control over their lives, the less good their lives are, the poorer their lives are. This is why Israeli Arabs for instance when Israel began the negotiations with the PLO, for years they had never wanted to apply for Israeli citizenship….And then suddenly they started lining up by the thousands outside of the Ministry of the Interior to apply for Israeli citizenship. You saw Christian Arabs in Jerusalem increasingly moving into Jewish neighborhoods and away from Arab neighborhoods because they were frightened and they didn’t want to risk living under the control of the PLO. And so the tendency to apply for Israeli citizenship rises with any expectation that Israel may abandon the lands and we’ve seen similar things happen with the Druze of the Golan Heights who were given a similarly permanent residence and status after Israel applied its laws there as well in 1981…It’s also why the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria oppose economic boycotts of Israel – and other political isolation of Israel that is being propounded by their leadership at their expense.”

7. Bush and Obama’s Israeli policy substantively the same?

“…on a substantive basis, the fact that President Bush embraced the two-state paradigm meant that overall his policy regarding Israel and the Middle East generally was based on and therefore advanced the cause of this pathological view of both Israel and the Middle East that discarded reality and so even at the time when Bush gave his most seemingly pro-Israel speech on June 24, 2002, in the midst of a massive terror campaign by the Palestinians, the points that he set out were substantively difficult to distinguish from the policies that Obama has laid out in some of the most anti-Israel speeches that he has given as president. Because if that’s the model, even if you support Israel on a sort of visceral level like I think Bush did, the policy that you end up advancing is necessarily anti-Israel because the two-state paradigm is inherently anti-Israel. It places all the blame for everything on the Jews.”

8. Is there actually an alternative to the two-state paradigm?

“Well my column in tomorrow’s Jerusalem Post says that Obama left the door wide open to this in his interview with Jeff Golberg because he said “Nobody’s given us an alternative to this, and so you gotta do this because there’s no alternative.” Well no, that’s not true. I don’t know that Israel can go forward with anything like this with the Obama administration, but it can certainly prepare the ground for it – he’s not going to be president forever – because what Netanyahu I suggest in my article ought to do is say “Well, this is the alternative: applying Israeli law to all of these areas. Now I support a Palestinian state and two-state solution, however, we certainly have a viable alternative to it, so if they don’t want to give us an offer that we’re going to be able to live with then we’re just going to go our own way. It’s fine, don’t worry about us. We’re ok. And by the way your demographic statistics are complete lies.‘”

9. Is there a foreign policy Democrats and Republicans can get behind?

“…a policy that’s based on standing with America’s allies and trying to make them strong is possible and opposing America’s enemies, that’s just, in a way it’s obvious although it has not been the policy of any president in recent times. And so, Israel does not want American forces to be deployed in the Middle East to protect it – Israel has consistently rejected such proposals and I’ve always said “We’ll stand on our own two feet thank you very much for asking.” If America were to adapt this policy, it would save a half a billion dollars a year because it wouldn’t have to finance the Palestinian terrorist army any more – that would be a good thing – it’s a net savings. The United States is actually here required to do less, rather than more. It’s a policy model that the U.S. could easily adopt as well in places like Latin America and Asia. You want to scale back U.S. military involvement? Fine, then help the Japanese and the South Koreans defend themselves. It’s about being a good ally and I think that this is something that speaks to most people in the United States whether Democrats or Republicans. Americans are good and they want to do the right thing and they know that allies are better than enemies. This isn’t rocket science. This is schoolyard rules. If you’re good to your friends and bad to your enemies people will want to be your friends and they won’t want to be your enemies.”

10. President Obama has removed the safety net from Israel…and all is well

“…one of the consequences of Obama’s hostility towards Israel, guarded hostility towards Israel is that for the first time in a generation, Israel has had to think about how to defend herself in the absence of American support. And this has had a liberating impact on the Israeli political discourse because America had sort of in a way…cultivated a welfare mentality among Israelis talking about Israel not as an ally but as Condi Rice used to say patronizingly as a “friend” or a “special relationship” which people said was so important and wonderful, but they didn’t call us an ally as a serious strategic ally – and the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a resolution saying that which was very important. And Israelis are now feeling it more than they had in the past because when you don’t have a very cushy kind of security blanket to hold on to or a safety net underneath you then you have to really think carefully about what your options are or what you can do or what you can’t do, what you can sacrifice or what you have to maintain and so I think that you know from that perspective Israelis are much more independent after six years of Obama or five-and-a-half years of Obama then we were when he took office, and that’s good.”

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Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Follow Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) on Twitter

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In her book, Glick puts forth a controversial plan that calls for the complete abandonment of the so-called two-state solution, to be replaced by the so-called one-state “Israeli solution.”

In light of the growing rift between doves and hawks on the right, and the centrality of America’s relationship with Israel to our foreign policy, I asked Caroline Glick about her plan, and why libertarians should get behind it.

Here is how she described her plan [emphasis added]:

Featured Book

Title: The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East

Author: Caroline Glick

Purchase this book

The Israeli solution involves the application of Israeli law and through it Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea and Samaria — the West Bank of the Jordan — and providing the Palestinians who live there with automatic permanent residency status and the right to apply for Israeli citizenship in accordance with Israel citizenship law, and through that, the dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority and the abandonment of the two-state paradigm for peace-making. This is an idea, this is a policy that is based on an understanding that at base the Palestinian national movement since its inception in 1920 has not been about the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state but rather the destruction of the Jewish state or earlier the prevention of the establishment of a Jewish state and so it remains to this day which is why the PLO has consistently refused statehood every time it has been offered them since 1993. And so it’s about abandoning a fake idea, an idea that’s based on lies, that is that the Palestinians aspire first and foremost to a state of their own, and embracing instead the truth that Israel is capable of absorbing the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, and giving them what they’ve always lacked which is full civil rights, and through that their ability to determine their own fate as individuals and as members of a society of Israel.

And here is what Glick said in response to why libertarians should approve of it as an alternative policy:

I mean if you don’t want the United States to have to deploy overseas, and what you want is for the United States to have the strongest allies possible because the stronger your allies are the less you actually have to do because they can actually fight their own battles, Israel is essentially the only U.S. ally I think in the world that has never asked the United States to fight a battle for it. Britain brought the United States into World War II to save it by the way. But Israel’s never done that. America hasn’t ever had to send troops into battle in order to protect Israel. To the contrary all they’ve had to do is ship weapons to Israel which Israel then knows how to shoot straight and it does and it wins. So I mean this policy of strengthening Israel enables the United States to further disengage from the Middle East in a way though that protects America’s interests.

The other thing is that you know Israel is a liberal democracy. It’s not a totalitarian dictatorship. It’s not some sort of wild-eyed military dictatorship or whatever. It’s a liberal democracy. All Israelis support the United States so you know that anybody who comes into office is going to be pro-American. It’s not like you have to worry that tomorrow Israel’s going to have an election and everybody’s gonna hate America. It just doesn’t happen that way, so you know everybody knows that the Middle East is horrible and everybody knows that the Middle East “Ugh, we don’t want to hear about it anymore.” So fine, the way not to hear about the Middle East is to enable America’s allies first and foremost Israel to take care of themselves.

In response to a separate question, Glick added:

If America were to adapt this policy, it would save a half a billion dollars a year because it wouldn’t have to finance the Palestinian terrorist army any more – that would be a good thing – it’s a net savings. The United States is actually here required to do less, rather than more.

Be sure to check out the rest of our interview, in which we discuss issues ranging from how and what a one-state solution would look like, Glick’s debunking of the fallacious demographic numbers that leaders have been citing for almost two decades to argue for the two-state solution, to the true Palestinian oppressors, and the surprising similarities between Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama when it comes to Israel and views on the Middle East more broadly.

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The central premise of Glick’s — the Deputy Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post’s — book is that the two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians is unfeasible, legally, historically and morally unjustifiable, and based on a discredited world view. Glick argues instead for a one-state solution whereby Israel would apply Israeli law, and through it Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea and Samaria (commonly referred to as the West Bank).

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post speaks with Glenn Beck on Feb. 5, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)

Below is our interview, conducted with Glick from TheBlaze’s newsroom in Manhattan. The conversation has been transcribed and slightly modified for clarity. All emphasis is ours.

Give us your pitch for why Americans should be interested in this book.

Glick: The United States has been pushing this idea of a two-state solution for over a generation. It was first pushed by the Nixon Administration in 1970 and it’s based on this totally false understanding of the Middle East which places Israel at the center of everything. It says that the size of Israel is really responsible for all the bad things in the Arab world, and if we can make Israel smaller than the problems will be smaller. And the ultimate idea is partition and establishing a PLO state in areas that Israel controls.

The problem with this paradigm is that it’s totally false. Israel doesn’t dictate events in the Arab world. Those are dictated by internal issues in each Arab state as we’ve seen now with the revolutions going through all of them that have absolutely nothing to do with Israel. They all have to do with the internal dynamics and pathologies of Arab societies. But because the U.S. has been pushing this idea for so long, what has happened is that U.S. policymakers are fundamentally incapable of understanding the Middle East, because they’re basing everything on this false assumption of Israeli culpability. And once you start with that, you can’t think about anything else. So they didn’t understand Iraq when they went in, because they didn’t think about it. They didn’t understand Egypt when they decided to overthrow Mubarak because they didn’t think they had to think about it. They put everything into prisms, so “democracy,” “Israel,” “peace process” and they’re all very convenient but they’re all completely irrelevant.

Featured Book

Title: The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East

Author: Caroline Glick

Purchase this book

So what this book does is it shows why this is false, how devastating it has been for American policymakers’ capacity to analyze situations as they unfold based upon reality, and so I think it’s absolutely critical for Americans who are concerned about U.S. national security and their interests abroad. Furthermore, this has had a debilitating impact on Israel because basically you have the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is to pressure Israel, which is the U.S.’ only stable ally in the Middle East, and so by necessity this policy has weakened Israel, and as threats rise in every area of the Middle East against Israel or simply rise because of the massive instability and empowerment of the most radical extremist actors in the Muslim world in places like Syria, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia…and of course in Iran, Lebanon, you need Israel to be as strong as possible and so Israel itself has to get out from under the tyranny of the two-state paradigm, which places again all of the blame for everything on the Jews.

And so it’s imperative for Israel to get past this; it’s imperative for the United States to get past this and to move on and base a policy on reality. The policy that I put forward here seems radical, but actually it’s not at all radical because it’s based entirely on reality and fact, statistics…and interests and values. And what it says is, the West Bank of the Jordan River, what we in Israel refer to as Judea and Samaria, is part of Israel: by law, by national rights. And Israel has to control it for those reasons as well as for military necessity because it can’t defend itself without them.

As I argue in my book, America is much better off having an Israel that is stable and capable of defending itself against all aggressors because the stronger Israel is the more secure U.S. interests are and so this book is both for people who are involved in policy and national security, it’s also for people who care about Israel, and understand that there’s something fundamentally wrong when the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is to push for the establishment of a terrorist state that is dedicated to destroying Israel but can’t figure out what to do about it because they’ve been told all of this time that Israel is the problem, or the absence of a Palestinian State is the problem; that if they care about Israel they should support America financing a Palestinian terrorist army and spending upwards of $500 million a year bankrolling Palestinian terrorists. It’s always been crazy, but that’s what people have been told and they’ve come to believe it over time. It was always a lie, and so that’s something else that I focus on in my book and I think is critical for people to understand.

Describe what the “Israeli solution” is.

Glick: The Israeli solution involves the application of Israeli law and through it Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea and Samaria — the West Bank of the Jordan — and providing the Palestinians who live there with automatic permanent residency status and the right to apply for Israeli citizenship in accordance with Israel citizenship law, and through that, the dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority and the abandonment of the two-state paradigm for peace-making. This is an idea, this is a policy that is based on an understanding that at base the Palestinian national movement since its inception in 1920 has not been about the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state but rather the destruction of the Jewish state or earlier the prevention of the establishment of a Jewish state and so it remains to this day which is why the PLO has consistently refused statehood every time it has been offered them since 1993. And so it’s about abandoning a fake idea, an idea that’s based on lies, that is that the Palestinians aspire first and foremost to a state of their own, and embracing instead the truth that Israel is capable of absorbing the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, and giving them what they’ve always lacked which is full civil rights, and through that their ability to determine their own fate as individuals and as members of a society of Israel.

U.S. and Israeli administrations alike have both spoken to the demographic disaster that will face the Israelis if they are to maintain the status quo given the growth rates of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Describe how Israel could go about absorbing mass numbers of Palestinians and still be a viable entity.

Glick: Well what we’re talking about is giving permanent residency status in the first instance to approximately 1.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and that in addition to about 1.6 million Arab Israeli citizens who already live in Israel would make Arabs jump to around 30-32% of Israel. The demographic argument that President Obama made most recently in his interview with Jeff Goldberg is based on a complete falsification of demographic data by the PLO in 1997 that inflated the base Palestinian population by 50% and then asserted birth rates that had no equal throughout the world for the Palestinians, when in fact there’d been a collapse of Palestinian fertility rates over the past 15 years along with the rest of the Muslim world, and on the other hand, at the same time, there’s been a steep rise in Jewish fertility rates in Israel. Israeli women moved from 2 to 3 children per woman, and the Palestinians are down to below 3 children per woman, which means that Israel has already outpaced the Palestinians on fertility. The base population of Jews is twice the base population for Arabs to begin with and they’re hemorrhaging immigrants. And Israel has high and rising immigration rights…so demography is actually Israel’s strongest suit and I would just add to that that the concept if you establish a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria that this is going to avert a demographic disaster even based on the false demographic numbers that people like President Obama are pushing is completely wrong because they’re saying that a sovereign Palestinian state in those areas will have the right to absorb millions of foreign-born hostile Arabs who live today in Palestinian and UN-administered refugee camps in places like Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and these are terrorists. These are camps that are terrorist bases, run by terrorists, and so you’re talking about bringing in up to several million foreign Arabs into the Palestinian state. They will not be at peace with Israel and they will be using that area (even if local Palestinians didn’t want it to happen)…to make war against a shrunken Israel that would lack the basic capacity to defend itself because its borders would be so porous and indefensible. That would be the demographic disaster.

One of the points you make in your book that is often overlooked is that the living standards for Palestinians during times of relative peace has increased exponentially and at a disproportionate rate versus the rest of the Arab world. Speak a little bit to the narrative that the Palestinians have been “oppressed” since the creation of the state of Israel.

Glick: Well to a certain degree it’s true. But they haven’t been oppressed by Israel, they’ve been oppressed by Palestinian leaders and they’ve been oppressed by Arab leaders. The people who reside in those camps that I mentioned in places like Syria and Jordan and Lebanon have been denied the basic rights of citizenship that all other refugee populations are supposed to receive. They’ve been shunted from one place to another–in Lebanon they have no civil rights to speak of–they live under an apartheid regime where they’re not allowed entry into almost any profession in Lebanon and are therefore doomed to massive poverty – intergenerational poverty – as a consequence of this discriminatory policy against them. And they live in squalor and that is horrible. Under the PLO jackboot for the past 20 years the Palestinians of these areas have lived in an area ruled by the law of the jungle, by kleptomaniacs who have stolen billions of dollars in international aid funds that were supposed to go to building a state which their leaders of course were not interested in. And they’ve suffered torture and of mass privation. As a result of that the Christians for instance have been targeted. Bethlehem was majority Christian when Israel handed it over to the PLO in 1996 and today I think only 12% of Bethlehem is now Christian. Their property has been stolen, their stores have been taken over by people who have forced them to immigrate to other lands. So they have been oppressed. But just not by Israel. Israel is the only force in the area that has actually provided them with a good life, with rights, with the protections of a liberal legal code, with universal education. Israel built all of the Palestinian universities. During the years they lived under Israeli military rule from 1967 through 1996 the Palestinian growth rate – their economy was consistently one point above Israel’s growth rate. They were fully integrated into Israeli society. The big problem for the Palestinians began with the PLO’s entrée into the areas under the guise of the so-called peace process of 1994.

To this end, you cite a 2012 poll that showed that Palestinians are more strongly opposed to Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria than Israelis. Explain to Americans why that is.

Glick: Look at what happened in Gaza – when Israel left, Gaza became a jihad state. It’s a hub for global jihad – any semblance of residual civil rights is gone and the Palestinians who live in the West Bank don’t want that for themselves. They know exactly what happens — the more PLO control over their lives, the less good their lives are, the poorer their lives are. This is why Israeli Arabs for instance when Israel began the negotiations with the PLO, for years they had never wanted to apply for Israeli citizenship. They had never done it. The number of Israeli Arabs who had applied for Israeli citizenship, you could almost count it on your fingers. And then suddenly they started lining up by the thousands outside of the Ministry of the Interior to apply for Israeli citizenship. You saw Christian Arabs in Jerusalem increasingly moving into Jewish neighborhoods and away from Arab neighborhoods because they were frightened and they didn’t want to risk living under the control of the PLO. And so the tendency to apply for Israeli citizenship rises with any expectation that Israel may abandon the lands and we’ve seen similar things happen with the Druze of the Golan Heights who were given a similarly permanent residence and status after Israel applied its laws there as well in 1981. So, they know exactly what Israel is. It’s also why the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria oppose economic boycotts of Israel – and other political isolation of Israel that is being propounded by their leadership at their expense.

One of the things you speak to in your book is that the distinction between Presidents George W. Bush and Barck Obama is “rhetorical, not real.” Many in the U.S. tend to think of Bush as being a strong, pro-Israeli figure, and Obama as being a hostile figure. Explain the “rhetorical, not real” phrase.

Glick: I think it’s true that at base the inclination of President Bush was much more sympathetic towards Israel, and the basic inclination of President Obama is hostility, is to be hostile towards Israel. I think that is borne out now on a daily basis with all the actions that are being undertaken by the White House to downgrade Israel’s status in the United States. But on a substantive basis, the fact that President Bush embraced the two-state paradigm meant that overall his policy regarding Israel and the Middle East generally was based on and therefore advanced the cause of this pathological view of both Israel and the Middle East that discarded reality and so even at the time when Bush gave his most seemingly pro-Israel speech on June 24, 2002, in the midst of a massive terror campaign by the Palestinians, the points that he set out were substantively difficult to distinguish from the policies that Obama has laid out in some of the most anti-Israel speeches that he has given as president. Because if that’s the model, even if you support Israel on a sort of visceral level like I think Bush did, the policy that you end up advancing is necessarily anti-Israel because the two-state paradigm is inherently anti-Israel. It places all the blame for everything on the Jews.

You speak frequently in your book to the “Soviet-Arab anti-Israel” worldview. What does this view represent, and can you explain how the West came to espouse it? 

Glick: As I explain in my book, after World War II it became sort of socially unacceptable to be anti-Semitic. But anti-Semitic feelings that formed the basis of the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the expansion of their ideology to many of the lands that they conquered during the war was based upon widespread hatred of Jews that had been existent in Europe for over 1,000 years. That hatred doesn’t go away overnight just because people are embarrassed suddenly at the site of death camps to express it in public. What the Soviets did in the late 1940s is they figured out a way to transpose Jew-hatred, which was politically unacceptable or socially unacceptable after World War II to anti-Zionism, so they simply made Zionism — the Jewish national liberation movement — the new Jew. We saw it already in expressions by Soviet leaders immediately after the war basically, but certainly from 1949 on it became a central narrative which is why leading Jews who were being purged by Stalin weren’t attacked for being “Jewish,” they were attacked as “Zionist.” The head of the Hungarian Communist party Rudolf Slansky and other Jews were sentenced to death and show trials in 1953 as Zionist agents, and it was clear to everybody that what they were were Jews, and that this was the beginning of a major campaign that Stalin would have enacted against the Jews in the Soviet sphere if he hadn’t died thankfully on Purim in 1953. So the Soviets took this and they said “Ok, if we say that Zionism is now the new repository of all of the things that everybody hates in the post-war era, specifically imperialism, racism – it won’t matter that Zionism was an anti-imperialist movement – that Zionists fought first the Ottoman Empire and then the British Empire to gain independence in those colonial possessions that had been granted to the Jews under international law as their sovereign state.” History as we know in the Soviet Union was one of the most malleable things in the world for them, and what they did was they said “No, we’re going to ignore everything and we’re going to take this Zionism and we’re going to pretend that it’s all of the things we struggle against in our war with the United States.” And so they began claiming that Israel is imperialist, Israel is colonialist, and all the rest. And it was very convenient because all of the passionate anti-Semitism the Europeans didn’t feel comfortable expressing any longer – they could put into this.

Hajj Amin Al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler in 1941. Husseini was the anti-Semitic and militant founder of Palestinian nationalism. (Photo: German Federal Archives via Wikipedia)

Arafat was the successor of Haj Amin al-Husseini who was the founder of Palestinian nationalism. Haj Amin al-Husseini in a way had an easier time than Arafat did as I explain in my book because he lived at a time when the fashionable position was Nazism. It was the default position of all of the bon ton to be a Nazi and to support the annihilation of the Jewish people. So anti-Semitism was an incredibly popular position to have in the 1930s when he was most active and rising in prominence, and so when he was calling for the annihilation of Jewry in the Arab world and the annihilation of the Jews in the Palestine mandate, there were a lot of people who thought that that made a lot of sense. And then Arafat came along in the 1950s when it’s no longer acceptable to say kill the Jews, slaughter the Jews, throw them all into the sea. So the Soviet sort of merging with the Arab nationalists through Nasser and then through Arafat after the Six Day War were able to take a position that was fundamentally at odds with the kind of zeitgeist of the 1950s of seeking the physical annihilation of the Jews and turn it into something that was politically and socially acceptable by claiming that it’s really an anti-colonialist movement, an anti-imperialist movement and that it’s not Jews per se, it’s Zionists. The fact that Zionists are Jews and all Jews as far as they’re concerned are Zionists is immaterial because what was important was to transpose it into something seemingly different and we see that now of course today has become really the new wave of anti-Semitism, Jew-hatred that is really spreading all over the Western world. And its again in this guise of anti-Zionism based upon such flimsy lies that the only way you can believe them is if it’s part of a basic belief structure of faith because there’s no basis for any of these efforts to malign Israel, in fact.

Bringing this forward to today, you speak to a refrain in President Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 in which he refers to the “Muslim world.” In your book you describe this as an “Islamist concept,” (presumably referring to the ummah), and Obama’s use as signaling “an acceptance of the…view that all Muslims are motivated to act by the same totalitarian religious and political impulses that inform the actions of Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.” Explain.

Glick: Obama is interesting because this whole – if the two-state paradigm is essentially saying we don’t have to think about anything it’s all Israel’s fault, the concept of the ummah is the flip side of that which goes in the same direction, it’s all Israel’s fault, but you don’t have to think about the Muslims, you don’t have to think about anything that’s happening in Cairo in Egyptian society. You don’t have to think about anything that’s happening in Syrian society, in Iraqi society, because everybody is part of an ummah. And there’s no distinction – a billion Arabs or Muslims worldwide have more in common that distinguishes them from one another because they’re all Muslim – that cancels the individual. That’s a very totalitarian way of looking at the world that we’re all the same simply because we share the same faith. It cancels individual will. So, if anti-Semitism at the base of the two-state solution that gets to blame the Jews for everything is also something that ends thought as opposed to enabling it, then the whole concept of the ummah as well is something that ends thought as opposed to enabling it. In both cases you’re told that you have an all-encompassing explanation for everything that happens or everything that ought to happen – what motivates individuals to act – that doesn’t require you to think at all.

Could Israel actually pursue the solution that you propose in an Obama age?

Glick: Well my column in tomorrow’s Jerusalem Post says that Obama left the door wide open to this in his interview with Jeff Golberg because he said “Nobody’s given us an alternative to this, and so you gotta do this because there’s no alternative.” Well no, that’s not true. I don’t know that Israel can go forward with anything like this with the Obama administration, but it can certainly prepare the ground for it – he’s not going to be president forever – because what Netanyahu I suggest in my article ought to do is say “Well, this is the alternative: applying Israeli law to all of these areas. Now I support a Palestinian state and two-state solution, however, we certainly have a viable alternative to it, so if they don’t want to give us an offer that we’re going to be able to live with then we’re just going to go our own way. It’s fine, don’t worry about us. We’re ok. And by the way your demographic statistics are complete lies.” You know if Netanyahu were to say that, he would be able to park Israel so to speak in a much better place vis-à-vis the Palestinians for the duration of the Obama administration than he can do without asserting this because we have to begin to change the discourse on the Palestinian conflict with Israel because the way that it is now is that nobody’s thinking at all. Israel’s friends are not thinking. Israel’s opponents are not thinking because everybody has agreed that Israel for demographic reasons which again are wholly false, needs a Palestinian state more than the PLO does, and therefore the terms of such an agreement that is reached between Israel and the PLO are far less important than actually reaching that agreement. Well that’s crazy, it’s not true. So simply by saying “Yes, actually you know, dear president, we have an alternative, and here let me just set it out, not saying that I’m adopting it, like I said it’s not the position of my government that this should go forward, but this is – you know two bills have been submitted to the Knesset in the current session calling for Israel to apply its laws to various parts of Judea and Samaria – this is the hot item in town. You know maybe you’re not paying attention to what’s going on but over half of my Knesset faction in the Likud supports this. One of our major coalition partners supports this, so yea we have an alternative. What do you think?”

On post-Obama U.S.-Israeli relations

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, looks towards President Barack Obama as he speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, left. (Credit: AP) 

Glick: Senate Democrats right now are beholden to Obama because they have the 2014 election cycle to think about. But I’m convinced that most Democrats support Israel. Most Democratic politicians support Israel. Right now they’re being cowed by the administration into supporting the administration against Israel, but after the 2014 elections I think that the Democrats are going to feel much freer to take independent stands on issues then they can now because Obama is going to determine who gets full financing for their election campaigns and all of the rest of it. But in 2016, the person who’s going to be calling the shots in the Democratic party is going to be the presidential nominee. It’s not going to be the lame duck president. So things are going to change in terms of the power equation that Democrats are going to be making after November and that is significant. The other significant thing is that the Republicans as well right now are veering between two policy paradigms of foreign policy-making that have been discredited by events. The first one is sort of the Rand Paul, neo-isolationism: Well that was discredited in 9/11, and everybody knows it, so he can get traction from time-to-time with people who are just fed up, but in general that’s not something that resonates with either the Republican Party or the general public in the United States as best as I can tell. People don’t want to get involved but they don’t want to close America off to the world and they understand that’s not a possibility – it’s not a real option…at base he is in the mind of the public the representative of the neo-isolationist policy school in the Republican Party. And on the other hand you have someone like Senator John McCain who supported the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and supported the overthrow of Gadaffi in Libya because he has this sort of neo-conservative view — sort of this pollyanish view of the prospects for liberal democracy taking seed in places where it has no roots, and so that was discredited by the Iraq War. McCain can make good points on this that or the other, but when his basic outlook is something the American people think failed in Iraq – rightly or wrongly believe failed in Iraq, it’s not something that’s going to capture the public’s attention or imagination.

But this book will – you know a policy that’s based on standing with America’s allies and trying to make them strong is possible and opposing America’s enemies, that’s just, in a way it’s obvious although it has not been the policy of any president in recent times. And so, Israel does not want American forces to be deployed in the Middle East to protect it – Israel has consistently rejected such proposals and I’ve always said “We’ll stand on our own two feet thank you very much for asking.” If America were to adapt this policy, it would save a half a billion dollars a year because it wouldn’t have to finance the Palestinian terrorist army any more – that would be a good thing – it’s a net savings. The United States is actually here required to do less, rather than more. It’s a policy model that the U.S. could easily adopt as well in places like Latin America and Asia. You want to scale back U.S. military involvement? Fine, then help the Japanese and the South Koreans defend themselves. It’s about being a good ally and I think that this is something that speaks to most people in the United States whether Democrats or Republicans. Americans are good and they want to do the right thing and they know that allies are better than enemies. This isn’t rocket science. This is schoolyard rules. If you’re good to your friends and bad to your enemies people will want to be your friends and they won’t want to be your enemies. Unfortunately that model has been turned on its head in recent times – people want to try to be too clever by half and they say, “Oh, well if we keep our allies at bay and we try to draw our enemies in then everybody will be happy, we’ll end up with some sort of happy equilibrium” – that never happens. When you empower your enemies your enemies become more powerful. When you weaken your allies they become weaker. And they still remain your allies on one hand and your enemies on the other hand, but you just weakened yourself by doing what you just did. Get it? So I think that this policy, although first and foremost the focus is of course Israel and the Palestinians, its ramifications are far wider and I would love it if it would be the basis for a renewed post-Obama U.S. foreign policy. I would love it for Israel. I would love it for America. I would love it for the rest of the free world that is now struggling under the shadow of Obama’s presidency.

Your solution requires an Israel with the ability and willingness to assert itself. Having worked with Prime Minister Netanyahu during his prior tenure in office, and understanding Israel’s internal politics well, and given Netanyahu’s prior land concessions and terrorists swaps, can he and would he the solution you propose in this book?

Glick: Well I know that Netanyahu believes in most of the points in the book, because he made most of the same points in his own books. These are the positions in terms of defending Israel’s rights and pointing out the fallacy of the concept of Palestinian nationalism from the get-go – these are arguments that Netanyahu has made throughout his life. In terms of where he is now politically and in relation to this, is he going to do this tomorrow? I doubt it. But this has become a very serious proposition in Israeli society and Israeli politics. The conversation in Israel began just a few years ago about this, so as demographic data began percolating deeper and deeper inside Israeli society, people got that the demographic time bomb is a dud and that it’s one of our chief assets, not liabilities. That opened the door for a conversation about what Israel’s assets are [with demographics being] one of the central points that has been presented by serious leaders in Israel. So I think that the internal politics of Israel are becoming prepared for this and I think that oddly or ironically one of the outcomes, one of the consequences of Obama’s hostility towards Israel, guarded hostility towards Israel is that for the first time in a generation, Israel has had to think about how to defend herself in the absence of American support. And this has had a liberating impact on the Israeli political discourse because America had sort of in a way…cultivated a welfare mentality among Israelis talking about Israel not as an ally but as Condi Rice used to say patronizingly as a “friend” or a “special relationship” which people said was so important and wonderful, but they didn’t call us an ally as a serious strategic ally – and the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a resolution saying that which was very important. And Israelis are now feeling it more than they had in the past because when you don’t have a very cushy kind of security blanket to hold on to or a safety net underneath you then you have to really think carefully about what your options are or what you can do or what you can’t do, what you can sacrifice or what you have to maintain and so I think that you know from that perspective Israelis are much more independent after six years of Obama or five-and-a-half years of Obama then we were when he took office, and that’s good.

On Israeli leftism…

Glick: …Well Americans almost only see Israeli leftists. Those are the people that are invited to speak and get op-eds in the major newspapers and speak for major audiences here because they reflect back the basic prejudices and notions that have become the bon ton here in America. So you know most Americans are not at all aware of what’s happening in Israel politically. Most Americans are not aware at all that the left in Israel has been completely marginalized. And their chances of getting elected to form a government are essentially zero. But they don’t recognize that because they’re not listening to mainstream Israeli politicians, they’re listening to much more marginal voices in Israeli politics and society so they have a distorted view.

One of the nefarious actions of the Obama administration in relation to Israel has been U.S. meddling on the ground to try to alter Israel’s internal politics and undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu, as reflected in articles by yourself and Eli Lake. Can you talk a bit about what is going on internally and what the Obama administration is trying to do on the ground?

Glick: I think that they fundamentally didn’t understand what has happened in Israel over the past 20 years. When Rahm Emanuel was chief of staff when Obama first came into office he essentially said we’re going to overthrow Netanyahu…he made [some statement] indicating that they would overthrow Netanyahu in 2009 or 2010 just as the Clinton administration had done in 1999 when Clinton sent his election advisors – [James] Carville, [Robert] Shrum and [Stanley] Greenberg to Israel to oversee Ehud Barak’s election campaign for the 1999 elections. And really just took over the whole thing and Clinton’s behavior towards Netanyahu was essentially part of an overall campaign that they were managing to overthrow Netanyahu’s government – destabilize and then overthrow it, and replace it with Ehud Barak’s government. And Israel was in a much different place in 1999 then it is today, then it was in 2009. You know we hadn’t had the complete discreditation of the peace process, [Yitzak] Rabin’s assassination was a very fresh memory for most Israelis, and the left was able to “raise the bloody flag,” and Yasser Arafat hadn’t rejected Palestinian statehood and peace and opened up this massive terrorist campaign against Israel. He would only do that while [Ehud] Barak was Prime Minister in 2000. So you know none of the truly horrible things had happened and Israeli society was in a different place, but by 2009 when Obama came into office it wasn’t going to be possible to overthrow Netanyahu using the same strategies that they used in 1999 because Israeli society had moved on. We had not only suffered from the disillusionment with the concept of peace because we realized that the Palestinians were fundamentally dishonest about their intentions towards Israel but we also recognized we can’t even leave on our own. You know we tried it in Lebanon in 2000 and it blew up in our face and then five years later we did it again in Gaza and had by 2009 suffered over 13,000 missile strikes on Israel from Gaza. So you know Israeli society was in a different place then, and the Obama administration didn’t realize and so all of their tinkering with Israeli politics – it’s just not effective – every time that they’ve tried to weaken Netanyahu they’ve strengthened him. Every time that they’ve publicly humiliated him his polling numbers have gone up. Israelis are just not moved by the same things today that they were moved by when Clinton was president and so they’ve failed.

Make the case for why liberty-oriented Americans should care about Israel and why this plan is a pro-libertarian plan.

Glick: I mean if you don’t want the United States to have to deploy overseas, and what you want is for the United States to have the strongest allies possible because the stronger your allies are the less you actually have to do because they can actually fight their own battles, Israel is essentially the only U.S. ally I think in the world that has never asked the United States to fight a battle for it. Britain brought the United States into World War II to save it by the way. But Israel’s never done that. America hasn’t ever had to send troops into battle in order to protect Israel. To the contrary all they’ve had to do is ship weapons to Israel which Israel then knows how to shoot straight and it does and it wins. So I mean this policy of strengthening Israel enables the United States to further disengage from the Middle East in a way though that protects America’s interests.

The other thing is that you know Israel is a liberal democracy. It’s not a totalitarian dictatorship. It’s not some sort of wild-eyed military dictatorship or whatever. It’s a liberal democracy. All Israelis support the United States so you know that anybody who comes into office is going to be pro-American. It’s not like you have to worry that tomorrow Israel’s going to have an election and everybody’s gonna hate America. It just doesn’t happen that way, so you know everybody knows that the Middle East is horrible and everybody knows that the Middle East “Ugh, we don’t want to hear about it anymore.” So fine, the way not to hear about the Middle East is to enable America’s allies first and foremost Israel to take care of themselves.

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Posted online Sunday, the 26-second video started making the rounds on the Internet Monday morning. It quickly found its way to the front page of Reddit and has since inspired countless laughs.

“Funniest video ever,” one individual declared on YouTube.

“I have never laughed so hard before,” echoed another.

Watch the Viral Video:

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Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner pictured during testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee May 22, 2013 in Washington, DC. AFP PHOTO / Karen BLEIER (Photo credit should read KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

Lo and behold, in the annals of history it turns out there was an Anti-Federalist paper, number VI, published by “Brutus” writing on December 27, 1787 that foretold of a central government whose tyranny would manifest itself through the power of taxation. The government would grow replete with an army of officers — including tax collectors — controlling and regulating everything we hold dear, while subsuming the power of state governments (and ultimately the people), that citizens today are in part trying to restore.

In the below passage, “Brutus,” likely New York judge Robert Yates, ominously and presciently sums up his concerns on the power of federal taxation and what it will do to the states:

This power [federal taxation and the authority to collect such funds], exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every comer of the city, and country — It will wait upon the ladies at their toilett, and will not leave them in any of their domestic concerns; it will accompany them to the ball, the play, and the assembly; it will go with them when they visit, and will, on all occasions, sit beside them in their carriages, nor will it desert them even at church; it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlour, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks; it will attend him to his bed-chamber, and watch him while he sleeps; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office, or his study; it will watch the merchant in the counting-house, or in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop, and in his work, and will haunt him in his family, and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labour, it will be with him in the house, and in the field, observe the toil of his hands, and the sweat of his brow; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE! GIVE!

A power that has such latitude, which reaches every person in the community in every conceivable circumstance, and lays hold of every species of property they possess, and which has no bounds set to it, but the discretion of those who exercise it[,] I say, such a power must necessarily, from its very nature, swallow up all the power of the state governments.

Read these quotes in context of the below fuller excerpt from Anti-Federalist VI, and you won’t be able to say that we weren’t warned about taxation, its threat to states’ rights and the danger of the general welfare clause of the Constitution [emphasis added]:

What will render this power in Congress effectual and sure in its operation is, that the government will have complete judicial and executive authority to carry all their laws into effect, which will be paramount to the judicial and executive authority of the individual states: in vain therefore will be all interference of the legislatures, courts, or magistrates of any of the states on the subject; for they will be subordinate to the general government, and engaged by oath to support it, and will be constitutionally bound to submit to their decisions.

The general legislature will be empowered to lay any tax they chuse, to annex any penalties they please to the breach of their revenue laws; and to appoint as many officers as they may think proper to collect the taxes. They will have authority to farm the revenues and to vest the farmer general, with his subalterns, with plenary powers to collect them, in any way which to them may appear eligible. And the courts of law, which they will be authorized to institute, will have cognizance of every case arising under the revenue laws, the conduct of all the officers employed in collecting them; and the officers of these courts will execute their judgments. There is no way, therefore, of avoiding the destruction of the state governments, whenever the Congress please to do it, unless the people rise up, and, with a strong hand, resist and prevent the execution of constitutional laws. The fear of this, will, it is presumed, restrain the general government, for some time, within proper bounds; but it will not be many years before they will have a revenue, and force, at their command, which will place them above any apprehensions on that score.

How far the power to lay and collect duties and excises, may operate to dissolve the state governments, and oppress the people, it is impossible to say. It would assist us much in forming a just opinion on this head, to consider the various objects to which this kind of taxes extend, in European nations, and the infinity of laws they have passed respecting them. Perhaps, if leisure will permit, this may be essayed in some future paper.

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 19: Nancy Riordan holds a sign while participating in a Tea Party rally at the U.S. Capitol, June 19, 2013 in Washington, DC. The group Tea Party Patriots hosted the rally to protest against the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting Tea Party and grassroots organizations for harassment. Credit: Getty Images

It was observed in my last number, that the power to lay and collect duties and excises, would invest the Congress with authority to impose a duty and excise on every necessary and convenience of life. As the principal object of the government, in laying a duty or excise, will be, to raise money, it is obvious, that they will fix on such articles as are of the most general use and consumption; because, unless great quantities of the article, on which the duty is laid, is used, the revenue cannot be considerable. We may therefore presume, that the articles which will be the object of this species of taxes will be either the real necessaries of life; or if not these, such as from custom and habit are esteemed so. I will single out a few of the productions of our own country, which may, and probably will, be of the number.

Cider is an article that most probably will be one of those on which an excise will be laid, because it is one, which this country produces in great abundance, which is in very general use, is consumed in great quantities, and which may be said too not to be a real necessary of life. An excise on this would raise a large sum of money in the United States. How would the power, to lay and collect an excise on cider, and to pass all laws proper and necessary to carry it into execution, operate in its exercise? It might be necessary, in order to collect the excise on cider, to grant to one man, in each county, an exclusive right of building and keeping cider-mills, and oblige him to give bonds and security for payment of the excise; or, if this was not done, it might be necessary to license the mills, which are to make this liquor, and to take from them security, to account for the excise; or, if otherwise, a great number of officers must be employed, to take account of the cider made, and to collect the duties on it.

Porter, ale, and all kinds of malt-liquors, are articles that would probably be subject also to an excise. It would be necessary, in order to collect such an excise, to regulate the manufactory of these, that the quantity made might be ascertained or otherwise security could not be had for the payment of the excise. Every brewery must then be licensed, and officers appointed, to take account of its product, and to secure the payment of the duty, or excise, before it is sold. Many other articles might be named, which would be objects of this species of taxation, but I refrain from enumerating them. It will probably be said, by those who advocate this system, that the observations already made on this head, are calculated only to inflame the minds of the people, with the apprehension of dangers merely imaginary. That there is not the least reason to apprehend, the general legislature will exercise their power in this manner. To this I would only say, that these kinds of taxes exist in Great Britain, and are severely felt. The excise on cider and perry, was imposed in that nation a few years ago, and it is in the memory of every one, who read the history of the transaction, what great tumults it occasioned.

This power, exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every comer of the city, and country — It will wait upon the ladies at their toilett, and will not leave them in any of their domestic concerns; it will accompany them to the ball, the play, and the assembly; it will go with them when they visit, and will, on all occasions, sit beside them in their carriages, nor will it desert them even at church; it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlour, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks; it will attend him to his bed-chamber, and watch him while he sleeps; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office, or his study; it will watch the merchant in the counting-house, or in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop, and in his work, and will haunt him in his family, and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labour, it will be with him in the house, and in the field, observe the toil of his hands, and the sweat of his brow; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE! GIVE!

A power that has such latitude, which reaches every person in the community in every conceivable circumstance, and lays hold of every species of property they possess, and which has no bounds set to it, but the discretion of those who exercise it[,] I say, such a power must necessarily, from its very nature, swallow up all the power of the state governments.

I shall add but one other observation on this head, which is this — It appears to me a solecism, for two men, or bodies of men, to have unlimited power respecting the same object. It contradicts the scripture maxim, which saith, “no man can serve two masters,” the one power or the other must prevail, or else they will destroy each other, and neither of them effect their purpose. It may be compared to two mechanic powers, acting upon the same body in opposite directions, the consequence would be, if the powers were equal, the body would remain in a state of rest, or if the force of the one was superior to that of the other, the stronger would prevail, and overcome the resistance of the weaker.

But it is said, by some of the advocates of this system, “That the idea that Congress can levy taxes at pleasure, is false, and the suggestion wholly unsupported: that the preamble to the constitution is declaratory of the purposes of the union, and the assumption of any power not necessary to establish justice, &c. to provide for the common defence, &c. will be unconstitutional. Besides, in the very clause which gives the power of levying duties and taxes, the purposes to which the money shall be appropriated, are specified, viz. to pay the debts, and provide for the common defence and general welfare.” I would ask those, who reason thus, to define what ideas are included under the terms, to provide for the common defence and general welfare? Are these terms definite, and will they be understood in the same manner, and to apply to the same cases by every one? No one will pretend they will. It will then be matter of opinion, what tends to the general welfare; and the Congress will be the only judges in the matter. To provide for the general welfare, is an abstract proposition, which mankind differ in the explanation of, as much as they do on any political or moral proposition that can be proposed; the most opposite measures may be pursued by different parties, and both may profess, that they have in view the general welfare; and both sides may be honest in their professions, or both may have sinister views. Those who advocate this new constitution declare, they are influenced by a regard to the general welfare; those who oppose it, declare they are moved by the same principle; and I have no doubt but a number on both sides are honest in their professions; and yet nothing is more certain than this, that to adopt this constitution, and not to adopt it, cannot both of them be promotive of the general welfare.

It is as absurd to say, that the power of Congress is limited by these general expressions, “to provide for the common safety, and general welfare,” as it would be to say, that it would be limited, had the constitution said they should have power to lay taxes, &c. at will and pleasure. Were this authority given, it might be said, that under it the legislature could not do injustice, or pursue any measures, but such as were calculated to promote the public good, and happiness. For every man, rulers as well as others, are bound by the immutable laws of God and reason, always to will what is right. It is certainly right and fit, that the governors of every people should provide for the common defence and general welfare; every government, therefore, in the world, even the greatest despot, is limited in the exercise of his power. But however just this reasoning may be, it would be found, in practice, a most pitiful restriction. The government would always say, their measures were designed and calculated to promote the public good; and there being no judge between them and the people, the rulers themselves must, and would always, judge for themselves.

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Attendees at the event, held at the Gaylord hotel in National Harbor, Md., picked Paul with 31 percent of the vote, nearly three times the votes that went to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who came in second.

Also notable: 62 percent of attendees said marijuana should be legalized for either medical or recreational purposes.

The poll is commissioned by the Washington Times.

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Credit: Eddie Scarry/TheBlaze

Friday night at the “Breitbart Embassay” in Washington, D.C., the conservative outfit threw a speakeasy-themed party in light of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Likeminded media types and some others ate shrimp, drank and  smoked freshly-rolled cigars while listening to the live big band playing in the living room.

In the kitchen, TheBlaze Blog spotted Republican Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert chatting up some friends and fans. We asked if he was attending any of the CPAC speeches. He said no but that he caught some on TV, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Perry’s speech earlier in the day electrified the crowd and might have been the start of his second bid for the Republican presidential nomination (he lost his first one in 2012 to Mitt Romney). We asked Gohmert if he thought Perry was going to run.

“Do you think there’s any shot he won’t run?” Gohmert asked rhetorically, indicating a certainty that Perry will run.

A supporter of Gohmert who was overhearing our conversation then walked up to introduce himself. He said Perry’s new spectacles are as good a sign as any that he’ll run. “It’s probably to make him look smart after that debate,” the Gohmert fan said, referring to the 2012 GOP primary debate when Perry tried naming three federal government departments, but failed to recall the third he wanted (“oops”).

At that, Gohmert wanted to go off the record. So, we did.

Later, however, we saw him demonstrating some impressive swing dancing.

Credit: Eddie Scarry/TheBlaze

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Just three weeks left of Piers Morgan: report [Mediaite]

Is this Valerie Jarrett‘s boyfriend? [White House Dossier]

CPAC awards “blogger of the year.” [Hot Air]

“A kinder, gentler Fox…” [Inside Cable News]

Barbara Walters: Russia Today anchor who quit not “a hero.” [HuffPost Media]

More things you may have missed from CPAC…

Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants his mail delivered on time and on Saturdays.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus: Republicans are on the same team.

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Credit: Eddie Scarry/TheBlaze

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According to the man who has photographed U.S. presidents and countless A-list celebrities, the secret is to capture the “wonderful moments in our lives,” not just the staged ones.

Photographer George Lange appears on The Today Show March 7, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)

“One of the things that we talk about is, when you kiss someone, your eyes are closed and all of your other senses are working,” he explained. “You’re hearing. You’re touching. You’re smelling. And I try to do that with photographs.”

Lange said with modern-day technology, you can focus on the moment itself and forget about the technical issues that plagued amateur photographers in the past.

“We can take amazing pictures of all the devices we have,” he said, and not think twice about the shutter speed or anything else.

George Lange speaks about his photography on The Today Show March 7, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)

One of his secrets to photographing children, Lange added, was dropping down to the eye-level of your subject.

“I’m on my knees or lower when I’m photographing my kids,” he said with a smile.

Lange delves much deeper into the subject in his book, The Unforgettable Photograph: 228 Ideas, Tips, and Secrets for Taking the Best Pictures of Your Life.

Watch the complete interview from The Today Show, below:

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One such operation that the authors speak to in “Disinformation” is the effort to turn the Arab world and ultimately the Western world against Israel following its establishment in 1948.

A controversial new book out by recent Glenn Beck guest Caroline Glick, an American Israeli who is deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, and a former assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu titled “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East” independently corroborates this claim in the following stunning passage:

A key part of the Soviet Union’s Cold War strategy for fighting the West was to deny the United States and its allies the moral authority to lead the world in a struggle against Communism and tyranny. The Soviets recognized that by causing Western societies to doubt their morality and the justness of their cause, they would curtail the ability of Western leaders to confront Soviet aggression.To this end, the Soviets sought to co-opt the postwar anticolonialist movement and transform the aspiration of colonial possessions to achieve national self-determination into an anti-Western prejudice. The Soviets believed that by subverting third-world independence movements in this way, they could convince the West, including the United States, that it lacked the moral authority to lead the world in international affairs.Rejecting Israel’s right to exist, and castigating it as an imperialist, racist enclave was a key part of the Soviet strategy. Israel was an anti- colonialist state par excellence. The Zionists had fought against both the Ottoman and British empires to secure an independent Jewish state. On the other hand, the Palestinians sided with the Nazis and their goal of global conquest, and they created the pan-Islamic and pan-Arab com- mitment to destroying the only non-Islamic and non-Arab state in the Middle East.

The combination of Soviet anti-Semitism, Israeli anti-Communism, and admiration for the United States meant that Israel’s anticolonialist pedigree presented the Soviets with a serious problem.

So they set about delegitimizing the Jewish state.

The Soviets began their anti-Israel campaign in 1949, when they cut off relations with it. They then began to develop a new political vocabulary for hating and seeking the defeat of Jews. The popular term for Jew hatred—anti-Semitism—had been discredited with the defeat of the Germans in World War II. So the Soviets developed a new term: anti- Zionism. In this manner they transformed Israel into the collective Jew, and denigrated Zionism—the Jewish national liberation movement— into a new repository for all the negative characteristics that haters of Jews had previously attributed to Jews as individuals.

In 1965—two years before Israel took control of Judea and Samaria— the Soviets brought their anti-Zionist pitch to the United Nations for the first time. They sponsored a draft resolution at the UN’s Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities that lumped Zionism together with Nazism, castigating both as forms of racism. The motion failed, but the process of delegitimizing Israel on the world stage by equating it with Nazi Germany and so rehabilitating anti-Jewish political action as a legitimate policy tool was set in motion.

Eleven years later, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which defined Zionism as a form of racism.

Glick’s book, which was released on Tuesday argues that the so-called two-state plan for peace in the Middle East is unfeasible, legally, historically and morally unjustifiable, and based on a discredited world view.

The author argues that in lieu of the two-state paradigm, such a plan should be abandoned in favor of the “Israeli solution,” a one-state plan for peace to be achieved by applying Israeli law, and through it Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea and Samaria (commonly referred to as the West Bank).

Look for more coverage on the book including an interview with Ms. Glick next week.

__

Editor’s note: Excerpt reprinted from the book THE ISRAELI SOLUTION: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. Copyright 2014 by Caroline Glick. Published by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.

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But at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday in National Harbord, Md., TheBlaze Blog saw what looked like a snub by one governor to a fellow Republican one-time senator.

As the governor wrapped up a radio interview outside the Gaylord hotel ballroom where CPAC speeches are given, he was mobbed by a group of fans and cameras. He shook a few hands and and posed for some photos but his handlers began ushering him along.

Meanwhile, the former senator, who was gearing up for his own radio hit, tried calling out several times to the governor, presumably to greet him and get a quick word in.

No luck for the senator. The governor never turned around and simply kept walking. Maybe he didn’t hear his name repeatedly called out over the bustling. Maybe not.

Guess who.

Hint: Both parties are former (and possibly future) presidential hopefuls.

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There was even some hubbub ahead of the event about gay Republicans being newly welcomed to attend (if not sponsor as a group).

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) made a name for himself running for president in 2012 as a culture warrior defending traditional values, and opposing same-sex marriage.

He’s scheduled to speak at CPAC here in National Harbor, Md., and TheBlaze Blog ran into him as he was touring the convention area of the Gaylord hotel, greeting supporters.

We asked what he makes of the event’s supposed new tone on gay issues. He didn’t seem too thrilled.

“I don’t have any comments,” he said. “I just showed up. I have no idea what’s going on at CPAC. I’m gonna give my speech and I’m gonna leave.”

In and out.

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Since he came onto the national scene in 2010, however, he’s been a regular at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, hosted this year in National Harbor, Md. He’s here again this year and showed up at an after-party following the conclusion of the first day’s official events.

The party was mostly 20-something conservative bloggers. West, who attended the party in corduroy pants and a crosshatch jacket, had been invited to headline as a “special guest.”

It was a noisy crowd at the party, the attendees paying no attention to conservative commentator Mary Katherine Ham (who was emceeing the event) as she tried to announce the “Blogger of the Year” award. Then West was brought on stage to address the crowd.

“SHUT UP!” he yelled over the noise. “Or I’m going to make you come up here and do push-ups.”

No effect. West went largely ignored as he spoke, though several attendees had asked to shake hands and take photos with him both before and after his speech.

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The below reflect not only a potential framework for understanding Vladimir Putin’s moves, but the moves of America’s enemies in Asia and the Middle East more broadly. All emphasis is ours.

1. “Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” [Chapter I.19]

2. “Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.” [Chapter I.26]

3. “…In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.” [Chapter III.1]

4. “Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.” [Chapter III.6-7]

5. “…If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” [Chapter III.18]

6. “Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” [Chapter IV.15]

7. “Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.” [Chapter VI.2]

President Barack Obama pictured with Russian President Vladmir Putin in Ireland in June. Photo Credit: Evan Vucci/AP 

8. “By holding out advantages to him, he can cause the enemy to approach of his own accord; or, by inflicting damage, he can make it impossible for the enemy to draw near.” [Chapter VI.3]

9. “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked. Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.” [Chapter VII.7-8]

10. “The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few.” [Chapter VI.16]

11. “Though the enemy be stronger in numbers, we may prevent him from fighting. Scheme so as to discover his plans and the likelihood of their success. Rouse him, and learn the principle of his activity or inactivity. Force him to reveal himself, so as to find out his vulnerable spots. Carefully compare the opposing army with your own, so that you may know where strength is superabundant and where it is deficient.” [Chapter VI.22-24]

12. “In making tactical dispositions, the highest pitch you can attain is to conceal them; conceal your dispositions, and you will be safe from the prying of the subtlest spies, from the machinations of the wisest brains. How victory may be produced for them out of the enemy’s own tactics—that is what the multitude cannot comprehend. All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved. Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances. Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” [Chapter VI.25-30]

Unidentified gunmen guard the gate of an infantry base in Privolnoye, Ukraine, Sunday, March 2, 2014. Hundreds of unidentified gunmen arrived outside Ukraine’s infantry base in Privolnoye in its Crimea region. The convoy includes at least 13 troop vehicles each containing 30 soldiers and four armored vehicles with mounted machine guns. The vehicles — which have Russian license plates — have surrounded the base and are blocking Ukrainian soldiers from entering or leaving it. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic) 

13. “When the enemy is close at hand and remains quiet, he is relying on the natural strength of his position. When he keeps aloof and tries to provoke a battle, he is anxious for the other side to advance.” [Chapter IX.18-19]

14. “Those who were called skillful leaders of old knew how to drive a wedge between the enemy’s front and rear; to prevent co-operation between his large and small divisions; to hinder the good troops from rescuing the bad, the officers from rallying their men. When the enemy’s men were united, they managed to keep them in disorder. When it was to their advantage, they made a forward move; when otherwise, they stopped still.” [Chapter XI.15-17]

15. “Rapidity is the essence of war: take advantage of the enemy’s unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots.” [Chapter XI.19]

16. “Success in warfare is gained by carefully accommodating ourselves to the enemy’s purpose. By persistently hanging on the enemy’s flank, we shall succeed in the long run in killing the commander-in-chief. This is called ability to accomplish a thing by sheer cunning. On the day that you take up your command, block the frontier passes, destroy the official tallies, and stop the passage of all emissaries. Be stern in the council-chamber, so that you may control the situation. If the enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in. Forestall your opponent by seizing what he holds dear, and subtly contrive to time his arrival on the ground. Walk in the path defined by rule, and accommodate yourself to the enemy until you can fight a decisive battle. At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.” [Chapter XI.60-68]

Sun Tzu also leaves us with something to mediate upon, worth considering:

“There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general:

(1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction;
(2) cowardice, which leads to capture;
(3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults;
(4) a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame;
(5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.

These are the five besetting sins of a general, ruinous to the conduct of war.

When an army is overthrown and its leader slain, the cause will surely be found among these five dangerous faults. Let them be a subject of meditation.” [Chapter VIII.12-14]

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Speaking of whom, Donald Trump thinks Carter is dead. [BuzzFeed]

Standing ovation for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. [Hot Air]

CNN scrambling more things with its primetime lineup. [Inside Cable News]

And in case you missed it: from CPAC…

National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre rails against “media elites.”

The way Sen. Mitch McConnell took the stage…

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O’Donnell is joining the Washington Times as a radio contributor and weekly columnist, according to a release.

“I’m honored to be joining the Washington Times team and to be a part of a vibrant, growing force in the media,” O’Donnell said. “My hope is to serve as a bridge between the ever changing confusing world of politics and the everyday American.”

O’Donnell famously ran for the U.S. Senate as a Tea Party Republican out of Delaware in 2010, ultimately losing the election.

The Times, which has never been in a financially ideal position since the paper was founded in 1982, is in the midst of an aggressive expansion of its talent. It recently announced that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and conservative radio talker Rusty Humphries would be joining as contributors as well.

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Before Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa–the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer to ever defect–there was another defector, a KGB intelligence officer named Anatoliy Golitsyn who fled the Soviet Union in the 1960s and sought to expose Communist strategic deception and subversion operations being perpetrated against the West, in order to defend the West against the Soviet Union and its Communist proxies worldwide.

Here’s what Golitsyn wrote in a passage titled “Convergence” in his 1984 book “New Lies for Old,” which seems to have eerily anticipated the recent efforts in politics, the media and academia to silence any dissent from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy [emphasis ours]:

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After successful use of the scissors strategy in the early stages of the final phase of policy to assist communist strategy in Europe and the Third World and over disarmament, a Sino-Soviet reconciliation could be expected. It is contemplated and implied by the long-range policy and by strategic disinformation on the split.

The Communist bloc, with its recent accretions in Africa and South-East Asia, is already strong. European-backed Soviet influence and American-backed Chinese influence could lead to new Third World acquisitions at an accelerating pace. Before long, the communist strategists might be persuaded that the balance had swung irreversibly in their favor. In that event they might very well decide on a Sino-Soviet “reconciliation.” The scissors strategy would give way to the strategy of “one clenched fist.” At that point the shift in the political and military balance would be plain for all to see. Convergence would not be between two equal parties, but would be on terms dictated by the communist bloc. The argument for accommodation with the overwhelming strength of communism would be virtually unanswerable. Pressures would build up for changes in the American political and economic system on the lines indicated in Sakharov’s treatise. Traditional conservatives would be isolated and driven toward extremism.They might become the victims of a new McCarthyism of the left. The Soviet dissidents who are now extolled as heroes of the resistance to Soviet communism would play an active part in arguing for convergence. Their present supporters would be confronted with a choice of forsaking their idols or acknowledging the legitimacy of the new Soviet regime.

Golitsyn writes of this scenario in context of his overarching conspiracy theory of a so-called Soviet grand deception strategy — that the Soviets had a conscious, long-term strategic deception operation to build a one world government under Communism. Such an operation entailed a planned fake dismantling of the Soviet Union (including potentially tearing down the Berlin Wall), leading to a period of “liberalization” and “democratization,” enabling the Russians to rebuild their economy, “cooperate” with the West (leading the West to slash its defense forces and ally with the Russians), and ultimately “convergence” under an international totalitarian government.

Golitsyn’s “New Lies for Old,” which he wrote over many years following his defection, proved shockingly prescient, however outlandish his overarching theory. As reported by Mark Riebling in a book on the decades-long battle between the CIA and FBI titled “Wedge,” of 148 falsifiable predictions, 139 of Golitsyn’s predictions had come true by the end of 1993.

Golitsyn was heavily influential following his defection with former CIA director of counter-intelligence, James Angleton, though many sought to discredit their shared theories and Angleton was forced to resign in 1974 after angering many for his zealous efforts to expose “moles” within U.S. intelligence circles.

American Thinker ran an article in 2010 that more extensively delves into Golitsyn and his theories, for those who are interested.

Regardless of what one makes of Golitsyn’s grand strategy however–and to be sure it is nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction when it comes to Cold War era conspiracies and intelligence revelations more broadly–it is striking to know that the prediction of left-wing McCarthyism had been made some three decades ago.

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While roaming around the Gaylord hotel, where the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is taking place, TheBlaze Blog spotted Trump in the lobby with a group of people who were taking a photo with him. The fans seemed charmed by Trump, who is speaking at the event in the afternoon.

Immediately after the photo, though, he started walking toward the ballroom at a brisk place, encircled by about eight different men and women dressed in suits.

Some how, we were unlucky enough to end up in the middle of the hurricane, getting pushed around in every direction by Trump’s handlers. They kept telling us to “move.”

We eventually made it ahead of the group to snap a photo. When Trump got close enough, we asked if he was looking forward to seeing McKay Coppins.

Coppins is the BuzzFeed reporter who wrote a recent profile on Trump, which ended up not being up to Trump’s standards of glowing news coverage.

He looked at us for a couple second before giving a fake laugh like you might give to an annoying younger sibling. “Very cute,” Trump said. With one final shove from a handler, we parted ways.

We recounted the incident to Coppins, who is here at CPAC.

“We’ll always have Mar-a-Lago,” he said in response, referring to the Trump resort where Coppins did much of his reporting for the now-notorious profile.

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The group showed up anyway.

Outside the ballroom of the hotel, where major speeches are being delivered, stood David Silverman, president of American Atheists. He was passing out flyers, sporting a shirt with his organization’s name, decorated with a couple buttons.

Most CPAC attendees passed him by with a polite “no thank you” for the flyers. TheBlaze Blog stopped to ask why he showed up, despite essentially being told not to come.

Silverman, who was with a couple more members of his group, told us he did indeed feel unwelcome by CPAC organizers but that he has received a surprising amount of positive support from attendees. “We still wanted to spread the message,” he told us. That message, he said, is for conservatives to stop tying Christianity (“prayer in schools”) to other conservative principles (such as gun rights). He said doing that will broaden conservatism’s appeal.

“I thought I was walking into a hot bed of hate,” Silverman said. “But we’ve had people saying — even Christians — ‘thank you for being here.’”

He said he hopes that next year, CPAC organizers will be open to American Atheists as sponsors.

As our interview ended, a woman with a camera took a photo of Silverman. “Thanks for being here,” she said.

“See?” Silverman said to TheBlaze Blog. “That’s what we’re getting. She may not be an atheists but she appreciates us being here.”

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We spotted Conservative radio talker Mark Levin near the row of radio booths, talking with some fans, even hugging a few.

Heading into this year’s event, there were reports that it has taken on a more inclusive tone than in the past, inviting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to speak, after he was shut out in 2013 and even welcoming gay Republicans. We asked for Levin’s thoughts.

“I don’t think a hell of a lot of it, quite frankly,” Levin told us. “As for an inclusive tone, my attitude is this: We have to unite behind our principles and eventually unite behind a candidate, or we’re going to get another Northeastern liberal Republican and we’re gonna lose. We’re not there yet but we will get  there because the country needs us.”

Asked if Christie qualified as a “Northeastern liberal Republican,” Levin simply said “yes.”

So, will Levin come into the hotel ballroom for Christie’s speech? “No.”

Speaking of a more inclusive tone, Levin threw in that he and Glenn Beck, who owns TheBlaze, “are friends now.”

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Cruz was the first to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday in National Harbor, Md. After his speech, TheBlaze Blog spotted him outside the stage room engulfed by fans and reporters trying to snap photos or get a quick quote.

We did our best to get in there and it went like this:

TheBlaze Blog: “Senator! Hey, Senator! Senator!”

This happened as we watched Cruz chatting with some devoted followers, taking a selfie with them here and there.

Again: “Senator! Senator! Hey, Senator!”

Cruz’s handlers, a rough crew by necessity (both male and female), then began pushing everyone aside to move Cruz along. They said he was on his way to do a “media available,” meaning he would talk with reporters.

We gave it another shot as we walked along his side: “Senator! Senator!”

Fortunately, this time, we got his attention.

For fun, we asked what he thought of Al Jazeera America’s rating woes (the fledging news operation is getting less than half the viewership of Current TV, which AJA bought in 2013).

“We’re on our way to do a media available,” Cruz said.

Damnit.

So, we continued following Cruz to a separate area of the Gaylord hotel, where CPAC is being held. Suddenly, media was blocked.

Some security guys prevented nearly all of us media people from entering the room Cruz was headed to.

Several press people protested, saying Cruz had said he was going to answer questions. No luck. We weren’t getting in. The security guys barked at us to move aside.

About 10 minutes later, Cruz resurfaced from the room and apologized to everyone for the mistaken announcement that we were doing a media available. So he took a few questions about Russia, declining to say whether he supported military action against the country for its aggression toward Ukraine.

And with that, he was off.

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The annual Conservative Political Action Conference kicks off Thursday in National Harbor, Md., and TheBlaze Blog is here to cover it.

The event hosts high-profile Republican like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. Other speakers include the likes of Donald Trump, CNN “Crossfire” co-host Newt Gingrich and more.

On the front page, we’ll have major stories from the event. Here on TheBlaze Blog, we’ll be floating around the convention area, seeing what’s out there and who we can run into. We’ll post about it here.

Keep checking back.

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Credit: The Daily Beast

It’s an odd comparison, considering Beck, who owns TheBlaze, is decidedly not pro-Putin and his reputation is, deservedly or not, the opposite of pro-government of any type. And, as it turns out, Beck has spoken out against Russia’s anti-gay policies and in the past has made remarks in favor of marriage equality.

So, what happened?

James Kirchick, who wrote the story, told TheBlaze Blog he didn’t write the headline with the Beck reference, though he didn’t say whether he agreed with the comparison.

We’ve reached out to The Daily Beast’s press team for some clarification.

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If there was only a place that where he could go to relax. A place that believes, “the busier life gets, the more we seek true tranquility, a place where the world’s clamor can be shut out and forgotten for a while.” Luckily, the president has found such a place.

President Obama (and we assume his family) is reportedly about to take another vacation.  This time, the first family is expected to visit the Ocean Reef Club, a private, gated community that requires the sponsorship of a member in order to play golf on one of its three courses.  Ocean Reef is a place Marc Caputo from the Miami Herald’s Blog also called, “about as far away from middle class as you can get in Key Largo.”

Image source: oceanreef.com

On Monday, disgruntled Ocean Reef members tipped TheBlaze to the this weekend’s high-profile trip. Their concerns were typical of most small towns that feel the overwhelming power of a presidential visit. However, in this instance, they were upset that the Obamas, their friends and a reported 57 Secret Service agents would paralyze traffic on the small island and exclude them from the golf courses during a “Spring Break weekend when many families count on relaxing together.”

Image source: oceanreef.com

The White House did not confirm the rumor, nor did they deny it. The response to our inquiry was simply, “No information has been released regarding Florida, but we are happy to add you to the distribution list if/when an advisory comes out.”

Calls to the office of the president of the Ocean Reef Club were met with a curt “no comment.” And then, within an hour of our inquiry, the following was sent to all members of the private club:

Dear Member,

The Ocean Reef Club is expecting a distinguished visitor this weekend, March 7th – 9th that will require an advanced level of security. As with all VIP visits, there may be some minor disruptions including special flight plan rules, closures at the airport and short closures of some roadways. Most of these security measures will be temporary, and should not impact the normal operations of the Club.  We appreciate your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience in advance.

Ocean Reef has a long tradition in hosting many high level individuals, and all of those visits have added to our rich and unique history and to our reputation as the safest most secure private club in the world. Please help us continue this tradition by ensuring the privacy of this guest at all times.

TheBlaze contacted several businesses on the island and learned that the rumor mill in the community of around 10,000 people was already abuzz with the word that the Obamas were coming to visit. From the UPS store to the local deep sea fishing outlet, it was fairly well known that a “very important person — probably the president” was coming to town.

On Tuesday, the Chicago Sun Times reported that the Obamas are headed to Ocean Reef for a weekend of “gab and golf.” Michael Sneed’s political gossip column claimed that the family was renting “five houses on the uber-politically conservative compound.” Sneed also stated that the guests would be arriving in five helicopters. TheBlaze cannot confirm that five helicopters will be used to bring the Obamas and their guests to Ocean Reef, but a helicopter arrival is likely as Air Force One is too large for the local airport and will probably have to land at Homestead Air Force Base (about 30 miles from Key Largo).

Calls to the Ocean Reef Public Information Officer have not yet been returned.

Follow Mike Opelka on Twitter – @Stuntbrain

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Credit: Russia Today

Anyone familiar with RT knows it’s owned by the Russian government. It’s generally understood to have a pro-Russia bias, and understandably so.

“I think I didn’t know exactly the extent of the propaganda that is this machine (RT),” Wahl said on CNN when asked by Piers Morgan why she had accepted a job there from the start. “I thought that the Cold War was over and maybe I didn’t realize that there would be this much of an infringement on the editoial– as much pressure. I guess I wasn’t expecting that.”

Wahl went on to say she “tried to make the most of the situation” and that she’s “done work that I’m not proud of doing.”

“I’ve been contemplating quitting for a long time,” she said.

RT released a statement on Whal’s resignation, calling it “nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.”

Abby Martin, another American anchor at RT, has also criticized Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. She has not resigned. An RT spokesperson said of her commentary that the channel’s journalists are “free to express their own opinions.”

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Tom Fitton is on Twitter: @TomFitton. You can order his book “The Corruption Chronicles” from Amazon.com.

Micah Morrison is on Twitter: @micah_morrison. His book about Whitewater is available on Amazon.com.

Hans von Spakovsky is on Twitter: @HvonSpakovsky

The full text of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): Freedom of Information Act. The section outlining the 20-day timeframe in which the government must respond is in the right-hand column of page 3.

The photo of Lyndon Johnson used in the episode is not from the signing of the Freedom of Information Act. Johnson was somewhat reluctant to sign the bill, and somewhat ironically he signed the Freedom of Information Act in private. The photo in the episode shows LBJ signing a college financial aid bill in 1963.

The Bloomberg News article on 19 out of 20 Obama administration departments failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

The statistic on the number of FOIA lawsuits filed by year comes from The FOIA Project. Select “all” for both the Organization and Suborganization columns to get the statistic cited in the show.

Judicial Watch took the Bush administration to the Supreme Court over a failure to disclose information about lobbyists working on a White House energy task force.

The statistic about the Department of Justice being involved in more than 1,000 FOIA lawsuits comes from The FOIA Project. Select “Department of Justice” in the Organization column to get the statistic cited in the show.

The September 2013 Judicial Watch report on the Benghazi attack.

The lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the Department of Justice seeking the release of photos from Benghazi.

The photos of the site of the Benghazi attack obtained by Judicial Watch through a FOIA request.

The State Department response to a FOIA about Benghazi shown in the episode. The letter to Judicial Watch is page 1. The Blue Mountain Group document shown in the episode is page 94. There is another invoice from The Blue Mountain Group on page 111. The document showing the value of the contract is page 4.

Victoria Nuland’s statement about never hiring private security in Benghazi came in her September 14, 2012 press briefing. The State Department posted a transcript online, but did not post a video of that briefing.

The letter from the Navy and the map of Navy assets near Benghazi at the time of the attack are posted on the Judicial Watch website.

The emails between Lois Lerner and the Federal Election Commission are posted on the Judicial Watch website. The emails shown during the episode are on pages 1 and 8.

The IRS regulation on disclosing taxpayer information to other government agencies comes from section 11.3.1.14.2 of this IRS Manual. “SBU” is an acronym for “sensitive but unclassified,” which includes tax information.

The Judicial Watch press release on its opposition to the proposed changes to 501(c)4 regulations by the IRS.

The House Ways and Means Committee posted additional IRS emails that exposed that in February 2010 the Tea Party cases were flagged because of “media attention” and not questions about their 501(c)4 qualifications. Prior to that, they had been approved within three months with no input from Washington: Emails from House Ways and Means Committee

Rep. Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, recently said that the IRS has still not turned over “thousands of documents from Lois Lerner” that the committee had requested.

This 2010 video shows Lerner speaking at Duke University about the pressure being put on the IRS to curtail political spending. “So everybody is screaming at us right now, ‘Fix it now before the election! Can’t you see how much these people are spending?’”

The Ways and Means Committee also released emails from Lerner saying, “Tea Party Matter very dangerous” and tying it to possible future court cases about Citizens United.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Section 8 of the law, requiring states to remove ineligible voters from the rolls, starts on page 6.

The 2012 Election Integrity Project from Judicial Watch. That page includes links to the letters sent to Indiana and Florida that were mentioned in the episode. Also shown was the lawsuit against Ohio.

The Department of Justice lawsuit to stop the cleaning up of Florida’s voter rolls: 2012 DOJ sues Florida

Rep. Elijah Cummings sent a letter demanding information from True The Vote after the group challenged voter registrations: Cummings’ letter to True The Vote

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CNN head: We’re not just about ratings. [TV Newser]

Newspaper picks worst headline possible for Oscars coverage. [HuffPost Media]

NY Times: President Obama “on the right track” with Ukraine. [NY Times]

Transparency at the White House, on background. [Politico]

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One such nugget comes on page 21 of Berkshire’s recently released 2013 letter, in which Buffett states, “Of all the investments I ever made, buying Ben’s book was the best (except for my purchase of two marriage licenses).”

What was Ben’s book?

“The Intelligent Investor.”

Who is Ben?

Ben Graham was an investor and Columbia Business School professor under whom Buffett studied, and the father of “value investing,” whereby simplistically speaking, investors seek to acquire assets at prices substantially below their intrinsic value, so as to invest with a substantial “margin of safety” in case their investment does not pan out as planned and the price of the asset does not reach its projected value. Stated differently, and even more crudely and simplistically, it is a strategy of buying low and selling high. 

Of his book purchase, Buffett noted, “I can’t remember what I paid for that first copy of The Intelligent Investor. Whatever the cost, it would underscore the truth of Ben’s adage: Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

Further:

“I learned most of the thoughts in this investment discussion from Ben’s book The Intelligent Investor, which I bought in 1949. My financial life changed with that purchase. Before reading Ben’s book, I had wandered around the investing landscape, devouring everything written on the subject. Much of what I read fascinated me: I tried my hand at charting and at using market indicia to predict stock movements. I sat in brokerage offices watching the tape roll by, and I listened to commentators. All of this was fun, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere.

In contrast, Ben’s ideas were explained logically in elegant, easy-to-understand prose (without Greek letters or complicated formulas). For me, the key points were laid out in what later editions labeled Chapters 8 and 20. (The original 1949 edition numbered its chapters differently.) These points guide my investing decisions today.”

Read the whole letter here.

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Has [Vladimir] Putin’s estimate of [President] Obama led directly to his decision to invade Crimea? Did Obama’s inability to stand up to Syrian President Bashar Assad leave the Russian leader with doubts about the American’s strength? Did his decision, right after taking office, to scrap American missile deployment in Eastern Europe — handing Putin his cheapest victory — lead the Russians to question our president’s strategic sense? Did Obama’s cave-in to Iran cause Putin to think he could get away with aggression?

Does Obama’s weakness invite aggression as surely as Neville Chamberlain’s did?

Morris’s column comes on the heels of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who said Tuesday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “what Hitler did back in the ’30s.”

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Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

From a White House pool report on President Obama‘s Wednesday trip to Connecticut, where he made remarks on raising the minimum wage:

Obama arrived at the Cafe Beauregard, a small restaurant with green awning on Main Street. They serve salads, soups and sandwiches. A sign outside says “Brr…Come in the cafe to warm up.”

“You guys all gotta buy a sandwich,” Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin told pool (press). The governor was seated to Obama’s right.

“That’s true,” Obama said. “They’re expecting, Pete, for you to spring.”

“Vermont’s buying.” …

Asked if he had any update on Ukraine, Obama smiled and said, “Thank you.” Asked what he ordered, Obama said “A Korean beef sandwich, along with some chili. So I’m going with beef. I’m going with meat.”

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Credit: Getty Images

“It (the speech) was cluttered a bit at the top with personal emotionalism about how he feels about what he is seeing, how he feels about various aspects of the crisis,” Noonan writes at the Wall Street Journal. “Sharing their feelings is what U.S. diplomats now think is necessary to convey real engagement and sincerity: I’m so upset, my heart is exploding and will soon deposit clumps of tissue all over your unmarked uniform. They should cut it out.”

Noonan then went on about Kerry’s social media habits. “They should also stop tweeting their emotional reactions to events. They’re diplomats. They’re supposed to be grownups. They’re supposed to be mature.”

Presumably, Noonan is referring to any one of several tweets Kerry sent from Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday morning. “Incredibly moving visit to Shrine of the Fallen,” one said. “Courageous, proud people.We stand with Ukrainians for self-determination.”

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John Bingham, an MI5 agent (and prolific spy novelist in his own right) who partly inspired John le Carré’s George Smiley character, he of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and numerous other works, according to the Telegraph’s review of the documents was a “‘genius’ spy who pretended to be a German agent duped British Nazi sympathisers into revealing their secrets during the Second World War…”

Further:

Bingham, who was not named in the files but referred to by his pseudonym “Jack King”, uncovered disloyalty that “astonished” hardened spies.

From 1942, he had direct contact with six men and women who believed he was working for the Gestapo and gave him information on “scores and probably hundreds” of sympathisers.

He gathered information on the aristocracy, the military and the intellectual elite, with one sympathiser claiming to have influence over Herbert Morrison, the home secretary at the time.

He also shed light on the fascist plans of Sir Oswald Mosley and “Hitler worshippers” such as George Pitt-Rivers, Churchill’s cousin.

…The sympathisers’ hatred for Britain, driven by anti-Semitism and the propaganda of Mosley’s group, was so strong that they “applauded” women and children being killed by German bombs, reports from Bingham show.

This spy operation known as “SR” was closed down in 1949 and “MI5 was unable to prosecute those involved for fear it would be accused of entrapment, and it was decided that telling the sympathisers they had been duped would push them further underground.”

The release of these documents has generated some controversy over le Carré’s treatment of Bingham.

Responding to a letter chastising le Carré for his criticism of Bingham’s allegiance to the British Secret Services in the wake of the revelations from the newly released MI5 files, le Carré reiterated his reverence for Bingham as “a most honourable, patriotic and gifted man,” but also challenged Bingham.

le Carré stated:

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The channel isn’t even pulling in half the total audience that predecessor Current TV managed. Al Jazeera America has averaged just 15,000 total viewers in prime-time since bowing in August, with only 5,000 viewers in the target 25-to-54-year-old demographic, according to Nielsen figures. That’s low enough to be considered “scratch,” or negligible, by Nielsen. For the marketers that still worry about the channel’s perspective and its image in the U.S., those aren’t the kind of numbers to tempt a re-examination.

Al Jazeera America announced it had purchased Current at the start of 2013.

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Credit: Chris Pizzello/AP

But he’s made a fan out of Piers Morgan.

“I sat next to David Koch at a dinner last year,” Morgan tweeted Tuesday night. “One thing he’s most definitely NOT is ‘Un-American’. Rarely met a bigger patriot.”

Morgan’s remark comes after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Koch brothers were “un-American” and that Republicans, who are frequently supported by them, were “addicted to Koch.”

The response to Morgan’s tweet was a mix of shock and sarcasm from his followers.

“Thank you for being honest,” said one reply. “Kind of shocked, but thanks.”

“Lookin’ for a job?” read another, referring to the oncoming cancelation of Morgan’s CNN show.

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