The Syrians are a people unillusioned. "We have been forsaken by the world,"

America's Syria Abdication

by Fouad Ajami 

Suspicions that the U.S. doesn't really want to see the fall of the Assad regime have taken hold in the region. In the charitable version, the policy toward Syria is hostage to the electoral needs of President Obama—stasis is to be the order of things until November. The president has no interest in truly taking on the Iranian regime, so Syria twists in the wind.

There is enough outrage—and resources—in the region to bring down the regime in Damascus if and when an American decision to do so is made. And there are two borders, the Jordanian and the Turkish, from which a determined effort could be made. A no-fly, no-drive zone on the border with Turkey would critically alter the terms of engagement and encourage greater defections from the regime's forces.


http://www.hoover.org/news/daily-report/115591

The fact of business is that if Congress spends $3.8 trillion of what we produce this year, it necessarily must force us to spend $3.8 trillion less privately this year.

Devious Taxation

Walter E. Williams 

The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation does a yeoman's job of keeping track of how much we're paying in taxes and who's paying what. It turns out that American taxpayers worked this year from Jan. 1 to April 17, 107 days, to earn enough money to pay their federal, state and local tax bills. That statistic requires some clarification, and I ask my readers to help me examine it.


http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams/devious-taxation.html

Jim Manzi’s new book is a powerful indictment of political central planning.

America Is Out of Control

By Nick Schulz

Potential ‘American decline’ is an active topic of conversation among policy intellectuals right now. But what I think this talk misses is that this decline has already happened.



http://www.american.com/archive/2012/april/america-is-out-of-control

Mr. Hollande has railed against the strictures of the recently agreed European fiscal pact, which is the central plank of the European response to its sovereign debt crisis.

Mr. Hollande would be bad news for Europe

By Desmond Lachman

A victory by Francois Hollande in the May 6 second round of the French presidential election is the last thing that Europe needs at this delicate stage in its ongoing sovereign debt and financial crisis. Not only would a Hollande victory throw into question a united German-French strategy for dealing with the Euro crisis, it would also raise fresh doubts as to the future direction of the French economy, Europe’s second largest.

http://blog.american.com/2012/04/mr-hollande-would-be-bad-news-for-europe/

Une fois de plus, la campagne met en scène les oppositions verbales et camoufle les convergences de fond.

France: dix enseignements sur le premier tour de l'élection présidentielle de 2012

1-Un nouveau désaveu de la classe médiatico-sondagière

2-Le vrai échec de Mélenchon

3-L’incontestable succès de Marine Le Pen

4-Le niveau du « bloc patriotique » est élevé

5-L’équation impossible de Nicolas Sarkozy

6-Le grand écart sarkozyste

7-Front national : les ambiguïtés de la « dédiabolisation »

8-Marine Le Pen : le défi de l’après-présidentielle

9-La crise en embuscade pour le nouveau président

10-Les ambiguïtés du « vote utile »

http://www.polemia.com/article.php?id=4775

Sarkozy : » Pour moi une famille c’est un père et une mère ...

... Ce n’est pas deux pères ou deux mères »

http://veille-education.org/2012/04/23/sarkozy-pour-moi-une-famille-cest-un-pere-et-une-mere-ce-nest-pas-deux-peres-ou-deux-meres/

Using Obama’s campaign rhetoric, Bishop Stephen Blaire wrote to Congress declaring that Ryan’s budget “fails to meet [the Church’s] moral criteria”

A bishop’s unjust attack on Paul Ryan

Marc A. Thiessen

“The preferential option for the poor,” Ryan says, should not mean “a preferential option for big government.” After the recent federal assault on religious liberty, the bishops should appreciate the destructive power of big government. They should also appreciate the fact that the chairman of the committee crafting the Republican Party’s budget is a man of faith who is working to address the problems of poverty and our nation’s debt, so we can ensure we are not living, in Pope Benedict’s words, in “untruth” and “at the expense of future generations.”


http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/a-bishops-unjust-attack-on-paul-ryan/