SERENA ALTSCHUL: Good afternoon. We'll get you back to the game shortly.
We start with breaking news out of Germany. An Islamic suicide bomber attempted to kill dozens of people, including many children, in Leipzig today. A princess festival was being held under a heated tent, with many little girls in attendance. A German television crew was already filming when the suicide bomber arrived. Luckily for everyone, a group of French, Germans, Danes, and Americans had just come from playing a hockey game. To enable everyone to understand the many languages heard in the video, we have placed English translations at the bottom of the screen. Here is the video.
VIDEO STARTS: Scene with many little girls dressed in mainly white, frilly costumes.
VIDEO: A tall person dressed in a black burqa walks into the area and opens the front of the garment by means of a quick-release. Many sticks of dynamite are exposed. The person beneath the burqa is revealed to be a man. He starts to laugh.
MUSLIM: Allahu Akbar!
[The Islamic god is the greatest!]
VIDEO: Behind the suicide bomber, an American man carrying a hockey stick appears. The American winds up and strikes the suicide bomber in the head. The suicide bomber falls to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Two European men jump on the suicide bomber and grab his arms. A second American man grabs the suicide bomber's legs so he cannot move.
AMERICAN MAN: Hockey is great!
FRENCH MAN: Le vin français est grand!
[French wine is grand!]
GERMAN MAN: Deutsches Bier ist das Beste!
[German beer is the best!]
FRENCH WOMAN: Les femmes françaises sont délicieuses!
[French women are delicious!]
EVERYONE: Avec la crème fouettée! Mit Honig! We are all cunning linguists!
[With whipped cream! With honey!]
GERMAN WOMAN: Deutsche Frauen sind lecker!
[German women are tasty!]
EVERYONE: Sie schmecken so gut! J'ai faim! I love sitting down to a great spread!
[They taste so good! I'm hungry!]
DANISH WOMAN: Danish women are yummy!
EVERYONE: I love eating a Danish in the morning! Frühstück im Bett! Le repas de matin est le plus important!
[Breakfast in bed! Breakfast is the most important meal!]
VIDEO ENDS:
SERENA ALTSCHUL: Okay, everyone got a little giddy at the end there.
We also have some video of the press conference held later.
VIDEO STARTS: Scene showing a number of young adults behind a podium.
AMERICAN MAN: I'm tired of hearing that Britain and the USA have a special relationship. All Britain does is coddle Muslim terrorists. France and Germany are much better friends than Britain. France banned the burqa and I hope Germany will do that soon now that one was used to try to kill lots of little girls. Besides, a special relationship is what you'd call a private meeting between Liberace and Freddie Mercury.
VIDEO ENDS:
SERENA ALTSCHUL: We've just learned that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering charging the Americans seen in that video with hate crimes.
Changing gears, we asked Pamela Geller, book author and owner of the Atlas Shrugs 2000 website, and Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News' Red Eye, to come on the show and comment on not only the burqa incident, but also on a few questions we had on some of their recent actions. When they heard the questions we wanted to ask, they both declined to appear on our show.
We wanted to ask Geller why it is that she believes that President Obama is the Muslim devil because he placates / appeases Muslims who often kill in the name of their sect, yet her website is named after an Ayn Rand book, with Rand having greatly admired William Edward Hickman, a vicious killer of a 12-year-old girl in 1927. In 1928, he said: "I am like the state: what is good for me is right." Rand wrote in her journal regarding his statement "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."
Rand went on to say: "The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority' . . . It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal."
Worse sins and crimes?
As to Gutfeld, he complained about Julian Assange's rape accusation in one of his Gregologues, yet Gutfeld was strangely silent on the subject of Israeli President Moshe Katsav, who was recently convicted of rape. So, Greg, why does a convicted rapist get a pass from you while Assange, who has yet to be proven to be a genuine weasel, is dragged through the muck? Is it because Fox News' master, Rupert Murdoch, dislikes WikiLeaks and what it represents, a threat to his power?
We'll now go to a conversation I had a short time ago with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
Mr. Kristof, you recently wrote of the growing disparity between the richest and poorest in the USA where you compared the USA to Latin American banana republics. Would you please elaborate?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Sure, Serena.
The richest 1% of Americans now take home almost 24% of income, up from almost 9% in 1976. The United States now has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. The rich-poor gap in the United States is wider than in any other developed country.
SERENA ALTSCHUL: In any developed country?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: That is correct.
CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. And from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1%.
And perhaps what is the most troubling aspect, the Tea Party and most Republicans are striving to make it even more inequitable.
SERENA ALTSCHUL: But how do you respond to critics who say that these are the people who create jobs?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: That is true, these people are the ones who create jobs. The problem is that all of these jobs are now being created in China, India, Vietnam -- anywhere except the USA.
In the old days, we had company owners who made lots of money, but also created lots of jobs, so everyone benefited. Now we have CEOs like Carly Fiorina who outsource production overseas, yet still collect their enormous salary. The kicker is that she actually proclaimed in her recent Senate campaign that she was the only candidate who "created jobs": sure, in other countries.
Half of those starting at the bottom 20% never leave that level. The American economy tends to help those at the top stay there while making it difficult for those at the bottom to move up. Trickle-down economics is a cruel myth.
SERENA ALTSCHUL: Why do you think the Tea Party and Republicans ignore these facts?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: In a word, education, or lack thereof. We often hear members of the Tea Party making comments like "There is not one thing that the government has made better." To be blunt, this is nonsense.
I will give you two examples of why this kind of thinking is wrong-headed.
In 1948 during a temperature inversion in Donora, not far from Pittsburgh, the emissions from U.S. Steel's Donora Zinc Works and American Steel & Wire plant caused 20 people and 800 animals to die, and 1/3-1/2 of the town's population of 14,000 residents to become sick. It was estimated that had the inversion lasted for just a few more hours, thousands of people would have died. For ten years afterward, mortality rates were much higher in Donora than in neighboring cities. Congress passed the Clean Air Act largely in response to the incident. Today, people breathe clean air because of laws like this.
The second example is the meat packing industry at the turn of the century, 1900. One simply has to read Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle to see how disgusting that industry was. After Sinclair's book was published, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, with a few improvements to the law since then. And even worse than the meat described in the novel were the conditions of the workers in those plants. The book was based on actual events, so the chapter containing the story of the child who was eaten alive by rats should send shivers up any normal person's spine.
Today, people breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat uncontaminated food, yet fanatics like Libertarians and the Tea Party somehow believe that we should turn back the clock to the early 1800s.
Many people argue that industries can self-regulate without government intervention, but history, especially recent history regarding Wall Street, has definitively proven this to be a fallacious assumption.
SERENA ALTSCHUL: Thanks a lot for your time, Mr. Kristof.
We move on now to Europe, to Hungary.
The chairmanship of the European Union rotates every six months and Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán now has the seat. However, just a short time ago, he pushed through a new law that muzzles the press. Fines can be levied as follows: for national TV channels, a maximum fine of $950,000; for daily newspapers and Internet news portals, $119,000; and for weekly or monthly publications, $48,000. And since the rules are vague and capricious, many people are worried that Orbán will use the new law to eliminate any opposition, just as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has eliminated all opposition press.
When Orbán and a few fellow students founded Fidesz -- the "League of Young Democrats" -- in 1988, he initially wanted the new party to admit no one older than 35. We are curious, is he concerned about people becoming "wild in the Hungarian streets"? Does he intend to create a Logan's Run environment, with a carousel where undesirables are launched skyward into a giant bug-zapper?
A country without a free press is a dictatorship. Just ask the people in Belarus, Vietnam, China, and North Korea, and, it appears, Ukraine.
And now a personal comment regarding Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg was made Time's Man of the Year for creating Facebook. But thinking of the many phrases which have become popular via the concept of social media -- for instance, Amazon's "what other people are looking at" and "be the first of your friends to like this," not to mention the entire concept of "friending" -- it seems to me that Facebook is nothing more than a virtualization of high school, with cliques and popularity contests. Did Zuckerberg create Facebook because he was unpopular in high school and never got any dates -- with women, that is?
At least he hasn't texted a photo of his frankfurter to someone he did not know.
We now hear that Zuckerberg has become a philanthropist. He donated an undisclosed amount to Diaspora, an open-source personal web server which implements a distributed social networking service. Great, an open-source Facebook; is that all he thinks about?
Why not think outside of the donation box? Instead of jetting down to Africa, having photos taken, adopting a local boy, and jetting back home, as Madonna and Angelina Jolie have done, why not create a few companies in countries which really need it, for example Moldova? And instead of creating the usual capitalist company, establish it as a cooperative where the employees own it? In other words, donate the infrastructure and manage it only until the employees are able to do it themselves. That way, they won't be reduced to slaves, as has happened in China because of Apple's Foxconn, Walmart, and other legal entities of American multinational corporations.
Or create clinics in countries like Moldova, which has one of the highest incidence rates of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the world, to help eliminate a disease which, if not stopped, will threaten us all?
Finally, we just learned that during the recent snowstorm in Washington DC, President Obama used his authority to requisition plows and other snow removal equipment from other parts of Maryland and DC so the runway at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland could be cleared so he could jet to Hawaii with his family to take another vacation. It's good to be the king!
We'll return to the game after these messages.
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