Posts By Author » Rachel Marsden

Are government’s ‘strategic communications’ coming to American airwaves?
23 May 2012 12:01 am

Did you hear about the new bill that would allow the U.S. government’s official overseas information agency to rebroadcast its content onto American TV and radio? The bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 was introduced in Congress last week by Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.), both of whom are presumably dissatisfied with their satellite TV package and think more government-produced content would go down better with an after-work beer.
Not really. As Thornberry explains on his website: “While the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was developed to counter communism …

Waiting for a European Santa Claus
16 May 2012 12:03 am

While your co-workers hover around the water cooler debating whether it matters if Mitt Romney bullied some kid in his youth, a formerly First World nation called Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, you might ask, should Middle America pry its overworked eyes away from Jennifer Lopez gyrating around in a bodysuit on “American Idol” long enough to bother caring?
Now replace “Greece” with “your bank.” It suddenly matters a little more, doesn’t it? What if your bank couldn’t loan you money, give you a mortgage or allow …

Why France elected a Socialist president
9 May 2012 12:01 am

France has elected only the second Socialist president in its history — the first being Francois Mitterrand, who spent 14 years in the driver’s seat back when French presidential terms lasted seven years rather than five, and who made a hard-right turn away from economic socialism and toward spending cuts after his first two years in office. The best France can hope for now is that the newly elected Francois Hollande takes a similar plunge into a pothole of pragmatism and douses any budding socialist ideas.
France is deeply in debt, …

Lame attempts to shut off Afghan heroin spigot have been futile
2 May 2012 12:02 am

A Russian source recently brought an obscure but disturbing article to my attention. Published last month by a little-known online journal called the Oriental Review, the piece, “Active Endeavour And Drug Trafficking,” proposed that not a single gram of heroin has been confiscated on the Mediterranean Sea since the inception of NATO’s Operation Active Endeavour, a maritime operation launched a month after the September 11th attacks with the mission of “monitoring shipping to help detect, deter and protect against terrorist activity.”
My first thought was that perhaps this information was being …

The truth about France’s ‘far-right’ electoral surge
25 Apr 2012 12:02 am

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That’s what an outsider looking at the country’s first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée.
The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May 6 final: Socialist Francois Hollande (28.6 percent) and incumbent center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2 percent). This isn’t the story, though. The most striking news is the 17.9 percent score by Marine Le Pen’s National Front party. …

The ‘Pretty Woman’ strategy for political victory
19 Apr 2012 12:02 am

There’s a scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” where the kindhearted hooker played by Julia Roberts asks her client, portrayed by Richard Gere: “Who do you want me to be?” Regardless of who she might really be, she realizes that it’s far less attractive than a tabula rasa onto which her client can project his own desires, and around which she can then build a tailor-made palatable persona. It’s essentially the same principle that dating-and-mating books recommend adopting when suggesting that women retain an air of mystery at the outset …

The GSA scandal and throwback civil service culture
11 Apr 2012 12:01 am

By now you’ve likely heard about the infamous Las Vegas convention bash during which federal civil servants at the General Services Administration indulged in various frivolities to the tune of $823,000 of your money. That conference featured, among other things, a hired professional clown — which is like Picasso hiring some guy from out of the Yellow Pages to paint a mural.
As with political sex scandals, nothing vaults a fiscal scandal into the headlines faster than photographic or video evidence. The GSA spendthrifts didn’t even have the good sense to …

Romney’s Russia remarks and the dangers of dumbed down
4 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Last week, Mitt Romney described Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” prompting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to respond: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards instead of being realistic about where we agree, where we don’t agree.”
While Romney’s basic sentiment is correct, Clinton is also right in suggesting that Romney’s characterization of Russia is both dated and diplomatically unproductive. Not to mention that it makes for awkward dealings later when you inevitably have to sit down across the table from someone like Vladimir Putin and ask …

Terrorist hijacks French elections
28 Mar 2012 12:02 am

In France, an Islamic terrorist has likely hijacked the agenda for the remainder of the French presidential race. That terrorist is 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, a Franco-Algerian from Toulouse who was fatally riddled with bullets by French forces last week after a 30-hour standoff and took the television remotes of an entire nation with him.
Because of Merah, an election fought on economic grounds has become dominated almost exclusively by national security. The extreme nationalist National Front party has used the incident to leverage its support of stricter immigration policy. Center-right French …

First World problems
21 Mar 2012 12:01 am

After being bombarded with news of Third World problems for so long, I figured it was time to give a bit of equal time to First World suffering. Every so often I reach a boiling point with modern Western culture and feel the need to rant — so I’m going to bleed it out through my fingertips, as Ernest Hemingway used to say of writing, before my brain explodes from the pressure.
– After years of not owning a television, I finally broke down and bought one in November, thinking that …

Sarkozy’s cry for help
14 Mar 2012 12:02 am

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected five years ago by promising to modernize France’s societal infrastructure and bring it more into line with America’s: less government reliance, more freedom in life and work. It was a tall order, but his mandate was overwhelming, with a six-percentage-point win over Socialist rival Segolene Royal. Sarkozy was full of vigor and free-market, limited-government ideas imported directly from across the Atlantic.
But then something got in the way: France. It’s a case of ambition being unable to surmount the overwhelming power of entrenched history.
The battle …

Russia re-Putined
7 Mar 2012 12:02 am

So Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just been re-presidented for at least another six years, during which we can all watch his newly tucked eyes migrate back to where they used to be. And as surely as a pound dog comes with fleas, this election came with “irregularities” — cloaked in “democracy,” as Russian powers like to do it.
For instance, there were 200,000 webcams to monitor the polling stations, but all fed directly into the Kremlin. There were also candidates other than Putin. See if you can name one. …

New WikiLeaks stash: a frightening view of government intelligence
29 Feb 2012 12:01 am

As promised in December, WikiLeaks has begun to release a stash of documents related to the modus operandi of the “private intelligence” sector, using Texas-based Stratfor as a case study. Claiming to have hacked Stratfor’s system to obtain millions of private emails, WikiLeaks has just released the first batch — and what it suggests about the American intelligence community makes me feel as secure as day-old pizza in a frat house.
The CIA has long used private intelligence firms for “black ops,” allowing for plausible deniability in the event that an …

Twitter mentality a threat to America
22 Feb 2012 12:01 am

In less than two weeks, Russians go to the polls for a presidential election exercise. The overwhelmingly likely outcome: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will dust off the old stationery from his first two terms as president.
In the final run-up, Putin is publishing a series of position papers, the latest one focusing on reloading and reforming the Russian military. The most striking remark: “We need a response system for more than just current threats. We should learn to look ‘past the horizon,’ and estimate threats 30 or even 50 years away. …

Obama has it right on birth control
15 Feb 2012 12:02 am

I can’t believe that I actually agree with something President Obama has done. Granted, I’m one of those conservatives who has never subscribed to the full-meal-deal checklist, preferring to critically consider whether each of my positions is the most logical and sensible given the available information and my own values. Usually that process results in coming down on the “right” side of things. In this case, though, I somehow find myself in the odd position of agreeing with Obama and being rather miffed at his opponents.
The president’s new birth control …

Romney is dangerously naive on foreign policy
8 Feb 2012 12:02 am

Mitt Romney appears to have all the foreign-policy savvy of someone who once visited Euro Disney, and it’s freaking me out. Not to say that President Obama is any more knowledgeable on that front, but at least he seems aware of his limitations, outsourcing foreign leadership to the French, the Brits, Hillary Clinton and private contractors.
Never has the world been so interconnected, with power and influence becoming decentralized and regionalized. America’s problems — economic or otherwise — can no longer be solved from inside America, nor can conventional wisdom and …

Will any part of Europe save itself?
1 Feb 2012 12:02 am

The Fitch Ratings agency has downgraded the credit of another five European countries — Belgium, Cyprus, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain — citing “the financing risks faced by eurozone sovereign governments in the absence of a credible financial firewall against contagion and self-fulfilling liquidity crises.”
In other words, these self-styled fiscal medics plunged headfirst into deadly disease without making sure they had all their shots. Is every European country that tries to find a clean end by which to lift up this mess now doomed?
Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum chairman, opened …

Globalization — survival of the phoniest
25 Jan 2012 12:02 am

As increased globalization forces countries to pretend that they like playing with all the other kids in the playground despite fearing they’ll have their toys stolen, never has there been more blatant self-interest cloaked in the phony pretext of outreach or do-goodery. Nowadays, a country is expected to appear both broke and overtly generous — otherwise, you’re just a jerk.
Take Canada, for example. Canada used to be run by nanny-state leftists more concerned with looking like Boy Scouts to the rest of the world than with any kind of self-preserving …

Socialism bombs out again
18 Jan 2012 12:02 am

Once again, socialism has put a silver fork in itself. Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s AAA credit rating, giving the country the side-eye on its claims to have its debt under control. This means the country will now have to pay it all back at an even higher interest rate.
Who are we kidding? No one’s paying back any debts right now. You need money to do that. When was the last time France had any extra cash lying around? It’s like raising the interest rate on the credit card …

Margaret Thatcher and the plague of fake female empowerment
9 Jan 2012 12:01 am

Two items have burst onto the media stage this week: A movie called The Iron Lady about one of the greatest women in history — former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — and a growing European recall of breast implants in danger of exploding. I wonder what the former would say about the latter. Did it ever cross Thatcher’s mind that women’s lives could be meaningfully enhanced by surgically strapping gel packs to their chests? How did women get from Thatcher to this?
Any such unfortunate developments are independent of feminist …

Who Is Brett Kimberlin?

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