The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Is Uncle Sam Being Duped Into Fighting Israel's War? MIKE WHITNEY   This week’s drone strike on senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in southern Beirut provides compelling evidence that Israel wants to expand the conflict beyond its borders.  In the last few weeks, Israel has assassinated a deputy political leader in Hamas ( al-Arouri),  a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards , ( Sayyed Razi Mousavi ) and “nearly a dozen senior Iranian military officials” ( Fox News ) at an airport in Damascus.  At the same time, Israel has launched multiple unprovoked airstrikes on Lebanon and Syria. All of these incitements suggest that Israel is exploring ways to expand the hostilities beyond Gaza in order to plunge the entire region into war. Israeli provocations across the Middle East are an attempt to draw the United States deeper into a region-wide conflict.  Israeli leaders know that their country will not become the dominant regional power unless its enemies –mainly Hezbollah and

  The Perpetual War on Free Speech Does anyone believe in it? DONALD JEFFRIES The Founding Fathers made the Constitution palatable by including a Bill of Rights. Without the First 10 Amendments, the Constitution is just what its early critics, including Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, said it was; a dangerous consolidation of power far less representative of liberty than the Articles of Confederation. The First Amendment was always a huge concern with statists of every era. Those who thirst for power, and will compromise themselves in order to attain it, have never looked favorably upon those critical of them. John Adams, the second president of the United States, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts for just this reason. He bristled at criticism. Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson succeeded him in office and scrapped this tyrannical concept. But the notion reared itself again in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln. Adams was a civil libertarian compared to Lincoln. “Honest” Abe di