Over half of all new jobs created in the last year were created in Texas

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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.

What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, “Open for Business.”

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How to Turn a Recession into a Depression

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Destroy business confidence, cozy up to socialists abroad, send deficits through the ceiling ― that should do it. It is hard for a president to turn a recession into a long-term downturn in the United States, given the inherent resiliency of private enterprise and America’s open and free markets.

But if you were to try, you might do something like the following...

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Assassins In Arizona?

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Border: If there's one word we shouldn't want to add to the U.S. lexicon, it's sicario, the Spanish word for contract killer. But with lawmen warning of sicarios now in Arizona, we may soon know that word — and worse. With little to worry about in crossing the unguarded U.S. border, it was only a matter of time before cartel smugglers began fighting over the lucrative spoils themselves.

Last May 13, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned Arizona authorities that it had intelligence that 15 trained sicarios from Mexico's Sinaloa cartel were heading to Arizona...

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Germany holds inflamed debate on Islam and migration

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HAMBURG - Germany's inflamed public debate about Islam and integration risks serious overheating as politicians compete to make ever tougher statements criticising Muslims immigrants they accuse of refusing to fit in here. The escalating row, sparked off when a Bundesbank board member slammed Muslims as dim-witted welfare spongers, has mixed some social problems and some Muslim customs into a vision of Islam as a looming menace to German society. When President Christian Wulff tried to build bridges by saying Islam was now part of German society, critics retorted the country was based on "Judeo-Christian values"...

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Britain Faces Very Serious Threat From Terrorism,

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Home Secretary Theresa May said the U.K. faces a “very serious” threat from international terrorism, with an attack “highly likely,” as the government issues a report on its security priorities. Prime Minister David Cameron will identify the biggest dangers the U.K. faces today in the first part of the Strategic Defense and Security Review. The second section, published tomorrow, will set out how the nation will defend itself from attack, while also outlining cuts to defense spending of between 7 percent and 8 percent...

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The (Distorted) View

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“Why is it inappropriate when 70 families died?” an outraged and incoherent Whoopi Goldberg questioned Bill O’Reilly on “The View” about the Ground Zero mosque, referring to 70 Muslims who died during the 9/11 attacks.

“Because Muslims killed us on 9/11, that’s why!” the cable-news kingpin matter-of-factly responded. “No!” Goldberg interjected. “Oh, My God! That is such bulls---!”

Goldberg and her co-host Joy Behar stormed off set in huffy protest.

Had O’Reilly overlooked a closet Presbyterian among the hijackers?

If nine years ago, roughly one month after 9/11, you announced that Muslims would soon seek to construct a mosque upon the site where their coreligionists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, people would have called you “crazy.” If you had added that in the future merely mentioning the religion of our attackers would spark public censure, they would have put you in a straitjacket. Strangely, on the island of Manhattan in 2010, controversy pounced upon Bill O’Reilly’s mainstream view rather than Jay Behar and Whoopi Goldberg’s out-of-touch outrage...

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Glaring double standard in tolerance for anti-Muslim bigotry

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In theory, it could be a fun game to try to detect the double standard in this pattern of facts, except that it's so obvious and glaring that no effort is required to see it: The Washington Post, July 8, 2010: Octavia Nasr has been fired. CNN fired the editor responsible for Middle Eastern coverage after she posted a note on Twitter expressing admiration for a late Lebanese cleric considered an inspiration for the Hezbollah militant movement...

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Obama gives us Marxism 101

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Chilling as it may be to hear the President of the United States of America resorting to the lexicon of Star Wars to gin up the crowds in Ohio, there is an upside. Obama’s “The empire is striking back” speech yesterday is Marxism Dialectic 101—right there on YouTube as indisputable proof to teach your children...

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Sneering MSNBC Slams GOP Candidates as 'American Freak Show'

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Sometimes the bias can't get any clearer: A MSNBC graphic on Monday mocked GOP senatorial candidates with the headline, "American Freak Show: Angle, Paul, O'Donnell: New Faces in Politics." American Freak Show is also the title of guest Willie Geist's new book on politics, but all the apparent "freaks" discussed in the piece were Republicans...

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The Closing of the Muslim Mind

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Professionally, I was working in the “war of ideas” area both at the Voice of America and then at the Defense Department. One cannot fight a war of ideas unless one understands the ideas one is at war with. Our 9/11 attackers justified themselves in terms of their Muslim faith. Therefore, I was ineluctably led into a deep study of Islamic theology and into an examination of what constitutes justice in Islam...

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