MARIAN L. TUPY, DECEMBER 17, 2012 1:43PM, CATO Institute Few Frenchmen are more recognizable at home and abroad than the movie star Gerard Depardieu. Last week, Depardieu caused a great controversy in his native land by moving to Belgium – partly to avoid the 75 percent income tax on the wealthy that was introduced by the socialist President of France, Francois Hollande. Depardieu’s move was condemned by the French political establishment, including the Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault who called the actor’s action “pathetic.” Depardieu shot back and, in an open letter to Monsieur Ayrault, wrote, “I’m leaving because you think success, creation, talent and anything different should be punished. I am sending you back my passport and social security, which I have never used.” The French actor claimsto have “paid 85 percent taxes on his revenues this year [2012] and estimated that he had paid €145m ($189m) in total since he started work as a printer at the age of 14.” The lessons from…

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Posted By Michael Ledeen On December 3, 2012, Faster, Please! Pj Media Jonathan Spyer, one of the best reporters on things Syrian, now believes that the tide of battle has turned against President Assad, and that the regime may be forced to retreat to a rump state in the western coastal region sometime in the next several months. If that happens, it would be a stunning defeat for Assad and his allies in Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran, even though the regime might well live on in an amputated form for many years. The Russians and the Iranians have been arming and funding the regime’s Army.  We’ve read recently about Iranian airplanes exploiting Iraqi airspace to smuggle weapons, and there’s a busy ground traffic as well.  The Iranians have also been doing a good deal of the killing. You’ll recall that they started by sending snipers and advisers at the beginning of the uprising–figuring that the same methods they used in the streets…

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By CALEB ROSSITER Washington, The Wall Street Journal, 11/30/12 I recently bumped into a former student of mine outside the high-poverty public high school where I used to teach math. Quaniesha, as I’ll call her, was on her way home, and I was on my way in for the SAT tutoring sessions I hold with athletes trying to become “NCAA-eligible” so they can accept sports scholarships. Quaniesha feigned anger as we walked past the school’s metal detectors: “Why you do me like that, Doc? I gotta start Credit Recovery next week.” She was smiling and knew full well how our back-and-forth was going to go. She’d say I failed her in math. Then I’d say no, you failed yourself. She’d say I was a bad teacher. Then I’d ask her how often she had come to class, done her homework, or even brought her notebook and done the class work rather than cursed and fought and joked around. Once…

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By Michael Oren, Published: November 28, Washington Post Michael Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States. What makes better headlines? Is it numbing figures such as the 8,000 Palestinian rockets fired at Israel since it unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and the 42.5 percent of Israeli children living near the Gaza border who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Or is it high-resolution images of bombed-out buildings in Gaza and emotional stories of bereaved Palestinians? The last, obviously, as demonstrated by much of the media coverage of Israel’s recent operation against Hamas. But that answer raises a more fundamental question: Which stories best serve the terrorists’ interest? Hamas has a military strategy to paralyze southern Israel with short- and middle-range rockets while launching Iranian-made missiles at Tel Aviv. With our precision air force, top-notch intelligence and committed citizens army, we can defend ourselves against these dangers. We have invested billions of dollars in bomb shelters and early-warning systems and, together with…

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