So you don't "get" President Bush's trip to Iraq?
Beldar has some thoughts:
Go read the whole thing.If you "get" the President, if you understand what drives him, then this is so much in character that you say to yourself afterwards, "Duh, I shoulda expected him to want to eat his Thanksgiving turkey with the troops, and I wish I coulda been there."
If you don't, you'll figure it's all about Rovian politics and photo ops — in which case I feel very, very sorry for you, because it's hard to digest Thanksgiving leftovers when your gut is so full of bitter black bile.
What nice reporting:
Regarding the bolded section -- many people also fear ghosts and UFOs, but typically we don't make their concerns a focus of national healthcare policy. Seriously, that's a politically loaded sentence, not to mention silly, if you think about it. The notion that the GOP got together and figured out a way to "harm" one of the most significant voting blocs in American politics isn't very realistic.Senior citizens angry over the AARP's endorsement of the Medicare bill are ripping up or burning their membership cards and flooding the lobbying group's Internet message board with complaints in what could be the biggest revolt in its ranks since the 1980s.
Many fear the Republican-backed bill approved by Congress on Tuesday will harm senior citizens, and they say the AARP -- the nation's most influential retiree lobby, with 35 million members -- sold them out.
The bill "destroys one of the most successful programs in the history of this country," Isaac Ben Ezra, president of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, said as he led a demonstration of about 40 people here against the bill Monday. "Shame, AARP."
AARP chief executive William Novelli said Wednesday that between 10,000 and 15,000 members have quit over the bill.
A better lead for this story would have been, "Liberal Democrat seniors angry over the AARP's not taking its orders from Ted Kennedy on the Medicare bill are tearing up their membership cards."
AIDS cases among gay men are on the rise again:
One almost gets the idea that certain lifestyles are strongly associated with the disease. Is it politically correct even to suggest such things these days?Experts attribute the trend to two things: a complacency about risky behavior that arose in the wake of lifesaving antiretroviral therapy and the coming of age of a new generation of gay men with no memory of the epidemic's early, devastating years.
The 'fair' traders in the Democratic Party should take note; protectionism hurts the poor more than any other demographic. So should President Bush, whose commitment to the principles of free trade have been very lax. His steel tariffs were bad enough, now he's trying to place tariffs on Chinese textile goods.A new report from Consumers for World Trade quantifies the impact of trade barriers on American families, concluding that the cost of protection is quantitatively large and impacts most heavily on those with low incomes.
- In the aggregate, both tariffs and quotas add about 6 percent to all the goods we buy, but because low-income families buy more of the things that import restrictions affect, they pay more.
- Minorities are estimated to pay 6.9 percent more on average and single parent households pay 7.5 percent more.
- Every family would get the equivalent of a $238 per year tax cut if all import restrictions were abolished, according to the report.
A recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute emphasizes the disproportionate impact of trade protection on low-income families.
- It notes that "tariffs are highest on the goods important to the poor." For example, a tariff of 48 percent is applied to sneakers costing $3 or less.
- This means that poor people, the ones most likely to buy such shoes, pay $4.79 instead of $3.23, which is what they would sell for without the tariff.
Another problem with trade protection is that it invites retaliation. The day after the U.S. textiles decision, China canceled a trade mission to the United States that probably would have led to billions of dollars of orders for American goods, says Bartlett.
The global economy is not helped by individual nations closing themselves off. It may appear good in the short-term, but it doesn't make for a viable economic strategy across time. Washington doesn't seem to be understanding this lately, and the situation doesn't look likely to improve after the next election.
Bush gives free trade lip service. Dean and his ilk deny it entirely.
As usual, the local newspaper (which I not-so-affectionately call the Comical) misses the point on a recent conservative bake sale held at Texas A&M:
That's unfortunate if that's how the editors of the Comical interpret "actions like these," because that's not the point at all. Rather, the intention is to draw attention to the fact that when the government or an institution treats some people differently because of their race, they are treating some people differently by race! How hard is that to understand? And how hard is it to understand that those of us who hold the Declaration's statement "all men are created equal" as a self-evident truth are opposed to making such distinctions based on race, whatever the intent?Conservative Texas A&M University students, joining a rash of student groups around the country clamoring for attention to their stance against affirmative action, held a bake sale at which buyers were charged different prices depending on their race or gender. The students got the spotlight they craved, but the message they sent fell flat.
The A&M students, members of the Young Conservatives of Texas, sold cookies to "humans" for $2, to Asians for $1, to whites for 75 cents, to Hispanics for 25 cents and to blacks for 10 cents in protest of the new diversity office on the campus, where whites make up about 85 percent of the student population.
Actions like these reinforce the common misconception that affirmative action policies give academically unqualified minority students a get-into-college free card, and they ignore historical discrimination that denied nonwhites opportunities to be successful at any price, no matter their talents or intelligence.
Yes, the political compromises of the Founding that allowed for slavery were a shameful episode in our nation's history. But that shameful episode does not render the central teaching of the Declaration any less true. And treating American citizens differently today based on their race -- no matter how noble the intent -- is still inconsistent with that central teaching of the Declaration.
THAT is the only point being made by the organizers of these bake sales.
Steve Hayward notes that John Kerry relaunched his presidential campaign yesterday by borrowing a line from Jimmy Carter.
That seems appropriate enough. What an unimpressive group of potential nominees.
Cathy Young weighs in rather unimpressively on the issue of establishment of religion. And in the process she does what so many secularists (soft or otherwise) and agnostics try to do, and that's change the terms of the debate:
Of course, nearly the entire Founding political class endorsed Christianity. But in an effort to avoid deadly sectarian disputes, the Founders thought it best to head off the possibility of national, established religion. And so they did. Interestingly, however, some states at the time of the Founding did have established religions. That would go beyond Miss Young's "endorsement," presumably. But as a soft secularist/agnostic and libertarian, Miss Young is less concerned about the tradition of American constitutionalism than she is her religious/political preferences. Hence her focus on "endorsement" of religion, a term I've quoted because it is found nowhere in the Constitution.As an agnostic, I welcome religious expression in the public square. But the endorsement of religion by the state, be it the exclusionary symbolism of the Ten Commandments or even the political promotion of a broad, non-sectarian belief in God, is something that should have no place in America.
Elsewhere, she makes this contention, apparently thinking if she says it, that will make it so:
Our American constitutionalism, however, is steeped in the religious coventant tradition. Apparently, Miss Young does not know much about that. Ignorance, however, does not make right. Part of the genius of the Founding was the fusion of both Ancient ideas (Greek and Roman), Modern ideas (Sydney, Locke, and others), and Religion. Focusing on one, to the exclusion of the others, tends to give one a skewed view of the Founding.Of course American culture is steeped in Judeo-Christian heritage. But our law has its roots in the secular Western tradition, from the Magna Carta to ancient Greece and Rome. Not that Roy Moore would know much about that....
On the pronouncement from Howard Dean (or Duck, M.D. as our friend Sean Hackbarth refers to him) that he's for more government regulations (because apparently a government that mandates how much water can be used per each flush of a toilet is UNDERregulating), David Cohen writes:
Having carefully learned their lessons from the last half-century, the Democrats are going to nominate a Frankencandidate, drawing together George McGovern's foreign policy, Jimmy Carter's economic policy, Walter Mondale's tax policy and Michael Dukakis' biography.
Too true.
No wonder liberals are beside themselves about Dean.
(Update) I didn't see it mentioned in Houston's dreadful daily newspaper, but it seems that Sheila Jackson Lee endorsed Howard Dean yesterday. If it walks like a liberal, quacks like a liberal, and gets endorsements from fellow liberals, then it must be Duck, M.D.
(Update 2) It was mentioned in the Comical after all. John Williams added this:
The Dean campaign originally had scheduled its gathering for outside the Enron headquarters downtown. The event was moved to Hermann Park in hopes of attracting a crowd of more than 5,000, but drew about 1,500, campaign officials said, as the city began recovering from the previous day's flooding and tornadoes.
If the campaign said it was 1,500, it was probably closer to 1,000. That must have been terribly disappointing to the Dean people. During the city's municipal elections a couple of weeks ago, the Deaniacs were out in force passing out flyers and encouraging voters to come see Duck, M.D. That's a terrible turnout in the largest city in Texas (and one that Al Gore carried last election against George Bush), and using Monday's flash flooding as an excuse is just spin. For the most part, the city was functioning normally yesterday.
Reductio contributor Owen Courreges takes Glenn Reynolds to task on the Massachusetts Supreme Court's gay-marriage decision here.
Law professor or not, Reynolds is like so many libertarians (and liberals as well) who would read their own preferences into American constitutionalism (which is, of course, easier than working through the design and intent of the Founders).
Despite the label so many people give Reynolds (and one that he himself occasionally points out isn't quite right), his is not the position of a conservative constitutionalist.
If you scroll down, Owen has some more thoughts on gay marriage itself.
Tom Bevan uses Joshua Micah Marshall's latest ramblings about foreign policy as a taking-off point to suggest that many on the Left are simply returning to their pre-9/11 form:
There's a larger context here that continues to baffle me. Clearly, September 11 shattered many illusions we had as a country and proved beyond a doubt that the world is a very dangerous place. But every day since 9/11 a rift has been growing in the country between those (generally on the right) who still think there are real and present dangers abroad that need to be battled aggressively and those (generally on the left) who think the real and growing danger isn't rogue regimes or terrorists overseas but a "unilateral, imperialist" President at home. To the political left, Bush isn't reacting to danger, he's creating it.
What's really striking about this theme that continues to spread throughout the left is that it's accompanied by a call to return to pre-September 11 policies with little or no recognition of their failure or contribution to the circumstances we now find ourselves in (see above).
This is not a "blame it all on Clinton" argument. To the contrary, the point I'm trying to make is that there is a lingering nostalgia for the Clinton years coming from those on the left that amounts to an almost head-in-the-sand mentality when trying to deal with a post 9/11 world.
I don't know that I would indict everyone on the Left, but certainly many Democrats have had trouble articulating a coherent post-9/11 foreign policy. And so they critique, and carp, and don't have anything much more useful to say than General Clark's notion that he would have more nations helping us in Iraq, and cede more control to the U.N. That's not a foreign policy. It's not even realistic.
Bevan's entire post is worth a read.
Bill Gertz reports on Secretary Rumsfeld's reaffirmation of U.S. nuclear deterrence policy:
The United States is committed to defending South Korea from an attack by the North and would use nuclear forces if needed, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the government here yesterday.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who finishes his first official visit to Asia today, said the U.S. commitment to South Korea includes "the continued provision of a nuclear umbrella" for South Korea, according to a statement issued after joint security talks.
"We understand that weakness can be provocative, that weakness can invite people into doing things that they otherwise might not even consider," Mr. Rumsfeld told a joint news conference with South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil.
Further down in the article, there is concern that American troops are stationed as a tripwire. That's true enough, and pulling them back is a good idea. That's why the administration wants to keep open the option of tactical (enhanced radiation/reduced blast) nuclear weapons. And why North Korea would be well advised to reconsider its nonproliferation stance.
It seems such a short time ago that the U.S. Supreme Court found a heretofore undiscovered right to anal sex in the Constitution.
That was only a signal for other courts to march full speed ahead, of course.
And so they do.
So how will sociocons respond?
(Update) The President's answer:
Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.
That's the TALK. What will actually be done?
My renewal notice for the American Political Science Association came several weeks ago, and I'm debating renewing the silly thing. I do consider myself a professional political scientist (albeit a non-academic one), but reading the journal is really some tough sledding (useful for insomnia), and there are no other significant benefits to membership. I really can't describe the journal as well as Thomas Krannawitter, though:
Even though most of my formal undergraduate and graduate education has been within the political science discipline, I try to avoid reading too much of the mainstream political science literature. Much of it is produced by silly men and women who cannot tell the difference between a free election conducted by free citizens and a free falling star or asteroid; they think the same laws of gravity and physics describe both. In fact, on the rare occassions when I do open up something like the official journal of the American Political Science Association, I find my limited background in mathematics to be much more useful for reading and interpreting the equation-laden articles than my background in politics and political science. At any rate, such literature cannot be good for the soul, so I try to minimize my dietary intake.
Amen, brother.
George Will comments on Howard Dean's decision to forgo campaign finance limitations imposed by the acceptance of public funds:
Which brings us to Howard Dean's decision, made after an East German-style plebiscite among his faithful, to forgo government funding of his campaign for the Democratic nomination, thereby escaping spending limits. He will rely on the voluntary contributions of people who agree with him. What a concept.
Dean's sensible and entirely self-interested decision means he knows he can get more money on his own than he can from the government. He has discovered the obvious: The government, by its restrictions on the amounts and conduits of political giving, has turned something that exists in wild abundance in America — money — into a scarcity (as the postwar Labor government did with coal and fish).
It is too early to tell if Howard Dean will get his party's nomination for President and go down to a Mondale-style blinking-dot defeat in November 2004, but we can thank the good doctor for blowing up the whole issue of campaign finance. We can probably expect John Kerry to try and dip into his wife's fortune to prop up his sagging campaign, meaning he may well ditch campaign finance limits (if, of course, he remains a viable candidate long enough to spend that much money).
And their Democrat supporters will cheer them on (much as the same people are currently cheering on the former Texas Democrat Party chair as he sets a new spending record for his mayoral run in Houston, a Democrat city), exposing the issue of campaign finance as completely phony.
So I'm happy to thank Dr. Dean for his contribution to this campaign. Well done.
Ann Coulter is out of control much of the time.
This column on Terri Schiavo is not one of those times:
In the absence of a living will, I would think the courts ought to be erring on the side of life. But short of that, couldn't we at least all agree that the courts should not defer to the pull-the-plug demands from anyone who:
- expresses an unseemly enthusiasm for another person's death
- was the only person present when the incident leading to the persistent vegetative state occurred
- stands to make money off the person's death
- is wearing a "W.W.C.V.B.D.?" (what would Claus von Bulow do?) bracelet?
More good stuff in this one.
From Brothers Judd:
AIDs is a difficult disease to give yourself and is very easily avoided. Ronald Reagan and other conservatives believe(d) you're morally obligated to avoid those behaviors that spread this disease and many others. Meanwhile, folks like Dr. Koop, mentioned later in the story, helped to spread AIDs by telling gay men they'd be "safe" if only they used condoms. Who then is more responsible for the AIDs subpandemic (wouldn't want to be judgmental and call it a plague), those who endorsed the behavior that caused it or those who opposed?
Personal responsibility?
What's that?
In a short but interesting post, Peter Schramm asks if 9/11 had any effect on Democrats?
I would say yes, for a short time. And then they lapsed back into their usual foreign policy preferences. Old (bad) habits are hard to break.
I suppose it's advantageous in some ways for California to have a Republican governor, but those folks who keep wanting to make Arnold a conservative (or even a moderate) should realize that his government is not likely to be all that conservative:
Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger's pick to head the state's environmental protection agency on Thursday criticized the Bush administration for failing to curb greenhouse gases or prevent forest fires.
In his first public remarks since his appointment, Terry Tamminen, executive director of Environment Now in Santa Monica, said a federal decision earlier this year "undermines our ability to control greenhouse gases.''
"We can't just stick our head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist,'' said Tamminen, referring to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision earlier this year not to regulate carbon dioxide, a contributor to global warming.
A liberal Republican can do greater harm to conservatives in some ways than a moderate, pro-business Democrat. That could be the case with Arnold if he continues to take a page from Richard Riordan's playbook, and populate his administration with liberals.
Former University of Houston political scientist David Brady has done a nifty bit of quantitative analysis on the media and political bias, a summary of which is published in the Wall Street Journal. It's subscriber only and this link will only work for a few days, but here's an excerpt:
The release of former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg's book, "Bias," first prompted our examination of the degree to which the news media deviate from objective coverage. Mr. Goldberg wrote of how, during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, Peter Jennings consistently labeled Republican loyalists as "conservatives" or "very determined conservatives." Meanwhile, the ABC News anchor did not refer to Democratic loyalists as "liberals," treating Mr. Clinton's allies, instead, as mainstream lawmakers. So we asked ourselves, was the media's tendency to label particular senators isolated to the Clinton impeachment trial? Or is there a more pernicious generality? After a study of New York Times and Washington Post articles published between 1990 and 2002, we conclude that the problem is endemic.
We examined every Times and Post article that contained references to a senator. Specifically, we set out to reveal the treatment of the 10 most liberal and 10 most conservative senators from each congressional session. We used the Poole-Rosenthal ratings -- developed by the University of Houston's Keith Poole to illustrate a senator's ideological extremity -- to determine which senators to study. Using a reliable news database, we deployed a constant search term to uncover when news writers labeled senators conservative or liberal. For five successive congressional sessions during this time period, we documented when Times and Post reporters directly labeled Republican loyalists "conservatives" and Democratic loyalists "liberals" in their news stories. (We excluded editorials.)
For those who are wondering, Brady is a highly respected political scientist (not just some partisan hack). Unfortunately, by the time I got to Houston for grad school, Brady was long gone. But I hear he was a real character.
(11-16-2003 Update) The article is now available to non-subscribers on OpinionJournal.
At 6:00pm tonight the Republicans are shutting down Congress. Congress has not delivered on countless promises to the American people and yet the Republicans are still preventing any and all business from getting done. The Republicans' reason for shutting down the Senate is that four, yes four of President Bush's extremist right-wing judges are not being confirmed.
I have a problem with this for two reasons:
#1 -- while the Republicans are focusing on four judges, it's not JUST four judges that have been stonewalled. The Democrats have pretty much refused to confirm ANY judicial nominee for Bush since their filibustering of Estrada began over two years ago. It's these four, PLUS all the others waiting for these four to have a vote so they can even get considered.
#2 -- Dean claims the Republicans are "shutting down Congress" at 6 PM. That's not quite accurate.
You see, nobody in Washington is normally at work at 6 PM. And the Talkathon is only happening in the Senate. The House, if they choose, can go about their business. If the House of Representatives wants to pass bills, they are free to do so all night long -- they'll just have to wait for the Senate to get done with the talkathon to work on the Senate versions of said bills.
Just the Senate is going to be "doing nothing". To make things even funnier, instead of it being a filibuster in the traditional sense (with Senators from one side hogging all the time) the Democrats get 15 hours to make THEIR case on whatever issue they choose to.
Further, the filibuster these days is a bit different than it used to be. See, you don't actually have to stall government to filibuster anymore. You have to stall it for about 4 hours each day, and then the Senate tables the issue till tomorrow to get on to other business.
To put things in perspective: IF we accept that what Howard Dean said is accurate, then the Democrats are guilty of "shutting down Congress" every morning for the past two years.
Claremont's Ken Masugi calls this news the error that may help decide the Louisiana gubernatorial election:
Jindal has cruised into a discernible lead, but I don't know that this issue in isolation will have that much impact. However, combined with this earlier news -- that black males were stronger in their support of Jindal than black females -- it seems likely that Jindal may see more support from blacks than might otherwise be the case, and this issue may contribute. That's really bad news for Blanco.An internal memo sent to gay activists this month says Democrat Kathleen Blanco has made specific commitments to gay rights, including one that contradicts a position she expressed on a questionnaire from a conservative organization earlier in the gubernatorial campaign.
The lieutenant governor, who faces Republican Bobby Jindal in Saturday's runoff election, told the Louisiana League for Equality that she would issue an executive order banning discrimination in state government and would veto legislation outlawing adoptions by gay couples.
If Jindal holds on, I wonder how the national media will spin the GOP going 4/4 in major gubernatorial races this fall when the President is allegedly so unpopular?
Scott Ritter has an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor.
Yes, that Scott Ritter.
Ritter argues that the current resistance in Iraq is indigenous, and extremely well trained in the creative design and use of plastic explosives. He cites firsthand experience with Iraq's extensive plastic explosives program from his days as a weapons inspector (nice that we find out about these things now, eh?).
I certainly don't agree with all of his conclusions -- especially his final paragraph -- but there is some useful information here, and probably some useful conclusions to be drawn about the efficacy of using UN weapons inspectors versus the way we used to fight wars (i.e. the victors impose their terms/armistice, and take care of verification issues themselves). But that last is a topic for another time.
I've written elsewhere that I often have trouble deciding if there is an intentional liberal bias in the elite media, or if it's just a matter of ignorance.
And two parts of this Newsweek piece illustrate that difficulty.
Check out this paragraph:
Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian’s long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon’s mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.
Let me do a quick textual analysis of that paragraph:
So, the conclusion you are left to draw is that the previously sensible Cheney has been fooled by the neoconservatives.
That's original.
But the authors of the piece don't even have the guts to write that. That's the conclusion you are supposed to draw, of course, but they've really only intimated it by stringing together their "facts" with what Hersh has said (let me remind readers that I said this is exactly how liberals were likely to read the Hersh article, and I said it weeks ago -- I guess the Newsweek guys are just a little slow).
This is an insidious sort of journalism, because it's opinion journalism without having the guts to call itself that. And yes, it's "biased" in the sense that it attempts to take the reader to a certain conclusion, by the manner in which it strings together fact and opinion.
But to balance it, there's this bit of ignorance:
Abe Shulsky, a defense intellectual who ran the office under Luti, was a Straussian, a student of a philosopher named Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts had hidden meanings that only an elite could divine. Strauss taught that philosophers needed to tell —”noble lies” to the politicians and the people.
If that's what Strauss taught, then it should have been easy enough for them to include a reference, such as "in his Persecution and the Art of Writing" or "The City And Man." The only problems are, that "teaching" can't be found and quoted from Strauss's written works, nor can a citation be provided. That "teaching" is the (mis)interpretation of one Shadia Drury, who has spent much of her recent career misreading and mischaracterizing the work of Strauss. The Newsweek journalists could at least admit their source for such a bold exertion. But then, that would be to admit their ignorance.
Hence the dilemma with which I opened -- bias or ignorance. I can never decide.
From Lileks (via the Fire Ant Gazette) comes this query:
This Riyadh bombing story would be cause for a brief dank gust of saudenfreude if the damage hadn’t been so horrible. Will the Saudi newsmagazines run covers that say “Why Do They Hate Us” – or, more accurately, “Why Do We Hate Us”? It’s a blue-pill / red-pill moment for the Saudis; it reminds you – if you needed just a jab – that history is moving swiftly around us. And it would seem to be an act of audacious stupidity by Al Qaeda – this isn’t just biting the hand that feeds them. This is biting it, tearing it off, chewing it up, and blowing smoke rings with the bone powder.
And it makes me wonder: They stick the shiv in the ribs of their richest and most enthusiastic backers.
What makes them this confident?
A better question is, what guides them?
Because if you understand Al Qaeda as motivated by a sectarian belief that the Saudi royal family has become a fat, corrupt, lazy group who no longer fulfill their holy obligations AND conspire with the infidel West (allow troops on Muslim lands, make deals with them, etc), then taking the fight to the royal family makes all the sense in the world.
And if you understand the Saudi royal family as essentially trying to have it both ways -- to pay off those it can pay off so it can stay in power, while faced with a demographic explosion that makes supporting its lavish lifestyle ever more difficult without possibly inviting more Western involvement in Saudi Arabia (the gas initiative is a possible precursor), which is likely further to agitate anti-Western sentiment among those the royal family would hope to pacify -- then you begin to get a glimpse of the problem faced by the Kingdom.
And it's a problem for the United States, because even though the royal family does fund terror to some extent, just about anything that would replace the royal family in the short term would be many orders of magnitude worse.
Sean Hackbarth doesn't buy into the notion that Howard Dean suddenly turned over a major bit of campaign strategy to his followers with no idea what they might decide.
Of course not!
It was about as fake as Ross Perot teasing his supporters for months that he might do something if they insisted, getting them to insist, and then announcing he would do whatever he planned on doing the whole time because the "volunteers" insisted.
Indeed, one might even suggest the two are similarly megalomaniacal. But we don't want to insult DR. Dean unfairly, so we'll hold off on that judgment for now.
Here's one of the most amusing lines in a decent New Yorker profile of General Wesley Clark:
I've often called Miss Albright one of the least impressive Secretaries of State in U.S. history, but even I have never mistaken her for the cleaning lady.The negotiations went badly. The Albanian Kosovars refused for a time to budge from their position of absolute autonomy, and eschewed the diplomatic niceties. (When Albright flew to Rambouillet in the hope that her presence might help to move things along, the Albanian delegation, working late at night, mistook her for a cleaning woman and told her to go away.)
Ouch.
This is quite a powerful photo and story.
(found via the Conservative Observer).
Further to this earlier post on the partial-birth abortion ban, Mickey Craig recounts a different approach taken by the pro-life side in Michigan.
In my earlier post, I intimated that the pro-life side might have been better served by arguing that when any part of the fetus is outside of the mother's body, he or she should be considered a child, and any effort to "abort" said child should be considered infanticide.
That's the approach taken by Michigan lawmakers (vetoed by the governor), and Craig's post highlights the reasoning behind it.
Sorry for the lack of non-news posts from me recently.
There's been some travel, some live music, some birthday celebrations, and (at the moment), some friends/former colleagues in town from the UK -- all serving to limit my time for posts on politics and culture.
I should have some more regular postings on this blog space next week. In the meantime, Thomas Krannawitter has an interesting post on the Claremont blog that defends Thomas Jefferson from the latest historicist attack (by Garry Wills). It's a good read.
Clayton Cramer lights into a reader who wrote to him defending the Brady Campaign (a.k.a. Handgun Control Inc). The reader, a worker with the Brady organization, claims that they "are not trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans." Cramer proves that this isn't quite true. In fact, it's entirely untrue:
I can't think of anything else to add...The Brady Campaign was originally founded for the stated purpose of prohibiting handgun ownership except by police, military, security guards, and a few licensed gun collectors. I've looked up the quote myself in New Yorker magazine from 1976. Nelson "Pete" Shields was very direct that the purpose of registration was a step towards that goal.
"We are not trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans, we are working to pass laws that provide for greater safety for all citizens."
Is this a new policy in the last year or two? Quite a number of Californians were required to turn in legally purchased SKS rifles three years ago--and what was especially galling was that those that had registered them in good faith received no compensation, while those who had not registered them (believing that they weren't required to, because of how badly the law was written) did receive compensation.
Of course, the entire California assault weapons ban is an attempt to take firearms away from law-abiding adults. California's Assault Weapons Control Act made sale of an AR-15 rifle into a more serious crime (minimum four years in prison) than forcible rape (minimum sentence only three years in prison).
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