The Community Impact of Increasing Prison Populations

The Wall Street Journal offers a disturbing take on the trends in increasing poverty in the western United States, which is resulting from the success of law enforcement efforts in crime prevention and increased rates of imprisonment (non-subscriber links here and here).

Academic analysts and social policy professionals argue that high incarceration rates are causing increased poverty, an analytical perspective that reverses the traditional explanatory arrows in theories on poverty and crime:

When she hit 60, Sarah Coleman thought she was done raising children. But today she is among the millions of Americans left to fill the void for family members gone to jail.

Now 66 years old, Ms. Coleman has three youngsters at home -- ages 5, 3 and 1. She doesn't know the whereabouts of her granddaughter, who is their mother. As for the children's fathers, they have both been in trouble with the law. One is in prison serving a 10-year term for second-degree murder. The other has been in and out of jail on drug charges.

"I didn't intend to raise my great-grandkids," says Ms. Coleman, who relies on supplies of diapers and baby wipes from a local social-services center. "There are so many things I can't do for them because of money, but I have to try."

Here in South Mountain, a district in south Phoenix, more than 3,800 residents are displaced, serving time in prison or the county jail. For every 100 adults, 6.1 are behind bars. That's more than five times the national average of 1.09 per 100, according to a report by the Pew Center, a nonpartisan research group. Arizona has the fastest-growing prison population of the Western states, having increased 5.3% in 2007 to more than 38,000.

Behind those figures are many hidden, related costs -- financial burdens that communities are often left to manage. For every person who goes to jail, businesses lose either a potential employee or customer. Inmates' children often depend on extended families, rather than a parent, to raise them. With only so many government resources to go around, churches, volunteer programs and other groups must often step in to help.

In one nine-block stretch of central South Mountain, nearly 500 out of 16,000 residents are in the state system either as prisoners or as probationers who return regularly to jail. Prison costs associated with this nine-block area amount to roughly $11 million annually, according to an estimate from the Justice Mapping Center, a New York organization that examines crime patterns.

But the state spends more than half that amount -- an additional $6.5 million -- on social programs for the residents who remain. In that nine-block span, 2,000 people receive cash payments under the federal government's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Nearly 5,000 are on food stamps. Almost one-third of the residents live below the poverty level. The total cost of prison and social services combined: approximately $2 million per block.

South Mountain may seem like just another desert town, yet its demographics are complicated. While a crackdown on crime has produced a high incarceration rate, it has also made the area attractive to new pockets of middle-class residents. Shopping malls, restaurants and grocery stores dot the area; there's a Target and a Wal-Mart. Gated communities and golf courses abound.

Most notable is what's missing: men of a certain age. "It's sad but we have men who are over 35 and we have young people under 17," says Faye Gray, a 71-year-old neighborhood activist. "The ones in between are missing." She quickly recites a half-dozen names, all men serving lengthy drug sentences -- people she watched grow up.

South Mountain's residents are mainly Hispanic and African-American. According to various studies, those two groups are the most overrepresented in the criminal-justice system. The Pew study released earlier this year showed the overall incarceration rate for all whites was one person per 245 adults, compared with one in 41 for blacks and one in 96 for Hispanics.

Arizona officials are worried about the $900 million the state spends annually on corrections. In an attempt to reverse the trend, the Department of Corrections has created several programs to give inmates tools to live successfully on the outside. Many convicts, for instance, can't read, so literacy is a focal point. One project seeks to identify job prospects for inmates, and offers classes in automotive, construction and catering fields. More than an effort to counter recidivism, such initiatives are meant to ease the burden of social-service providers -- programs already helping inmates' families.

The interplay of crime, poverty and race has long been a topic of study among criminologists and sociologists. Whether poverty creates crime or crime begets poverty is "an impossible question" to answer simply, says David Kennedy, director of crime prevention and control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The longterm decline of today's minority areas -- from drug epidemics and white suburban flight to a gradual rise in prison populations and budgets -- has taken a toll, says Mr. Kennedy. "These things play off each other," he says. "It's not arguable any longer that some of the things we're doing to fight crime are promoting crime and exacerbating poverty."

Read the whole thing, at the link.

What I don't see at the article is a discussion of alternatives. It's not enough to lament increased rates of imprisonment. We need to focus on the collapse of family values in minority communities that has led to the disproportionate number of young people winding up in prison.

British Neocon Blog Being Sued by Hamas

Harry’s Place, a left-leaning British blog of neoconservative opinion, writes of an impending lawsuit by Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative:

Last Friday, in the wake of a closely argued debate about whether Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, had used the phrase “Evil Jew” or “Jewish Lobby” in a speech, Harry’s Place received a letter. The letter is from Dean and Dean, a firm of solicitors who are acting for Mr Sawalha. Mr Sawalha has demanded that we take down certain articles from Harry’s Place, and publish an apology “in the attached wording”.

The solicitors have failed to attach the apology that Mr Sawalha insists we publish. That omission matters little, as we have no intention of apologising to him at all, nor of taking down any article.

We have responded to Mr Sawalha’s solicitors, through Mishcon de Reya, who are acting for us.

Mr Sawalha claims that we have “chosen a malevolent interpretation of a meaningless word”. In fact, we did no more than translate a phrase which appeared in an Al Jazeera report of Mr Sawalha’s speech. When Al Jazeera changed that phrase from “Evil Jew” to “Jewish Lobby”, we reported that fact, along with the statement that it had been a typographical error.

Mr Sawalha says that the attribution of the phrase “Evil Jew” to him implies that he is “anti-semitic and hateful”. Notably, he does not take issue with our reporting of the revelation, made in a Panorama documentary in 2006, that he is a senior activist in the clerical fascist terrorist organisation, Hamas. The BBC report disclosed that Mr Sawalha “master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and in London “is alleged to have directed funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”.

Be sure to read the rest of post, at the link.

Harry's Place describes its mission as:

... venue for heated discussion of the Iraq war, the ‘anti-war’ movement, the Islamist far-right, the decline of the Marxist left, the rise of left anti-Semitism, the slow death of internationalism, Zionism and Anti-Zionism and also examined issues relating to religion and secularism ...

The blog's administration indicates they may need help in resisting Mr. Sawalha's attempt "to silence us with this desperate legal suit..."

Check out Harry's Place here.

Hat Tip: Neoconstant

The Moral Power of Ingrid Betancourt

I wrote previously on "The Ingrid Betancourt Rescue." Yet, the more I learn of Betancourt's ordeal, the more powerful is her story of moral courage.

André Glucksmann, at City Journal, argues for seeing Betancourt's six years in captivity as a story of personal bravery and the ultimate rejection of slavery and terror:

Public opinion, government officials, ordinary citizens, and her friends and family—all are moved by, and rejoice in, Ingrid Betancourt’s liberation from the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Bravo to the woman who survived and stood fast in her tropical gulag; to her family, who moved heaven and earth to secure her release; to the organizations that fought against forgetfulness; and to the politicians who worked tirelessly to free her. Such joy aside, however, I fear that the thunderous worldwide applause may smother, with flowers and compliments, a troublesome and insistent truth—one that the hostage pondered ceaselessly during her six-year ordeal and has sought to deliver to us since her arrival on the Bogota tarmac. This truth alone gives absolute meaning to her liberation.

From the outset, Betancourt has congratulated the Colombian army and President Álvaro Uribe for the military operation that saved her. She praised not only its impeccable success but also—as she deliberately pointed out—its daring, for any military operation risked going awry for some unforeseen reason and leading to the execution of the hostages, as has sometimes happened in earlier attempts. Unlike her family members—who, she is careful to emphasize, have always so feared losing her that they distrusted and criticized Uribe’s adventurism and militarism—Betancourt congratulates the Colombian president. To be sure, Operation Checkmate could well have ended in bloodshed; but Betancourt had long wished for it, ready to face death if necessary. This had become a matter of principle for her. Better, she said, “a second of freedom,” even deadly freedom, than an eternity of slavery. She had attempted five escapes, and in retribution the guerilla fighters had chained her up by the neck. “I always avoided imagining my wife’s living conditions,” her husband said. “Now I know she lived like a dog.”

Betancourt’s choice, which she has proclaimed loud and clear since her first breaths of free air, is the result of mature reflection: rather the possibility of a bloody outcome than the life of a dog. She does not tell us that anything is better than death; she says rather that freedom is worth any price....

Ingrid Betancourt’s physical, moral, and intellectual courage reminds us of what is fundamentally at stake in a civilization: the refusal of slavery.

Betancourt, who was interviewed on Larry King Live the other night, cannot talk of some of the sheer inhumanity she witnessed while in captivity: "The memories are better left in the jungle," she said thoughout the broadcast:

Charles Krauthammer writes on the larger implications of the Betancourt story for international politics, "How Hostages, And Nations, Get Liberated" (on the hard power of military force and moral clarity).

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Cross-posted at NeoConstant

Obama's Sister Souljah Moment

In an earlier post, I suggested that Jesse Jackson's "nuts" controversy provided Barack Obama an opportunity to "break dramatically from the racial grievance masters of the Democratic Party's black-American base." Jackson's coments, in other words have provided Obama his Sister Souljah moment.

Dan Balz, at the Washington Post, makes a similar point:

Barack Obama leads a charmed life. He finally had his Sister Souljah moment and didn't even have to show up. Jesse Jackson did it for him solo.

Sixteen years ago, Bill Clinton used a Jackson-sponsored forum to rebuke the rap singer for suggesting that black people "have a week and kill white people" rather than each other. Jackson fumed as Clinton made the comments and denounced them later. Politically, Clinton came out such a winner that "Sister Souljah moment" now has its own entry in Wikipedia.

Roll forward to this week and the controversy that is attracting so much attention. Obama did not have to rebuke an important constituency himself to define himself as different from the Jackson-Sharpton wing of the Democratic Party. Being attacked by Jackson was more than enough to get across the point. Whatever people may know or think they know about Obama, they can no longer mistake him as a direct descendant of old-style black politics....

Whatever his disagreements, Jackson's outburst suggested that he has some fundamental disagreements with Obama's worldview. The more he makes that clear, the better it's likely to be for Obama. Jackson is an old-fashioned liberal with an abiding faith in government, for which he makes no apologies. He has kept that flame burning for many years.

But he is also trapped in a battle that was resolved within the Democratic Party long ago, when Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over. The party is comfortable with both governmental and non-governmental solutions and Obama is on the other side of that divide. He speaks in a language that is foreign to Jackson's ears.

I'm not fully in agreement that Obama is "fully over that divide," as the Illinois Senator's policy proposals would make Lyndon Johnson smile.

But I do think Balz hits the bullseye with his points on Jackson, and thus Obama's opportunity. Jackson-style post-civil right black leaders are caught in a time-warp of grievance politics - the "blood of martyrs" - that turns the contemporary civil rights agenda into a guilt-mongering shake-down scam.

The opportunity for Obama is to fully denounce the racial politics of victimology. He has yet to do so formally, although he has thrown MoveOn and the radical netroots under the bus.

I'm seeing some outrageous rejection of the Sister Souljah frame for Jackson's "nuts" controversy, of course.The leftist Obsidian Wings says just raising the issue is "racist":

I keep hearing that Nutsgate is a “Sister Souljah moment” for Obama. Frankly, it’s annoying me. First – it’s not a Sister Souljah moment at all. Second – I’m sick of that term. It’s time to retire the Sister Souljah label altogether. It’s inaccurate, and even borderline racist....

The [use of] “Sister Souljah” means distancing oneself from black people. When used in this sense, the Sister Souljah label masks an uglier, racial dimension lurking below the conceptual surface.

It takes a lot of, well, balls, to argue racism is at issue in suggesting Barack Obama ought to distance himself from the hardline black grievance-politics constituency.

But note here the deep sickness in Obsidian Wings' reference to racism.

The author of this post has no business writing about race and politics if he fails to realize the Jackson's comment was a call to lynch Barack Obama. Lynching was the standard tool of terror for racist night-riders in post-bellum America, and the phenomenon wasn't just isolated to Dixie. For Jesse Jackson to even suggest Obama's castration recalls the face of horror so devious that to argue against those who criticize him as "racist" reveals a strange, malevolent victim's irrationality.

It is not "racist" to repudiate the "master's mentality" of racial recrimnation that drives the grievance hordes of the black underclass interest group lobby. This is the very cohort that Balz suggests is stuck in a time warp.

You know we're in a very strange era of politcs when lefties twist the genuinely evil comments of a discreditied civil rights icon into some form of alleged neo-Reaganite anti-black ideology.

See also, "'Nuts' Case: How Did Media Cover Jesse Jackson's Choice of Words?"

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UPDATE: For more substantiation of my thesis here, that lefties have no sense of the seriousness of Jackson's "cutting" remarks, look no further than Young Ezra Klein, who says:

Jackson is getting a bad rap. The problem was the live mic, not his comment. His comment was a private utterance, graphically constructed, but not atypical for conversations between friends.

This is really unbelievable.

The problem is not a "live mic." The problem is that Jackson is so consumed by jealousy at Barack Obama's success, that in his sickening mental complex of faded civil rights glory he freely conjures up images of castrating the Democratic nominee, and his powerful comfort in talking about these sentiments in a casual off-the-cuff style reveals an absolute degree of utter moral depravity.

I've said it many times, but again, there's truly an absence of "divine soul" among today's hardline leftists.

The more I see of these episodes, the more depressing the prospect of Democratic power next year becomes (or, this is all the more reason Barack Obama needs to throw these nihilists under the damn bus!).

Iran's Failure to Launch

Here's the actual photo of Iran's missile tests, which have now been identified as doctored:

My morning copy of the Los Angeles Times, on the front page, included the photoshopped version below (showing four missiles), as did two other major national dailies:

There's some media controversy over the story.

It turns out the New York Times has taken credit for revealing Iran's faked photos, although timestamps indicate the first scoop was provided by Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.

See also, Beyond Babylon, "IRAN: Doctored Missile Image?"

Plus, Ace of Spades, Augean Stables, Blackfive, Gateway Pundit, Kamangir, and Suitably Flip.

The photos were produced by the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Further, the Iranian regime is apparently engaged in deep emergency planning at the prospect of an attack from Israel, the United States, or both (in contrast to firm public statements suggesting the West wouldn't dare attack Tehran).

For additional background, see "Iran in Preparations, Deployment to Withstand Possible Attack by West."

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UPDATE: The New York Times credits Little Green Footballs in a news story on Iran's photoshop controversy, "In Image of Iran’s Power, There’s Less Than Meets the Eye":

Little Green Footballs, a conservative blog, identified the altered image on Wednesday. Last year the blog pointed out a manipulated image that had been distributed by Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency. As in the case of Wednesday’s photograph and many others that the site has uncovered, the one from 2007 appeared to contain several cloned elements.

The End of Barack Obama's Ideology?

Presidential nominees unusually move back to the center of the ideological spectrum at the conclusion of the primaries, but the pace and scope of Barack Obama's centrist repositioning has thrown political observers across the spectrum into fits.

It's to be expected that the netroots would fly into hissy fits over Obama's new centrism. Over the last couple of week's the Illinois Senator's staked out middle-of-the-road positions on patriotic flag pins, the execution of child rapists, urban gun control, international trade (especially NAFTA), and faith-based initiatives.

Obama's also steadily thrown many of his most controversial political and religious associates under the bus, like William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright (and Samantha Power, and Michael Pfleger, and Wesley Clark, and ... well, you get the picture).

Now, with Obama's vote on retroactive immunity for corporations assisting government surveillance programs, even some top party leaders are scratching their heads in dismay: Where is Obama on the ideological map?

The Washington Post has the story:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama put himself on the opposite side of his party's leadership in the Senate yesterday by reversing course to support a compromise intelligence surveillance bill. His vote was the most dramatic in a series of moves toward the middle that have focused new attention on where he stands and where he would take the country.

Obama's vote was not unexpected, as he had signaled earlier that he would back the compromise legislation. But the senator from Illinois found himself at odds with Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), as well as three of his opponents for the Democratic nomination, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).

Just the day before, Obama had denied suggestions that "I am flip-flopping." But in recent weeks, he has softened his once-harsh rhetoric about the North American Free Trade Agreement, embraced the Supreme Court decision overturning a District of Columbia ban on handguns and criticized the high court for rejecting the death penalty for child rape.

After telling reporters last week that he will probably "refine" his position on the Iraq war after he meets with military commanders there this summer, he gathered reporters again to say that he remains committed to ending the conflict and to withdrawing combat troops, conditions permitting, within 16 months, should he assume the presidency.

One factor in Obama's success has been his ability to confound both left and right. But while that may be a measure of a skillful politician determined to win a general election, it has left unanswered important questions about his core principles and his presidential priorities. How well he answers them over the coming months will determine the outcome of his race against Republican Sen. John McCain.

Statements he has made over the past month have ignited a debate about who Obama is ideologically. His current policy positions have convinced some progressives that he is not one of them. Matt Stoller, editor of OpenLeft.com, said that an Obama win in November would be a victory for "centrist government," adding: "Progressives are going to have to organize for progressive values."

Note Stoller's use of the term "progressive," which is essentially the term of choice for the most radical advocates on the political left.

Note, though, that Obama's shift to the center caused nary a ripple among many on the Democratic Party's left side, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

As Barack Obama moves to broaden his appeal beyond loyal Democrats, a chorus of anger and disappointment has arisen from the left. But those voices are a distinct minority because the party has a more pressing concern: winning in November.

On Wednesday, Obama again bucked his liberal allies, voting in the Senate to give legal immunity to phone companies that took part in warrantless wiretapping after the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics chided Obama for the vote -- which put him crossways with dozens of Democratic colleagues, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

The vote, a reversal of an earlier pledge, was Obama's latest perceived step away from his party's base on a range of issues, among them the death penalty, gun control and taxpayer money for religious groups.

Reaction has been swift and - aside from the blogosphere and some newspaper columnists - notably mild.

"We're willing to work through this period," said Richard Parker, president of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, one of the party's most enduring advocacy groups. In the long run, he said, the organization's "serious concerns" about Obama are far outweighed by its disagreements with Republican John McCain.

That Obama has moved so far to the ideological center - essentially coming in from the cold of the ideological left - is a testament to his political skills. But his shifts are dangerous politically, as he's been so solidly steeped in the traditions of socialist ideology and postmodern cultural politics that his current move to the center can only be seen as crassly political or psychologically dissonant.

It is no wonder that Obama enjoyed powerful initial attraction among the most hardline actors on the left of the spectrum. The Illinois Senator's seen as "one of them," essentially a revolutionary in politics, one who will achieve power through non-violent means, but who will nevertheless facilitate a fundamental transformation of the conservative structures of hierarchy and attainment in American life.

The Obama backlash now seen among the netroots is thus completely understandable.

A sustained tour of the left blogosphere is to become submersed in the vile underworld of a nearly unbelievable maelstrom of implacable intolerance, bigotry, and ideological megalomania. It's not just one or two left-wing blogs, here or there: There's an entire radical subterranean establishment that wants nothing less than a wholesale restructuring of American politics, from education to foreign policy to health care to infrastructure to social policy to taxation and beyond.

The FISA debate demonstrated the genuine extremism of the far-left factions. But the big test of their influence lies ahead, during the post-Labor Day political mobilization of the general election campaign. The leftists will stay with Obama, grudgingly, out of sheer hatred for the GOP's governing legacy of the past seven years. But their true agenda is not difficult to discern.

Barack Obama, at this stage of the campaign, will demonstrate how fully he's abandoned his past associations with those on the left - and his indoctrination into state-socialist ideology - by decisively repudiating the extremist agenda of the netroots political establishment.

These people are today's protest generation - the revolution's gone online. If Obama wants to be a man of all the people, he's going to have to call out the left forces for what they truly are: unpatriotic nihilists intent on political retribution and totalitarian power.

Flint, Michigan, Cracks Down on Baggy Pants

David Dicks, the Chief of Police in Flint, Michigan, has ordered a city-wide crackdown on sagging paints:

"Some people call it a fad," Dicks told the Free Press this week while patrolling the streets of Flint. "But I believe it's a national nuisance. It is indecent and thus it is indecent exposure, which has been on the books for years."

The lefties and libertarians are already "cracking" wise:

* "Just Say No To Crack," announced the radical LGM.

* "Watch Your Butt," warns Jeralyn, at Talk Left.

* "Flint, Michigan, Battles Crack Epidemic," announces Reason, the libertarian standard-bearer.

While humorous, I think Chief Dicks is onto something.

To the extent baggy pants reflect the glorification of "gang culture" (which predicts limited school success) among particular urban demographics - or at least a hip-hop identity that is oppositional to educational attainment - then a crackdown on baggy pants might be considered a social extension of the "broken windows" theory of policing.

Image Credit: Detroit Free Press

Voters Reject Obama on Bilingualism

Here's Rasmussen's report, "Voters Reject Obama's Call for Bilingualism":

Barack Obama said yesterday that “instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English,” Americans “need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.” A national telephone survey conducted last month by Rasmussen Reports found that U.S. voters overwhelmingly disagree with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. (see video)

Eighty-three percent (83%) place a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13% take the opposite view and say it is more important for Americans to learn other languages.

In his comments, Obama emphasized the economic benefits of learning a second language: “If you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job.” Data suggests that most voters see the issue in a broader context.

A separate survey found that one factor fueling the anger over immigration is the belief that most government officials encourage immigrants to retain the culture of their home country. This helps explain why voters who are angry about immigration are primarily angry at the government, not immigrants. Among those angry about immigration, 59% believe most government officials encourage immigrants to retain their home country culture.

Last fall, a Rasmussen Reports survey found that 77% of Americans believed that employers should be allowed to require employees to speak English while on the job. With the Supreme Court recently upholding tougher standards for voter identification at the polls, 65% of voters now believe election ballots should only be printed in English. Thirty-two percent (32%) say they should be printed in both English and Spanish.

The importance of assimilation into the culture is highlighted in another recent survey: 54% of voters say it is more important to encourage all immigrants to embrace American culture than it is to reduce the number of immigrants. Just 36% take the opposite view and say reducing immigration is a higher priority. That survey, as with many others, also found a strong preference for ballots and other government documents to be printed in English only.

Only 26% believe that every American should be able to speak at least two languages. In his recent comments, Obama said parents should be thinking, “How can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.“

That's an interesting, even troublesome, statistic finding that 59 percent believe government officials encourage newcomers to retain their indigenous language and identity.

Other research shows, also, that some immigrant popuations are resisting the American mainstream. See, "Mexican Immigrants Prove Slow to Assimilate."

See also, Fausta, "Oh Look, Obama Changed His Mind ... on Spanish" (with video updates).

Victory in Iraq: An Update

Last November, I published, "Victory in Iraq? The War Has Been Won," drawing on Andrew Bolt's essay, "The War in Iraq Has Been Won."

Well it turns out that Nancy Morgan has an update on victory, in her essay, "We Won":

America, its allies and the Iraqi people have won the war against terror in Iraq. How do we know? Simple. Just follow the money. European and Asian investment companies are beating a path to Iraq, money in hand. Iraqi Airlines is flying high thanks to a colossal $5.5 billion contract with Boeing and the United Arab Emirates just canceled billions of dollars of Iraqi debt as they moved to restore a diplomatic mission in Baghdad.

When foreign countries start investing billions of dollars in a country, its a safe bet they are aware of the risks involved. And, unlike the old news media and our elected Democrat officials, they see a relatively stable country ripe for investment.

The influx of foreign investment is largely due to the improved security in Iraq, which continues to improve even after the withdrawal of nearly 25% of U.S. combat brigades. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recently acknowledged cautiously that security 'is on its way to becoming sustainable.'

American and Iraqi forces have driven Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror. Al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister said that "the government has defeated terrorism in the country." Pretty unequivocal. In fact, things are going so well in Iraq that the discussion has now shifted to a timetable for more troop withdrawals.

The American media is silent on all this good news, possibly out of embarrassment for being so incredibly wrong on pretty much every single issue having to do with Iraq. They would like to forget their near universal scorn for the now successful surge. The Democrats had declared defeat and there was no way they would accept anything more. The media trumpeted their views. Lo and behold, the surge worked. Horror of horrors, Bush was right.

When evidence of the progress on the ground was too overwhelming to ignore, new talking points emerged on the left. Democrats avowed that our military victory meant nothing. (Think about that a second) What really mattered, they intoned with one voice, was the political progress, as measured by Congressionally established benchmarks.

More horrors. It appears that a March 2008 report shows that the Iraqis have met 15 of the 18 benchmarks. The silence from the left, and the old media is now deafening.

Desperate to ignore any and all evidence of our astounding victory, the left, aided and abetted by the old media, continue to desperately search for any smidgen of bad news from Iraq. Not finding any, new talking points are starting to emerge. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the left has moved its focus off Iraq - to Afghanistan. The war has merely shifted, they say. We haven't won, they claim. For shame.

This is an excellent analysis, with more at the link.

Also, check out Morgan's news portal, Right Bias.

Barack Obama and the Patriotism of Dissent

Don Feder, at FrontPageMagazine, discusses Barack Obama's recent speech on patriotism, as well as Richard Stengel's recent article at Time, "The New Patriotism":

The Left's patriotism-deficit has less to do with dissent than a very real and ingrained hostility toward America.

Its recitation of our national saga runs from slavery to Wounded Knee, to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, to segregation to My Lai and Abu Ghraib -- excluding everything else. Liberals love America; they just can't find anything positive to say about it, other than Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks.

The article also discloses, "The American who volunteers to fight in Iraq and the American who protests the war both express a truer patriotism than the American who treats it as a distant spectacle with no claim on his talents or conscience."

This is a truly weird moral equivalency -- one which equates the young Marine who loses a limb in a Baghdad bombing with the moron Marxist who claims the Marines are the equivalent of the Waffen S.S. and the Iraq war is really about "blood for oil."

In trying to rationalize how the Left can hate our history and heritage while still claiming the mantle of patriotism, Stengel explains: "For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law." Toward the end of his Independence speech, Obama informed us: "Patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is loyalty to America's idea...."

In other words, the Left's loyalty isn't to America as it is, but to an ideal America reflected in certain principles. The problem with this proposition is that leftists have betrayed both America and the ideals on which it was founded....

At the Independence rally, standing in front of not one but four American flags, lapel pin firmly in place, hand over heart -- all that was missing was John Philip Sousa and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir -- Barack Hussein Obama "tried to reassure voters about his patriotism" (in the words of ABC News).

When was the last time a presidential candidate had to reassure voters that he actually liked his country? Do you wonder, then, that the Democrats consider patriotism Obama's Achilles heel?

Just because he refused to wear an American flag lapel pin last year, just because he wouldn't hold his hand anywhere near his heart while the National Anthem played, just because Frau Obama suggested that she never had a reason to feel pride in America until her husband's presidential campaign, just because his minister of 20 years regularly reviled the United States from the pulpit, is that any reason to question Obama's patriotism? That's a rhetorical question.

"At certain times over the last 16 months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged," Obama disclosed to gasps of astonished outrage from the audience.

But he wasn't about to take it in a supine position. "I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign," the Democrat promised. "And I will not stand idly by when others question mine." Yeah, like anybody's going to question the patriotism of the candidate with the crippled arm, the result of six years of torture as a POW.

Obama went further, charging that the "question of who is -- or is not -- a patriot all too often poisons our political debate" -- the flag-waving equivalent of the politics of personal destruction.

You can see why left-wingers get antsy when the discussion turns to love of country.

Treason permeates the Left. Its bastions -- Hollywood, academia, the establishment media and the mainline churches -- are nests of treason.

In a world where America fights for its survival against a jihadist threat dedicated to ushering in a new Dark Ages -- in an era when 3,000 Americans died in the bloodiest attack on the continental U.S., another 4,000 died in Iraq and more than 30,000 were wounded in that conflict -- it's not hard to see why the left is frantic to avoid a candid discussion of patriotism.

Last week's Fouth of July was a productive one for faux-patriot America-bashers.

Quaker Dave, who defiantly resists the term "radical," wrote on the Fouth of July, "Why I’m Not 'Patriotic'":

If anything, patriotism should be about devotion to a different set of ideals and actual practices ... It should mean love of one’s fellow human beings, not blind “love” of some notion of “country.” Most “countries” are contained within abitrarily drawn borders, which in most cases were crafted ages ago by folks who are no longer in the picture anyway, usually at the expense of other folks.

The reference to those folks from "ages ago"? These are the "dead white males" the postmodern left's is fond of excoriating. But don't miss this part:

Don’t tell me I don’t love my country unless you can demonstrate your own devotion to making things better for the people around you, and not just to making things more comfortable for yourself.

Aahhh!! ... self-interest is EVIL!!

Don't tell that to the American revolutionaries, who fought simply for egalitarian opportunity, to own a piece of land in the absence of the type of hierarchical and oppressive lord and peasant relationships that had characterized feudal Europe for centuries (Source: Gordon Wood).

And don't forget: Matthew Yglesias laments the defeat of British hegemonic control of the American colonies. Hail to the king!

The lefties just don't get it:

To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours" (Source: Peter Beinart).

See also, "How Obama Is Redefining American Patriotism."

Image Credit: The People's Cube

Obama's Trash Talkin' Opportunity

Jesse Jackson has apologized for his crudely intemperate remarks, after being caught by an open microphone saying he'd like to cut Barack Obama's "n**ts out."

Here's Jackson's statement:

For any harm or hurt that this hot mic private conversation may have caused, I apologize. My support for Senator Obama[s campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal. I cherish this redemptive and historical moment.

My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.

That was the context of my private conversation and it does not reflect any disparagement on my part for the historic event in which we are involved or my pride in Senator Barack Obama, who is leading it, whom I have supported by crisscrossing this nation in every level of media and audience from the beginning in absolute terms.

In other words, Jackson wants to castrate Obama for not toeing the "blood of martyrs" post-civil rights grievance line, which is a reference to Al Sharpton's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in which Sharpton attacked President Bush's question to the Democrats on why their leaders have failed blacks in educational outcomes:

Our vote is soaked in the blood of martyrs, the blood of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. This vote is sacred to us. This vote can't be bargained away...given away. Mr. President, in all due respect, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale! (Source: Juan Williams)

For the old-line Democratic Party civil rights leaders, Obama's not genuine - he ain't down with the brothas in da 'hood:

In the eyes of many blacks, Obama departs from past black presidential contenders such as Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton. They were readily identifiable, urban-bred, African-Americans who spoke out boldly on civil rights, poverty, and economic injustice. On the other hand, the racially mixed, Harvard-trained Obama, as the so-called postracial candidate, has soft-pedaled these issues. It's no accident that his appeal among whites seems stronger so far than among blacks.

If Obama's shrewd, he'll take this as his opening to break dramatically from the racial grievance masters of the Democratic Party's black-American base. Yo, Sister Souljah!!

He needs to throw the trash talkin' brothas and sistas under the bus. He'll still get the black vote - he's da Democrats' man now, more than Jackson ever was - but if he waits too long, indecision could turn this new flare-up into a Wright-like controversy (more here).

See also, Captain Ed, "Obama Gets Attacked On Race by … Jesse Jackson?"

Chicago-Area Local Coverage: "Rev. Jesse Jackson Caught Bad-Mouthing Obama."

The Inevitability of Socialized Medicine

Elizabeth Scalia, of The Anchoress, argues that government-run health is "essentially a done deal":

The words “socialized medicine” and “universal health care” have very different effects on one’s heart rate, depending on one’s politics.

If you call yourself a “liberal” or a “Democrat” the words create an uptick in the heart rate that feels remarkably like the first giddy surge of middle school amore. Splurp, plup! goes the heart, and the world is a beautiful place. “Every person will be insured! Every medical need will be addressed! Oh, look! Daisies and puppies! Yay!”

If you call yourself a “conservative” or a “Republican” the heart rate still ticks up, but the giddiness comes from a lack of oxygen as one contemplates the hand of Big Brother reaching into the chest cavity and giving the old pumper a good long squeeeeze. “Every person will be insured? Every medical need will be addressed if you survive the waiting list! Oh, look! The Four Horses of the Apocalypse, and politicians riding every one of ‘em! Nooooo!”

Both reactions are extreme, of course, but it is worth noting that the daisies and death-horses are only six months away from becoming permanent fixtures in our lives. It happened without any particular clamoring — yae or nae — on the part of a populace enjoying nearly two decades of essentially full employment, with majority participation in employer-sponsored health insurance programs....

Tell the truth: when you should have been pondering government and private-sector health care proposals in anticipation of this day, you were watching Dancing with the Stars. You can admit it — everyone else was, too — but it might be time to start paying attention, because incoherence coupled with recent feelings of economic insecurity may not translate into a levelheaded vote. Then again, it may not matter. In his column, Tanner gives bare outlines of the proposals being talked up by Senators McCain and Obama and writes:

It’s anybody’s guess how [McCain’s and Obama’s policies will] develop. But as November approaches, voters will reach a fork in the road, and as Yogi Berra says, they’ll take it.

Some time after Labor Day, many Americans will start to focus on the November elections, and they’ll be surprised to learn that while they were at the mall, government-run health care moved from being a vague idea to an essentially “done deal.” In just eighteen weeks Americans will, with every vote, submit to the idea of the government — that master of mismanagement — having a formidable control over their health care. Logic dictates that the common realities of age and illness — which come to us all — will steadily endow the government with ever-increasing authority over life choices and inevitable intrusions into decisions that should be private.

Once the thing is put into motion, there will be no pulling back. American presidents may peacefully surrender their power, but bureaucrats never do.

It may be too late to wonder — at this eleventh hour — if the free markets, local communities, and our elected officials have really done all they could to develop creative insurance alternatives to the super-sized government “solution” that will quickly affect our economy and slowly erode our freedoms. Will we look back and ask, perhaps naively, why citizens lacking work-connected health insurance could not have simply bought into the same or similar plans that covered state employees? If low-income families found the premiums too dear, might they not then have been able to use a tax-credit or deduction to offset that cost?

After taking the intractable step of handing our choices over to lawmakers and legislators who lately get almost nothing right, will we wonder why we did not encourage professionals and organizations to pool their resources and design flexible insurance plans with affordable rates.

Perhaps we’ll look back and realize that our own hobbies or fraternal associations or cottage industries could have organized and crafted insurance policies into which the similarly situated, but under-insured, might have participated....

We cannot say we were not warned. For more than 15 years politicos and media folk have asserted the need for government-managed health care, until their drone became little more than background music to our daily waltzes....

Instead, too late, we’re looking up from Dancing with the Stars just in time to see the Federal Jug Band introduce a new caller, and he’ll be telling us to step lively to their endless tune.

I've written about this myself, in "Money, Quality, and Healthcare."

Just reading Scalia's essay's giving me the willies.

The Left's FISA Orwellianism

As I noted yesterday, there's been an intense reaction by anti-administration extremists to the new FISA bill in Congress, which gained final Senate approval today.

Here's some of today's outrage:

First, there's "The FISA Capitulation Vote, Barack Obama, and These Orwellian Times," from Tennessee Guerilla Women:

Barack Obama promises that his vote to shred the Bill of Rights is not about politics but rather about his sincere belief that shredding the Bill of Rights is a wise and necessary move in order to protect we the people!

Big Tent Democrat, goddess love him, calls the presumptive nominee on the orwellian bulls**t...

Glenn Greenwald's also pissed with the Obamessiah:

I've written many times over the last two weeks ... beyond the bill itself are the pure falsehoods being spewed to the public about what Congress is doing -- and those falsehoods are largely being spewed not by Republicans. Republicans are gleefully admitting, even boasting, that this bill gives them everything Bush and Cheney wanted and more, and includes only minor changes from the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill passed last February (which Obama, seeking the Democratic Party nomination, made a point of opposing).

Rather, the insultingly false claims about this bill -- it brings the FISA court back into eavesdropping! it actually improves civil liberties! Obama will now go after the telecoms criminally! Government spying and lawbreaking isn't really that important anyway! -- are being disseminated by the Democratic Congressional leadership and, most of all, by those desperate to glorify Barack Obama and justify anything and everything he does. Many of these are the same people who spent the last five years screaming that Bush was shredding the Constitution, that spying on Americans was profoundly dangerous, that the political establishment did nothing about Bush's lawbreaking.

It's been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime -- completely reverse everything they claimed to believe -- the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill -- a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes -- will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and "Kit" Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama's altar in order to get yourself to think that way?

Once again, Greenwald's railing against the entire the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure!

But he's got some help, from Rachel Maddow and Jonathan Turley, who says he's "completely astonished by Senator Obama's position":

Jeff at Protein Wisdom puts some perspective on the left's outrage at Obama and the "evisceration of the Fourth Amendment." Obama's apparently a mere mortal in the centrist politics of the general election:

Of course, the irony here is that conservatives long suspected Obama would act in just such a way: after all, he has the cult vote locked up by virtue of his otherworldly luminescence (which, if certain anonymous sources high in the government are to be believed, is clearly visible from space — like a kind of magical negro version of the Great Wall of China), and really, what are the disappointed progressive Dems who “haven’t been listening” to his nuances going to do come election time, vote for McCain?

No, it was a veritable given he would act just as he’s been acting since securing the Democratic nomination — and today’s vote will likely prompt a special squealing from the leftest regions of the blogosphere and media, whose penchant for eating their own was evident in the primaries. But in the end, they’ll vote for a guy who they see as abandoning his principles — either by rationalizing his tacking to the center as a cynical and necessary ploy to get himself elected, at which point he’ll then move leftward (progressives can call this the “wink and nod” general election campaign strategy; classical liberals / conservatives / honest folk can call it the “opportunistic, dissembling, do anything to gain power strategy”), or by forgiving him all his broken promises if only so that the left can have at least nominal control of the entirety of government, which is what they are after, anyway. Policy is always secondary to power — and policy talk is generally geared toward telling people what they want to hear in order to gain that power.

Just know that the whole FISA debate, for all the sound and fury, is a massive defeat for the netroots hordes and their extremist ideology of surrender.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

See also, Jake Tapper, "Obama's FISA Shift."

The One-Dimensional Demonology of the Left

I've written much on the left's response to the death of Jesse Helms, but I'd be remiss not to post Jeff Jacoby's essay, "Dancing on the Grave of Jesse Helms":

LIBERALS DIDN'T think much of Jesse Helms when he was alive, and their feelings didn't soften with his death.

"Jesse Helms, you rat bastard, burn in hell," announced a headline at Daily Kos, the hugely popular left-wing blog; "Please excuse me while I dance upon his grave," gloated another.

In The Nation, the former North Carolina senator was memorialized as "Jesse Helms, American Bigot." For its online audience, The Washington Post resurrected a column David Broder produced when Helms announced his retirement: "Jesse Helms, White Racist."

The invective streamed in from across the pond as well. "There seemingly wasn't a right-wing, retrograde social issue Helms met that he didn't like," wrote Melissa McEwan in a savage essay on the Guardian's website. "It was . . . his unmitigated intolerance toward people of color that will define his legacy.

Well, hating Helms is nothing new. More than 16 years ago, the scholar Charles Horner observed in Commentary that for many people Helms had become a "symbol of the evil against which all enlightened people are automatically ranged." As with the poisonous rhetoric of today's pathological George W. Bush-haters, the point of the virulence expressed toward Helms was typically character-assassination, not contention - it was aimed at demonizing the man rather than debating or disproving his ideas.

For some liberals, Helms's death had long been a fantasy. "I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind," NPR's Nina Totenberg said in 1995, "because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion. Or one of his grandchildren will get it."

What the left despised most about Helms varied with the seasons. There was his unyielding anticommunism. His visceral opposition to homosexuality. His war on government funding of obscene art. His blackball of William Weld's nomination as ambassador to Mexico. His staunch support of the tobacco industry. And, of course his segregationist past.

In the one-dimensional demonology of the left, Helms comes across as an unreconstructed racist who dreamed of Jim Crow every night and whose first words each morning were "Segregation forever!" The truth was considerably different - and more admirable.

Readers can finish the essay at the link.

I'll just reiterate Jacoby's notion of "one-dimensional demonology."

Some will say "but both sides have the fringe elements," except it's not just the extremists in the Democratic Party who have mounted this campaign of recrimination. Folks at Kos and elsewhere, not to mention those in the media establishment, are the mainstream.

See also, "The Competitive Demonization of Jesse Helms."

Would Iran Kill Americans?

Via the News Buckit, here's Matthew Yglesias on John McCain's joking statement about increasing cigarette exports to Iran:

If a major Iranian political leader were to repeatedly joke about bombing the United States and killing Americans, you can just imagine the s**t-storm about how Iran isn't a normal country with normal interests, that it's run by irrational fanatics, appeasement won't work, etc.

Actually, it turns out an Iranian leader has called for killilng Americans, and he's not joking:

See News Buckit's post for more.

Recall too that Yglesias just last week argued essentially against American independence in 1776, and in a debate at Bloggingheads TV, James Kirchik hammers Yglesias' total hypyocrisy: "I have never taken you as someone who was an enthusiast for empire," snarks Kirchick.

Yglesias anti-patriotism is in the first two minutes, and worth a look, especially the incredibly nervous body-language

Note further that Yglesias offered a ham-handed retraction of his "no-independence-for-America" post, where he updates, arguing that it "was unfortunate that the course of events" led the Americans to push for freedom from the British yoke.

Talk about Heads in the Sand!

The Left's Fundamental Dishonesty

I've commented on the lack of "divine soul" on the left recently, for example, when writing about the radical demonization campaigns against Tim Russert and Jesse Helms.

One aspect found among many left-wing activists and commentators is a blatant disregard for the ideals of truth and fair play. It turns out that Daily Kos is applauding the underhanded tactics of Code Pink operatives in forging fake press passes to gain access to President Bush's 4th of July citizenship ceremony:

Here's how the Kos author describes his collaboration with Medea Benjamin, a Code Pink co-founder:

Early this morning I found an unusual email from Medea Benjamin waiting for me in my inbox. It seems that last week when she was arrested in Florida, they confiscated her Global Exchange press pass, and could I make her another one?

Ever since I figured out how to duplicate Medea's press pass for other members of CodePink, I have been doing so with her blessing.

A look at the Global Exchange website reveals the group as a progressive action lobbying organization, not a news media outlet. That's probably close enough to "journalism" for the postmodern nihilists in our midst.

Hat Tip: LGF

Left-Wing Media Refuses to Identify Disgraced Democrat by Party

Via Don Surber, the news that leftist journalists refused to identify disgraced former Central California congressman Gary Condit as a Democrat should come as no surprise, although the scope of story is noteworthy:

The Associated Press went all the way as to report Condit as a former GOP member of Congress:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by former Congressman Gary Condit claiming author Dominick Dunne slandered him over the death of a young female intern....

Condit, a former Republican congressman from California's Central Valley, has denied any involvement in or knowledge of Levy's May 2001 disappearance at age 24, or her death. However, he acknowledged to investigators that they had an intimate relationship.

The situation cost Condit his House seat in 2002.

Condit's case is one of example of congressional scandal in my classes on the legislative process, but perhaps I'll add this latest development to my lectures on media bias as well.

Note that McClatchy refused to identify Condit's party identification altogether.

Communist Party Backs Obama

Joelle Fishman, an executive of the Communist Party USA, recently announced her party's endorsement of Barack Obama for the presidency (via Accuracy in Media):

The yearning in our country for a new direction and new priorities has taken hold in the 2008 elections. Voters turned out in record numbers for the primaries, propelled by economic necessity and determination to end the war, and inspired by the historic breakthrough of a woman or an African American as a major party candidate for president.

Voters of all races and nationality backgrounds and all walks of life, young and old, women, men, union members and unorganized, flooded the polls, undeterred by the constant corporate media barrage of racism, sexism and divisive tactics which might have suppressed the vote.

When Barack Obama surpassed the 2,118 delegates required for nomination, his unity appeal and outreach to Clinton supporters deeply touched the country and was greeted around the world.

Unity — especially unity of African American, Latino and white voters, women and men — will have to be fought for and forged anew, broadened out and deepened in this new phase of the battle to defeat McCain and the corporate ultra-right in Congress.

The choice is clear — stay with the Bush-McCain race to the bottom or come together and raise up the whole country with a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right....

Big political shifts are under way....

The Communist Party USA’s emergency program to repair, renew and rebuild America is a contribution toward this effort.

I reported previously on the activities of "Revolutionary Communists for Obama."

What's significant now is the increasingly deep documentation of Obama's early affinity and indoctrination to Marxist-Leninist ideology.

For more, see "What Barack Obama Learned From the Communist Party."

Don't "Hope" for a Better Life ... Vote for One: McCain

John McCain's new campaign spot is hard hitting:

Captain Ed offers his take:

The imagery and the text make clear that McCain believes in the classic values of sacrifice and honor, especially in service to the nation. That sacrifice extends to his political career, which he has risked for issues he felt important to the country. Nowhere has that been more true than on Iraq. While Barack Obama continues to waffle and hedge his bets on withdrawal, McCain staked his presidential campaign on victory — and proved himself right and Obama wrong on the surge and the stabilizing effect it has had on Iraq.

There's more at the link.

Cases in Lieberman Derangement

The netroots has launched a public campaign to depose Senator Joseph Lieberman from his committee chairmanships and seniority ranking in Congress.

The group, "Lieberman Must Go," has created a video of the Connecticut Senator's alleged apostasies, and the group's got a petition circulating:

We CANNOT tolerate a leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus who supports George Bush and McCain's War in Iraq. We CANNOT tolerate a Democratic chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee who endorses and stumps for McCain. We call on the Senate Democratic Steering Committee to strip Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship and his leadership role.

Here's the YouTube:

From the current comments at the petition page:

Lieberman belongs in jail along with the rest of the Bush Junta.

For partisans who claim to be more enlightened and tolerant, on the question of Joseph Lieberman these folks are anything but...

See also, "Netroots Move (Again) Against Lieberman."