Browner Proves It: The Second Clinton Administration!

Carol Browner, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency for both terms of the Clinton administration (1993-2001), is expected to be tapped as "energy and environmental czar" for the incoming Barack Obama administration.

Well, that does it. I'm putting my foot down, finally. I've held off on criticizing Obama for his oppressively stale administrative appointments. But, I mean let's be honest, this is a de facto Second Clinton Administration, with a token black chief executive who'll be sitting in the Oval Office. This is not just a disaster for the Democratic Party, but for Barack Obama's personal claim to embody hope and change, not to mention post-partisan transformation.

Recall what we've seen so far: Obama picked the profane Illinois political operative Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff. Emmanuel, prior to being elected to Illinois' 5th conressional district in 2002, was Bill Clinton's campaign finance director in 1992, and later served in the Clinton White House as a personal advisor to the president.

Then, of course, we have Senator Hillary Clinton who has accepted her nomination to be secretary of state in the new administration. The Clinton pick raises more questions than anything we've seen so far. Tapping Clinton, above all, is a sign of Obama's dire weaknesses. Did Obama need to shore up his credibility with the PUMAs? Probably not, as he won a decisive 52.5 percent majority on November 4th (apparently showing that the pre-convention fears of party disunity were overblown). No, Obama selected Clinton to neutralize his own woeful inexperience, and not just in foreign policy, which Hillary had targeted so effectively during the primaries (don't forget the "3 am phone call"). After running perhaps the most successful presidential campaign in history, Obama put on the retroburners. Frozen by the fact that he's going to have to actually govern, he tossed his utopian calls for transformation and hewed to the tried and true of old-news party hacks. We'll have not just have Hillary, but Bill Clinton too, as an in-house deputy secretary of state, with tremendous influence on his wife (and not to mention his estimable connections, which at any other time in history would raise vigorous questions of conflict of interest).

Then you've got New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, the most qualified failed presidential candidate in American history. Richardson was Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of energy. Having been snubbed for state, Richardson will preside over private-sector ribbon-cutting at one of the smallest cabinet departments in Washington. What a letdown, but it's a perfect signature for Obama's already-failing style of bureaucratic leadership.

Of special note is attorney general-nominee Eric Holder. As assitant attorney general in the second Clinton administration, Holder endorsed Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, which soon became a culminating symbol of the moral vacuum of the Clinton presidency.

With the appointment of Carol Browner as a top staffer on Obama's energy and environmental policy, we'll see another top Clinton administration official coming back to D.C. for a second turn on the Democratic-insider merry-go-round (revolving door?). An undistinguished bureaucrat, Browner apparently stepped on toes during her tenure as the administration's enforcer on bone-crushing anti-business environmental mandates. This time around she'll have the added capital of global warming hysteria to really dampen entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

More announcements are on the way (including the possible appointment of Anthony Lake, a former national security advisor to Bill Clinton, as CIA director - no "change" there, again!).

Note that Obama's selection of physicist Steven Chu as secretary of energy should have been the model. This man has no inside Washington experience, and he boasts impeccable credentials as a winner of the Nobel Prize. Chu is a big thinker on the cutting-edge of alternative fuels and is thus exactly the kind of pick that Obama should be making across-the-board.

The progressive left has been deeply disappointed with Obama's appointments so far (not enough "genuine" Democratic leftists). But it's the American public who should really be disappointed, now that they're disabused of the campaign's lofty - even ethereal - promises of national healing, unity, and restoration of American values abroad. The fact is American government will largely return to the status quo ante, circa 1999. The difference is the country's got pent-up and deep-seated problems, and the man in driver's seat (or the figurehead, depending on how incompetent Barack Hussein ends up being) will have not a "team of rivals" but a team of cronies from the previous Democratic era of Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and the last presidential impeachment.

I can't see how this constitutes the kind of "change" Americans hoped for when they pulled their levers last month. But this year's been a black-magic tour of corruption and radicalism on the Democratic side, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, and now to Rod Blogojevich.

I'll be relieved, though, if Obama breaks with Bill Clinton's record and loses in 2012, ending up as a failed one-term president with his first-term agenda of big-government liberalism repudiated at the polls next time around.

Gay Marriage Disinformation and Intimidation

There's a little debate online this afternoon over Mike Huckabee's appearance on Jon Stewart's show. Apparenlty, Stewart's a big liberal PC master, and he peppered Huck with the standard leftists questions and false equivalencies.

Think Progress has the video, but note this transcripted portion and the response:

Huckabee tried to insist that “60 percent of the American population” opposes gay marriage. Stewart interrupted him, calling it a “travesty” that gay Americans have to plead for their civil rights:

HUCKABEE: If the American people are not convinced that we should overturn the definition of marriage, then I would say that those who support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of us. And as I said, 60 percent of the American population has made the decision–

STEWART: You know, you talk about the pro-life movement [abortion] being one of the great shames of our nation. I think if you want number two, I think it’s that: It’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights as someone else.

Watch the whole interview ....

It is true that 30 states have banned gay marriage. However, Huckabee — like other conservatives who make similar claims — is wrong to suggest that American public opinion is on his side. A recent poll found that a full 75 percent of Americans favor either gay marriage or civil unions, with nearly 50 percent favoring gay marriage itself. More importantly, the next generation is much more open to gay rights: According to CNN exit polls, an overwhelming majority — 67 percent — of 18-29 year-olds voted against stripping gay couples of their right to marry in California.

Note that Think Progress, to make its case, cites a bogus poll plus the views of young people, who are more liberal on the issue but don't vote in near the proportion to older and more conservative voters.

Just this week Newsweek published the results of its poll on gay marriage, and just 31 percent of those surveyed said they backed full-blown same-sex marriage rights. Huckabee's not only correct, but he's citing conservative estimates on support for traditional family structures.

But that doesn't matter to the radical leftists, who have launched a campaign of intimidation to overturn a decisive majority around the country in favor of retaining traditional heterosexual unions. As the New York Times reports today, in "Gay Marriage Ban Inspires New Wave of Activists," homosexual activists are launching anti-democratic campaigns seeking to browbeat and intimidate people over their agenda:

The ban [Prop 8], which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned a decision by the California Supreme Court in May legalizing same-sex marriage. The same court is currently considering a challenge to Proposition 8.

But many activists seem unwilling to wait for a legal solution and have planned a series of events to keep the issue in the public eye, including a nationwide candlelight vigil later this month, a Million Gay March in Washington next spring and continued protests at county clerks’ offices throughout California.

“We’re doing an end run around the mainstream organizations that run our causes,” said David Craig, a movie producer who is an organizer of Wednesday’s “call in gay” protest. “And the Internet has given us the tool to create these events.”

Recall that gay radicals frequently invoke the black civil rights movement in hopes of finding moral authority for their position. But blacks were disinfranchised prior to 1964 and 1965. They really were on the back of the bus.

Today, gay Americans enjoy full equal protection under the law (and recall that gay marriage is not considered as under the civil rights umbrella according to the federal Defense of Marriage Act). What they don't have - and they'll berate, lie, stomp, and whine until they get their way - is the right to impose their will on a majority of voters who have legitimately and peacefully sought to protect their interests through the ballot box.

New Down Syndrome Tests May Increase Abortions

A couple of years back I had a young woman with Down syndrome in my American government class.

She was the sweetest young woman you'd ever want to meet. Her condition was mild, and she had a wonderful way about herself and her abilities. She would often stay after class and ask me to look over her lecture notes to see if she got everything down. She wrote a perfectly fine news analysis notebook - the term-paper assignmnent for the course - and she wound up doing better in the class than a number of the coolsters and hip-hoppers who would drag their tails to class every day 20 minutes past the hour.

I never really thought much of it. My young student was more conscientious and polite than most young people I meet. It was my pleasure to have her in the class.

Thus, I was very disturbed to read this story on the new screening tests available for expecting mothers, tests that have pro-life adocates worried that even more Downs syndrome babies will be terminated:

Beth Allard was recovering from labor, waiting for a hospital photographer to capture her newborn son's first day in the world, when a pediatrician walked into her room and told Allard her life was ruined. Allard might have expected as much from a doctor, given what she'd already heard from others in the previous few months: little Ben, who had tested positive in utero for Down syndrome, would be mute and illiterate, they said; he would spend his life hanging off her, drooling. The pediatrician was harsher: "You should consider putting him up for adoption," she said. "You're going to end up divorced. Don't even bother having any other children. Didn't you have the option to terminate?" Finally, the pediatrician left, and Allard resumed her wait for the photographer. He never came.

Ben Allard is now 9, and it's hard to understand why doctors were convinced he would be such a burden. He's a friendly, witty kid who's happily enrolled in third grade at a regular school. He does, says Beth, "all the things they told us he wouldn't be doing, and more." She shudders when she thinks about how wrong the doctors turned out to be: she almost took their advice and ended her pregnancy.

Read the whole thing, here.

I have to confess I get a little emotional reading stories like this, which seem to be way too frequent amid this growing culture of death that's taken over today's Democratic left. The article cites a 2000 survey of pediatricians that found 1-of-4 doctors encouraging their patients to abort their pregnancies. This reminds me of Michael Barone's comments on why the media attacked Governor Sarah Palin so viciously: "The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby ... They wanted her to kill that child ... "

One of my very best blogging buddies sent this website along, theupsideofdowns.org. Please take a moment to think more about families with this kind of love. I do not know the difficulties parents face raising a child with Downs syndrome. I do know that they should not be coerced into killing their babies.

The Democrats' "Phony Scandal"

It's the nature of partisan politics to defend your side when a scandal emerges, but frankly, the Chicago pay-for-play allegations are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg for a presidential administration rooted in the corrupt Chicago patronage-machine cesspool.

Here's Digby blowing it off as a right-wing witchhunt:

I don't know if this environment is conducive to phony scandal. There's just so much going on. But if it is, this is one of the ways they do it. Guilt by association, drip-drip-drip of vague allegations and ongoing "questions." The key to really hammering it home, of course, would be for the Republicans to win back a majority in the congress in 2010, which I think is unlikely. The Republicans were growing in strength during that earlier era and are now in retreat, at least temporarily.

But keep this in the back of your mind. If there is room for scandal and the wingnuts can get traction, this is one of their tried and true methods of getting it "out there."

Of course, resort to comic relief is a sure sign that the scandal is damaging to Democratic power prospects next year. Check out this from Josh Marshall's reader:

I think you guys should do a Most Corrupt State smackdown. Maybe get CREW, POGO, ProPublica, and whoever else wants to help to cooperate. I think it's pretty clear that the only three serious contenders are Illinois, Louisiana, and Alaska. My money would be on the young upstart, Alaska, over the grizzled corruption veterans of Illinois and Louisiana, but who knows. Statistics should play a part in the contest, but style points are important, too. Cash in the freezer is pretty impressive, as is trying to shake down the President-Elect.

Now, back to reality: It turns out that Andy Stern, the new-age Big Labor roughneck, may have acted as a go-between for Blogojevich and the Obama tranistion team:

Among the revelations contained in the complaint brought against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich yesterday was the description of an official with the Service Employees International Union acting as an apparent intermediary between the governor and Barack Obama's camp in discussions over Obama's Senate seat.

The alleged role of the SEIU official was surprising, given that the union had not figured publicly in the investigation into Blagojevich (D). But on another level, the SEIU's apparent involvement is an indication of the extent to which it has, under the leadership of its ambitious and controversial president, Andrew L. Stern, become an omnipresent force in Democratic politics.

With organized labor holding such high expectations for the Obama administration -- notably, hopes for legislation fiercely opposed by business leaders that would make it easier to form unions -- officials of other unions were hoping yesterday that the SEIU's apparent involvement in the Illinois scandal would not undermine their cause in Washington.

The U.S. attorney's complaint states that Blagojevich mused aloud with his advisers about the possibility that he could seek a high-paying job with Change to Win, the coalition of seven unions -- dominated by SEIU -- that broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Blagojevich and his chief of staff wondered aloud about a "three-way deal" in which he would appoint Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago businesswoman believed to be the woman identified in the complaint as "Candidate 1," to Obama's Senate seat; Blagojevich in return would become Change to Win's executive director; and Obama would reward Change to Win with pro-labor policies.

The complaint also states that on Nov. 12, Blagojevich spoke by phone with an "SEIU official" who was in Washington and with whom Blagojevich had met a week before on the understanding that the official was an emissary to discuss Jarrett's interest in the Senate seat. In the conversation, the SEIU official is alleged to have said that Obama now wanted Blagojevich to consider candidates other than Jarrett.

It's no surprise that big union bosses are in the middle of all of this. We're seeing a culture of corruption with no equal in American politics:

Democrats and the media can no longer rest on the old rationalization that Blago is an exception to the "we're cleaner than thou" rule. 2008 was the year of Democratic Reps. William "Cold Cash" Jefferson, Charlie "Sweetheart Deals" Rangel, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame "Text Me" Kilpatrick. It was the year Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson got caught stuffing bribes from an FBI informant down her shirt. It was the year 12 Democratic leaders and staffers in Pennsylvania's state Capitol were stung in a massive corruption scandal involving cash, sex and abuse of public office. And it was the year of multimillion-dollar embezzlement scandals at Democratic satellite offices of ACORN and the SEIU.

The Democrats have met the culture of corruption, and it looks like it ain't just elephants among the jackasses soiling public office.

But the Dreams I've Seen Lately...

I'll again be away from the computer for some time (dinner and kids' homework-time tonight), so please enjoy The Eagles, with Randy Meisner, and "Take it to the Limit":

I'll be back online later.

In the meanwhile, here's Randy Meisner's Wikipedia entry, or click some of the tags below for more of my music favorites.

Remembering John Lennon (But Not Pearl Harbor)

December 7th is one of those days, like September 11th, that draws forth the deepest sentiments of history and American patriotism.

Not for everyone, it turns out.

I noticed that Jeralyn at Talk Left has made a tradition of remembering December 8th every year, the day John Lennon was killed:

28 years ago tonight, in the middle of Monday Night Football, Howard Cosell announced there had been an "unspeakable tragedy in New York City." John Lennon had been shot. (Video here.)

This is my sixth annual blog post about that night, and how for me, it's a day of both sadness and celebration ...

As readers know, I've always loved the Beatles, but I have to separate their music from Lennon's brainless idealism (although George Harrison's Concert for Bangledesh was too hip, I must admit).

Still, I probably wouldn't complain about Jeralyn, since she was a big Hillary backer in the Democratic primaries and she seemed - throughout the election - generally less deranged than most of the whack "progressives" we see across the leftosphere. But she makes no reference to Pearl Harbor in her Sunday posting (scroll down and you'll see). Rather, there's repeated posts on "Blackwater guards" and "911 detainees," that is, all the indicators of the "fascist" reign of the evil "BushCo" regime.

Then it occured to me: All of Jeralyn's pro-Hillary centrism was mostly bull. HRC's candidacy was the ulitmate gender quota. Why support the first black when the first white woman should be first in line? That's right: The radical sisters want America to pay down the debt of historical oppression by installing the "First Lady" in the presidency. Forget "hope and change" ... it's all about "identity politics" among leftists, so it makes sense - imagine, a sisterhood of man, and no countries on top of that, especially the hegmonic United States! NO BLOOD FOR OIL!

For those who don't worship the Church of John and Yoko, don't miss Stogie's awesome Pearl Harbor commemoration, "Remembering Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941."

Rod Blagojevich: Preview of Obama Administration Corruption?

Rick Moran has the backround the Illinois Governor's arrest in the state's "pay-for-play" scandal:

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, have been arrested and charged with a multitude of crimes involving everything from a “pay-to-play” scheme for state contracts to his attempt to sell the open Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for “financial considerations” for the governor and his wife.

I know political corruption follows no particular partisan lines, but Illinois remains the last big "party machine" state in American politics, and Barack Obama launched his career in the maelstrom of Chicogo's corrupt ward politics. Gina Cobb touches on the Democratic nature of the scandal, and what to expect in the coming months and years:

It may be schadenfruede time, but more than that, it's "hang your head, America" time. How did we elect this man? How many more Gov. Blagojeviches and Elliot Spitzers have we put into office? How many more politicians and bureaucrats in state and local government are trading their power for money and favors right now? How many corruptocrats many are waiting in the wings to join the Obama administration?

There's some speculation that top Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett was one of the possible candidates willing to pony up for the open Illinois Senate seat, AND some are suggesting that Jarrett's appointment as a "public liaison and senior aide to the president" was made just in time to avoid her being implicated in Governor Blagojevich's investigation.

Did President-Elect Obama know that his Senate seat was up for sale?

Don't doubt it folks. As I've said before, this man is the most secretive candidate we've seen in decades, and his administration's likely corruption will put Richard Nixon's in the shade.

See also, "GOP Ties Obama to Arrested Ill. Governor," and "US Atty: Not Alleging Obama Knew of Ill. Gov. Plan."

"Day Without A Gay" Protests Planned

The "No on H8" gay rights activists are stepping up their campaign of opposition to Proposition 8 with a "call-in gay" day, set for tomorrow:

Since California voters approved Proposition 8 last month and repealed the right of gay couples to marry, initiative opponents have marched, held rallies and blocked intersections.
On Wednesday, they're asked to do something different: nothing at all.

Modeled loosely after the 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations, "Day Without A Gay" is scheduled for Wednesday and billed as "a nationwide strike and economic boycott" at www.jointheimpact.com, an organizational site for supporters of same-sex marriage.

In San Francisco, the day will be marked by a 6 p.m. rally and march in the Mission District. But local organizers say they don't expect all Prop. 8 opponents to "call in gay" and instead spend the day doing volunteer work, as some proponents urge.

Jammie Wearing Fool adds this:

I could make a crude reference to how Wednesday is also commonly known as hump day, but we like to keep things highbrow around here.

Planned Parenthood's Abortion Extremism

From St. Blogustine, here's the video clip of a Planned Parenthood staffer covering-up of the statutory rape of a thirteen year-old girl in favor of aborting her child:

The above video is the latest example of Planned Parenthood's continued illegal activity, this time in Indiana, in which a 13 year old girl reports being impregnated by her 31 year old boyfriend to the Planned Parenthood nurse, who tells her to keep quiet about it or lie about his age. Apparently, killing her child in her womb is more imperative than prosecuting the 31 year old boyfriend for statutory rape and/or child abuse[emphasis added].

Newsweek on Gay Marriage: "At Least Get Scripture Right"

I need to follow up my piece from last night, "The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage," where I argued against Newsweek's cover story this week, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage."

It turns out that Mollie Hemmingway takes apart Newsweek's Lisa Miller and her disastrous hack job on the Bible's scriptural foundations for traditional marriage:

This is such hackery that it’s offensive ....

I hold sacred the New Testament model of marriage and find Miller’s comments to be beneath contempt. I also wonder what, if anything, she has read from the New Testament.

When my husband read the opening graph of this train wreck of a hit piece, he wondered if these words of Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew, indicated indifference to family:

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Would that be the indifference that Miller is referring to? Because it really just doesn’t sound indifferent to me. This quote from Jesus comes in a larger section on, well, earthly attachments. One part notes that only those who have the gift of celibacy are to be celibate. I have no doubt that my elementary school-age nieces know these things. Shouldn’t Lisa Miller?

And while St. Paul does endorse single life enthusiastically, for those who are able (a key point left out of Miller’s little opening paragraph), he writes extensively about marriage. In fact, he’s normally picked on for his clear endorsement of traditional marriage, as in Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

There is nothing lukewarm about this. In fact, there is nothing lukewarm about any of the writings of Paul.

Now, as a member of a contemporary marriage, albeit one that isn’t so foolish as to think marriage is about gender equality or romantic love, I can honestly say that the Bible has been the only guide that has helped my husband and myself. We turn to it constantly to be reminded that the husband is to sacrifice for the wife and the wife is to respect the husband (these things don’t come naturally to either my husband or myself).

And yet Miller discounts our faith by saying that “of course” a contemporary married couple wouldn’t turn to Scripture as a guide for marriage. Just who does she think she is? And why does she have the cover story of Newsweek?

The rest of the piece is about as worthless and mendacious as the opening paragraph. She repeatedly pretends that marriage is not defined in Scripture — although the two examples I gave above manage to define it unambiguously as a heterosexual union. Even her own mentions of the patriarchs prove the point that Biblical marriage is heterosexual in nature.

RELATED: "KipEsquire" has no effective response for my essay on the secular case against gay marriage:

It’s all circular: Since marriage is procreative, anything that is not procreative is not marriage.

Actually, the argument at the post is not circular, but gay advocates are more about visceral emotion than rigorous logic.

Most Influential Wartime Speeches

Here's a great selection from the editors at RealClearWorld, "Most Influential Wartime Speeches":

Sunday came and went almost unnoticed by most Americans. But it was 67 years ago, on Dec. 7, 1941 - also a Sunday - that the United States naval base in Pearl Harbor was attacked by a massive Japanese air strike that plunged the U.S. into the Second World War. It remains the most audacious aerial assault by a seaborne force in history. And the scars and vengeance from that fateful day did much to alter modern world history.

American reaction to the attack was fierce because it was considered a "sneak attack," for the Japanese had failed to deliver a declaration of war on the United States prior to the sinking of the battleships in Pearl Harbor. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt similarly reacted with strong rhetoric, imploring Americans to end decades of isolationism in order to defend their nation and freedom.

FDR used ferocious language - "day of infamy," "treachery," and "dastardly" among the expressions - to drive his point home to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. His speech was also broadcast on radio for all Americans to hear. By then, FDR's stellar oratorical skills were well known by the average U.S. citizen, for he had become a regular presence with his famous weekly fireside chats.

Oratorical flourishes were often needed to galvanize a nation in times of despair or war. Throughout the turbulent 20th century, major speeches were often given by heads of states engaged in conflicts. With the advent of radio, and later television, some of these speeches were immortalized and filed away for history's posterity.

Into the 21st Century, with grave new threats and challenges, major wartime speeches certainly will return to our radios, television sets and now computers and smart phones. This one took place on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001:

Read the whole thing, here.

Especially powerful is Winston Churchill's speech to the House of Commons, on June 18, 1940:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

Crisis in the Black Family

Kay Hymowitz comments on the enduring crisis of the black family in the United States:

In the nearly half-century in which we have gone from George Wallace to Barack Obama, America has another, less hopeful story to tell about racial progress, one that may be even harder to reverse.

In 1965, a young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan stumbled upon data that showed a rise in the number of black single mothers. As Moynihan wrote in a now-famous report for the Johnson administration, especially troubling was that the growth in illegitimacy, as it was universally called then, coincided with a decline in black male unemployment. Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but they were marrying - and fathering - less ....

Since 1965, through economic recessions and booms, the black family has unraveled in ways that have little parallel in human cultures. By 1980, black fatherlessness had doubled; 56 percent of black births were to single mothers. In inner-city neighborhoods, the number was closer to 66 percent. By the 1990s, even as the overall fertility of American women, including African Americans, was falling, the majority of black women who did bear children were unmarried. Today, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some neighborhoods, two-parent families have vanished. In parts of Newark and Philadelphia, for example, it is common to find children who are not only growing up without their fathers but don't know anyone who is living with his or her biological father.

And what has this meant for racial progress? Fifty years after Jim Crow, black U.S. households have the lowest median income of any racial or ethnic group. Close to a third of black children are poor, and their chances of moving out of poverty are considerably lower than those of their white peers. The fractured black family is not the sole explanation for these gaps, but it is central. While half of all black children born to single mothers are poor, that is the case for only 12 percent of those born to married parents. At least three simulation studies "marrying off" single mothers to either the fathers of their children or to potential husbands of similar demographic characteristics concluded that child poverty would be dramatically lower had marriage rates remained what they were in 1970.

Black married couples make a median household income of $62,000, which is more than 80 percent of what white households earn and represents a gain of 13 percentage points since the 1960s. Yet overall, black household median income is only 62 percent that of white households, a mere six-point increase over the same period.

Merely walking down the aisle can't explain these differences. Rather, the institution of marriage appears to promote ideals of stability, order and fidelity that benefit children and adults alike. Those who pin their hopes for black progress on education tend to forget this. Numerous studies, when controlled for income and race, show that, on average, children growing up with single mothers are less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. And Moynihan's discovery of a negligible relationship between "economic conditions and social conditions" suggests that even increases in black male employment are not a certain cure.

Through the power of his own example, Obama presents a chance to revive what Lyndon Johnson called "the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights." Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," conveys the economic, emotional and existential toll of growing up fatherless, and he has spoken movingly of his determination to ensure for his own children a different life. Yet tackling this issue won't be easy. When Obama gave a Father's Day speech lamenting "fathers . . . missing from too many lives and too many homes," Jesse Jackson was so incensed that he said he wanted to castrate Obama. Still, painful as the subject is, the alternative is far worse: racial inequality as far as the eye can see.

The importance of family stability has been a key theme of Barack Obama's speeches on the politics of responsibility. But the coming Obama administration cannot resort to stale spending initiatives - reminiscent of the War on Poverty - to kick start a black urban poverty agenda.

New ideas are needed. But when the proportion of single-parent black households declines, the country will see improvements in virtually all the other categories of socieoeconomic well-being.

Oh Yeah, All Right, Take it Easy Baby...

I'm going to be away from the computer for a while, so please enjoy Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "American Girl":



I remember watching the band at the Super Bowl halftime show this year. It was awesome to see these guys playing with such verve, and the enthusiasm of the crowd rushing the stage reminded me of some of the stadium concerts I attended years ago (YouTube here).

I called my son down from his room to watch the performance, but he wasn't interested. It reminded me of Jack Black in School of Rock, "What do they teach you kids around here ... !"Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a great American band.

Progressives Still Grumbling at Obama Cabinet Picks

In response to today's piece at the Politico, and hard-leftists like Chris Bower (cited therein), Megan McArdle offers an incisive analysis of the problems with today's progressives: "Some Progressives Apparently Shocked to Discover That They Elected a Politician, Not (Awesomely Wise Secular Teacher!) Jesus. Clip at Eleven":

For a movement that grew out of the anti-corruption campaigns of the late nineteenth century, and was nurtured in the hothouse built by domestic Communism and Socialism, modern progressivism seems curiously unwilling to think about, much less cope with, institutionalist models of politics. Enacting legislation is not a matter of getting a president and a filibuster-proof majority, unless you happen to have a congress filled with career-suicide bombers. It is a matter of getting a filibuster-proof majority and a bill that either no one cares about, or is supported by close to a majority of voters. (Actually, it's much more complicated than that. But as a general rule, this simple model is much more effective than believing that shortly before electing Barack Obama, America collectively read Gunnar Myrdal and shifted about 20 points to the left.)

Here's more McArdle on the letdown on the left:

This sort of ridiculous posturing pervades every post campaign let down. Oh, yes, Barack Obama couldn't have been elected without progressives. He also couldn't have been elected without lower-middle class Moms who like to drive to Wal-Mart in their SUVs to buy enormous flat-screen televisions for the family room. Guess which group is larger?

I would add that progressives themselves have identified their activists as the heirs to the radical leftsts of the 1960s and 1970s.

And while there are more Wal-Mart SUV moms in the coalition that elected Barack Obama, the media elite are firmly on the side of today's hardline secular radicals and their campaign to strip the public sphere of traditional moral values and objective truth. That, and the possibility of Obama's "secret theory of progressivism," means that all of these developments are in fact more complicated than McArdle allows.

Report from Afghanistan

Michael Yon has the first in a new series of reports from Afghanistan, where he says, the war "is just beginning":

While Americans sleep tight in their beds, this time of year U.S. soldiers sit shivering through the frigid, crystal clear nights at remote outposts in places most of us have never heard of and will never see. Often they head out into the enveloping darkness, to hunt down and destroy terrorists, who continue to kill innocent Afghans, Americans, Aussies, Balinese, Brits, Indians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Spanish … in short, anyone who opposes their violent tyranny. Their greatest weapons are ignorance and terror. Witness the latest unprovoked attack on our friends in India.

These enemies have no wish to reconcile with their fellow countrymen, or compromise in any way that would diminish their control of the lives of the ordinary Afghans who don’t share their feral vision of life. They throw acid in the faces of little girls whose only crime is that they go to school. So we must continue to send our toughest men to confront them eye to eye, while performing the difficult balancing act of not alienating those who intend us no harm. This is particularly difficult in Afghanistan, a proud nation with a deep tradition of antipathy toward outsiders — even those who are here to help, though I am finding many Afghans clearly do not want us to leave.

We will get the clearest, sober, and realistic reports from independent journalists on the ground in Afghanistan.

Read the rest of the report, here.

New York Times to President Bush: Screw You

The editors at the New York Times are kicking President Bush from behind as he prepares to leave office.

We long ago gave up hope that President Bush would acknowledge his many mistakes, or show he had learned anything from them. Even then we were unprepared for the epic denial that Mr. Bush displayed in his interview with ABC News’s Charles Gibson the other day, which he presumably considered an important valedictory chat with the American public as well ....

A few sentences of indignation, then:

After everything the American public and the world have learned about how Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated Congress, public opinion and anyone else they could bully or lie to, Mr. Bush is still acting as though he decided to invade Iraq after suddenly being handed life and death information on Saddam Hussein’s arsenal.

Bully and lie?

Notice how there's not one word here on all the other intelligence agencies worldwide who independently backed the U.S. position that Saddam Hussein was a threat to international security. Notice how there's no mention that all the postwar reports on Iraq's WMD found Saddam to have been capable to renew a monumental weapons programs in a moment's time, and it will always be the case that the world would never have known the extent of Iraqi disarmament without the U.S. invasion.

To ignore all this to denounce Bush as maliciously dishonest - because he should have magically known the intelligence "to be faulty" - is despicable.

The moral vacuum and political polarization evident on the left today is the real threat to American and international security in the years ahead.

Whatever mistakes this administration made in the last eight years, an absence of moral clarity and granite resolve to see the job through on the ground are not among them.

Protecting Whole, Living Human Beings

I love the summary at Dahlia Lithwick's piece, "The Abortion Wars Get Technical":

Under a new regulation poised to become law any day now, any health-care worker may refuse to perform procedures, offer advice or dispense prescriptions - like the morning after pills pictured here [at the link] - if doing so would offend their 'religious beliefs or moral convictions'.

Here's the body of the text:

What does it tell us about the state of the abortion wars, that battles once waged over the dignity and autonomy of pregnant women have morphed into disputes over the dignity and autonomy of their health-care providers? Two of the most pitched battles over reproductive rights in America today turn on whether health workers can be forced to provide medical services or information to which they ethically object. But as we learn from these fights, our solicitude for the beliefs of medical workers is selective: abortion opponents will soon enjoy broader legal protections than ever. Those willing to provide abortions, on the other hand, will enjoy far fewer. And women seeking reproductive services will be more caught up than ever in the tangle between the two.

Read the whole article, which concludes like this:

Whether we like it or not, the right to birth control, emergency contraception and—under most circumstances—abortion is still constitutionally protected. But these are not services a woman can provide for herself, which leaves her with few rights at all when her doctors are empowered by law to misinform her, withhold advice or deny services altogether. Even beyond the problem of subordinating a woman's rights to her doctor, however, there looms a larger question for health-care workers themselves: if they are indeed seeing their rights and freedoms either hugely expanded or severely restricted based solely on which side they've chosen in the culture wars, they might properly wonder whether any of them are truly free at all.

That's not the best way to spin things, as coequal claims on rights. The unborn can make no such claims. God's will works through pro-life conscientious objectors, bless them.

At issue, in any case, are new proposals at the federal and state level that are empowering providers of abortions to exercise their right of conscience to decline to provide services.

I especially like South Dakota's requirement that service providers read to the patient that she is about to:

... "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being" with whom she has an "existing relationship " ...

Right on, and more power to the South Dakota legislature.

There are lots of rights involved here. The right of freedom of conscience, as well as freedom of choice. Unfortunatley the unborn baby's right to life doesn't normally get a vote, much less a voice.

The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage

Newsweek ramps-up the gay marriage debate with its cover story this week, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage."

The piece starts with numerous examples of Biblical figures whose manners of living were diametrically opposed to what today's religious conservatives would champion as an appropriate traditional lifestyle for society: For example, "Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists."

Read the essay. The problem I see is the author argues an exclusively literalist case against faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage, when in fact most Americans would more likely argue an essentialist religious foundation against gay marriage, one that sees religious tradition - rather than literal prophetic realism - as the basis for an ethics privileging heterosexual marriage.

Here's how Newsweek paints religious literalism as a straw man in favor of a more holistic religious acceptance of same-sex marriage:

As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

As I have argued many times here, the case for an expansive religious interpretation of a homosexual right to marry was rejected decisively at the polls this year, and Newsweek's own poll that accompanies this article found only 31 percent of Americans in favor full-blown marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

But we can leave all of that aside for the moment, since the increasing secularism in American society seems like a steamroller at times, and its proponents have no qualms of adopting Soviet-style show-trial tactics to dehumanize those who suppor the majoritarian political process.

The fact is, conservatives may have to battle gay rights advocates on the secular battlefield, as contentious cultural issues like this are essentially uncompromising for people of faith.

Susan Shell, in a masterpiece of an article, "The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage," lays out a classical and secular liberal case against gay marriage ("liberal" is used here in the Lockean form, with a stress on "liberty of rights," not "liberal" as used to describe the American left).

The core of Shell's argument is that marriage historically is recognized as a practice that his essentially procreative and regenerative. Not all couples bear children, but the institution's social foundation is anchored in the elevation of the basic biological union of spouses, and it is protected under the law as available to only one man and one woman, as a matter of civil principle. Shell argues, for example, marriage should only be available for the regenerative union of spouses in the ideal, as funerals are in fact only available to the dead:

When considering the institution of marriage, a useful comparison exists between how society addresses the beginning and end of human life. Like death, our relation to which is shaped and challenged but not effaced by modern technologies, generation defines our human nature, both in obvious ways and in ways difficult to fathom fully. As long as this is so, there is a special place for marriage understood as it has always been understood. That is to say, there is a need for society to recognize that human generation and its claims are an irreducible feature of the human experience.

Like the rites and practices surrounding death, marriage invests a powerful, universally shared experience with the norms and purposes of a given society. Even when couples do not "marry," as is increasingly becoming the case in parts of western Europe, they still form socially recognized partnerships that constitute a kind of marriage. If marriage in a formal sense is abolished, it will not disappear, but it will no longer perform this task so well.

A similar constraint applies to death. A society could abolish "funerals" as heretofore understood and simply call them "parties," or allow individuals to define them as they wish. Were the "liberationist" exaltation of individual choice pushed to its logical conclusion, would not a public definition of "funeral" as a rite in honor of the dead appear just as invidious as a public definition of "marriage" as an enduring sexual partnership between a man and woman? If it is discriminatory to deny gay couples the right to "marry," is it not equally unfair to deny living individuals the right to attend their own "funerals"? If it makes individuals happy, some would reply, what is the harm? Only that a society without the means of formally acknowledging, through marriage, the fact of generation, like one without the means of formally acknowledging, through funeral rites, the fact of death, seems impoverished in the most basic of human terms.

Like generation, death has a "public face" so obvious that we hardly think of it. The state issues death certificates and otherwise defines death legally. It recognizes funeral attendance as a legal excuse in certain contexts, such as jury duty. It also regulates the treatment of corpses, which may not merely be disposed of like any ordinary animal waste. Many states afford funeral corteges special privileges not enjoyed by ordinary motorists. Funeral parlors are strictly regulated, and there are limits on the purchase and destruction of cemeteries that do not apply to ordinary real estate. In short, there are a number of ways in which a liberal democratic government, as a matter of course, both acknowledges "death" and limits the funereal rites and practices of particular sects and individuals. I cannot call a party in my honor my "funeral" and expect the same public respect and deference afforded genuine rites for the dead. And it would be a grim society indeed that allowed people to treat the dead any old which way--as human lampshades, for example.

Once one grants that the link between marriage and generation may approach, in its universality and solemn significance, the link between funereal practices and death, the question of gay marriage appears in a new light. It is not that marriages are necessarily devoted to the having and rearing of children, nor that infertility need be an impediment to marriage (as is still the case for some religious groups). This country has never legally insisted that the existence of marriage depends upon "consummation" in a potentially procreative act. It is, rather, that marriage, in all the diversity of its forms, draws on a model of partnership rooted in human generation. But for that fact, marriages would be indistinguishable from partnerships of a variety of kinds. The peculiar intimacy, reciprocity, and relative permanence of marriage reflect a genealogy that is more than merely historical.

Seen in this light, the issue of gay marriage can be reduced to the following question: Is the desired union between homosexuals more like a marriage between infertile heterosexuals, unions that draw ultimate psychological and moral sustenance (at least symbolically) from the experience of human generation; or is it more like insistence on attending one's own funeral--a funeral, one might say, existing in name only? This question is not easily answered. Progress can be made, however, by attending to the stated goals of most gay marriage advocates.

Someone who is living cannot attend their own funeral, and thus, according to this logic, someone who is gay cannot attend their own marriage, as marriage has been historically constituted heterosexually in law and culture.

But Shell adds another paragraph indicating the likely backlash militant homosexuals will engender through their hardcore gay marriage advocacy:

American citizens should not have the sectarian beliefs of gay-marriage advocates imposed on them unwillingly. If proponents of gay marriage seek certain privileges of marriage, such as legal support for mutual aid and childbearing, there may well be no liberal reason to deny it to them. But if they also seek positive public celebration of homosexuality as such, then that desire must be disappointed. The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. Gays cannot be guaranteed all of the experiences open to heterosexuals any more than tall people can be guaranteed all of the experiences open to short people. Least of all can gays be guaranteed all of the experiences that stem from the facts of human sexual reproduction and its accompanying penumbra of pleasures and cares. To insist otherwise is not only psychologically and culturally implausible; it imposes a sectarian moral view on fellow citizens who disagree and who may hold moral beliefs that are diametrically opposed to it.

Keep in mind that Shell argues this point with the acknowlegment that political libertarianism would accord homosexuals the same rights that accrue to traditional couples, such as adoption. And as we saw in the Newsweek survey, on every other gay rights issues outside of marriage equality majorities of Americans are tolerant and expansive in affording full inclusion for same-sex partners.

But the current militant authoritarianism for same-sex marriage rights - which we've seen demonstrated with nauseating clarity in the No on H8 attacks following the passage of California's Yes on 8 initiative - will almost certainly generate the kind of backlash against gay marriage equality that Shell envisions.

So, while there may indeed by a growing generation tolerance for full-blown same-sex marriage equality, the logical extension of full public affirmation of such marriage rights may well create the the kind of reaction capable of setting back the clock on gay rights altogether.

Militants Strike U.S. Convoy in Pakistan Attack

The Los Angeles Times reports that "suspected" Taliban insurgents destroyed a 150-vehicle supply convoy in Pakistan's northwest region, near Peshawar, early today. The losses were not "militarily significant," officials said:

With attention focused on tensions between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attacks in Mumbai last month, U.S. officials are concerned that Pakistan will throttle back on its confrontation with militants in the tribal areas, opening the door to more such strikes.

U.S. military officials in Afghanistan declined to specify the number of vehicles destroyed in today's attack, but described the losses as militarily insignificant. However, the bold assault underscored the vulnerability of supplies moving by road through Pakistan.

Booman Tribune, commenting on the U.S. deployment to Afghanistan, compares the U.S. to the Soviets:

Now the American Empire is repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Empire. And the British Empire before it. Empires never learn, I guess.

Move evidence of the enemy at home, folks.

Remember Terrorism

Via Wordsmith at Flopping Aces:

See Wordsmith's entire collection of cartoons, here.

See also, Caroline Glick, "The Jihadist-Multicultural Alliance."

Continuing Partisan Debate on Iraq

As the debate over the Mumbai massacre has shown, the backlash against the Bush administration's policy of taking the fight to the terrorists continues to poison reasoned discussion on the future of American foreign policy.

We'll be seeing considerably more discussion of the Bush legacy on Iraq in the near future, as we make the transition from one administration to the next. As it is, leftists are super-senstive to any meme on the right that credits the administration with the greater security of the nation. On Iraq, leftists continue to decry the origins of the war, harping on "the lack" of international legitimacy for the deployment, and discounting any effect of the virtually treasonous backstabbing we saw among antiwar activists and top members of the Democratic Party both before and after the first shots were fired.

Along these lines, Dave Noon, of Lawyers, Guns and Money, has published a review of David Horowitz and Ben Johnson's, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11.

Noon's piece, first rejected by the editors of FrontPageMagazine, is now published at The Edge of the West. Here's the introduction, for some flavor:

In a little less than two months, George W. Bush will leave office as one of the most despised presidents in American history. Taking mild comfort, perhaps, in the fact that he will end his term according to the customary schedule, Bush would nevertheless have much to envy in the presidency of Richard Nixon, who resigned — amazingly — with lower disapproval ratings than George Bush currently enjoys and could, for all his administration’s flagrant criminality, at least take credit for bringing a pair of Giant Pandas to the National Zoo. Bush, by contrast, may well be remembered as simply the least capable two-term president in the history of the republic. In accounting for this failure, there are almost too many factors to consider, but the administration’s showcase project — the war in Iraq — will weigh heavily on Bush’s historical legacy. On its own merits, the war was a profound disaster for a full four years. The much-vaunted “surge” may have contributed to an improvement in certain conditions, but the likelihood that the United States will ever be able to offer a plausible claim of “victory” in Iraq is slim. No less a figure than Gen. David Petraeus recently conceded as much.

The authors of Party of Defeat are to be congratulated, then, for struggling valiantly (if unpersuasively) upstream in their quest to vindicate this administration’s baleful legacy. They do so, however, by taking a primarily negative tack. That is, they defend Bush’s war in Iraq not so much by hailing its achievements but rather by impugning the motives of its most vocal critics, whom they argue have somehow forced the president to deviate from the path to victory. It is, in the end, a strange argument on which to hang a book. So far as I can recollect, no credible works of history or political science have ever been written based on the thesis that a minority party in a democracy — one that in fact witnessed its minority status intensified over two election cycles — somehow bears responsibility for taking the country to the brink of ruin. But Party of Defeat is not a credible work of history or political science.

Perhaps Noon, despite his training as an historian, is not familiar with the reseach on interwar Britain and France, for example, Peter Corthorn and Paul Corthorn's, In the Shadow of the Dictators: The British Left in the 1930s, or Eugen Weber's, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s.

The former explicitly examines the British left's refusal to respond seriously to the gathering threat of fascism in Europe before World War II, and the latter examines the collapse of national morale in interwar France that contributed to the country's utter collapse in the face of German power in 1940 (not unlike the evaporation of outrage and resolve among the American left since 9/11).

But no matter.

Historical accuracy is not Noon's design. There's really no rational argument that could shake folks like Noon - who populate the denialist left in ever-increasing numbers - from their hegemonic project of demonization of the Bush administration and the neoconservative right. Rather than engage Horowitz and Johnson's substantive points by other than a wave of the hand, Noon repeatedly hammers the claim that the book is not a "legitimate" work of scholarship:

In 164 pages of prose, the authors cite exactly zero historians and political scientists who enjoy any degree of credibility in the area of US-Middle Eastern history specifically or international relations more broadly. The authors are clearly not stupid men, but their footnotes reveal a research method for which the term “shoddy” is almost too generous a description.

This is such a blatantly dishonest statement I can only shake my head. Looking at the footnotes right now, I see Horowitz and Johnson cite Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay in the footnotes to Party of Defeat on page 174. Daalder and Lindsay are both political scientists and foreign policy experts (Daalder's Ph.D is from MIT, and Lindsay's from Yale). But more than this, the notes from Party of Defeat reveal a research process relying heavily on primary documents, archival materials, and first-person accounts and biographies that are central to the methods of diplomatic history. Perhaps the shift in the historical profession to the new "social history," and the concomitant refusal to teach military history to the youth of today, explains Noon's irresponsible dismissals of Horowitz and Johnson.

Indeed, Noon should pay more attention to the very scholarly literature he so pompously pumps. The Security Council authority for the use of force in Iraq embodied in a series of resolutions calling for Iraqi disarmament and compliance with multilateral demands dating from 1991. Resolution 1441, which many focus on in discrediting international action, was in fact a huge victory for the U.S. and the world body in signaling that Iraq risked a preponderant display of force in flouting the will of the international community. And even in the absence of a secondary resolution in the run-up to March 19, 2003, the U.S. - based on power, values, right, and responsibility - was obligated to act against Saddam's breach of faith.

Noon reacts to this as follows:

There are some real whoppers, such as their insistence that U.N. Resolution 1441 provided sufficient authority to launch a war against Iraq.

It's not a question of whether Resolution 1441 was "sufficient," but whether the world body in fact was prepared to act when objective international circumstances warranted it. As political scientist Anne Marie Slaughter argued on the legal rational for regime change in Iraq, Resolution 1441 and the French resistance to it:

If the United States has a majority and the French vetoes, then the United States will go ahead and will have the better of the legal argument, assuming the war is as the United States predicts—both short and successful.

At this point, how we reconcile all these views is less important than the larger divide between left and right on the legitimacy of the use of force in international affairs.

As Arthur Borden, the author of A Better Country: Why America Was Right to Confront Iraq, has written:

It is time for the nation to overcome the partisanship that has split us for the past five years. The current administration may have made errors in prosecuting the war, implementing post-Saddam renewal within Iraq, and communicating its message at home. Nevertheless, the underlying policy of protecting U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf as prosecuted by the Republican George W. Bush was in line with the long-standing bipartisan consensus as articulated clearly by Democrat Jimmy Carter and understood subsequently by both political parties.

It's the Democratic Party that has obliterated this same bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. This is what Horowitz and Johnson document in painstaking and scrupulous detail, and this is why leftists have placed their book in the nihilist crosshairs.

David Noon, unable to discredit these arguments on the merits, attacks Party of Defeat from some assumed but flimsy perch of academic superiority. As such, as I've noted previously, he "epitomizes the contemporary pacifism of the hard-left of the Democratic Party."

Why Rabbi Holtzberg Was Murdered

Here's Mark Steyn on the causes of Mumbai:

We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDs activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam — “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.

See also, "Deepak Chopra's Response to Sean Hannity."

U.S. Dollar Provides Stability in Financial Storm

The U.S. financial crisis has triggered numerous announcements that crashing markets signal the inevitable decline of the United States as the world's major power.

For example, the anti-American blog, Newshoggers, announced in September that the international system was becoming "more multi-polar, with the U.S. losing its superpower status as the world's financial powerhouse."

That's wishful thinking, of course (the anti-American left sees U.S. power as the font of evil in the world, and increasing multipolarity will rein-in America's alleged neoimperial project). The U.S. will remain the world's dominant economic power as long as no other states possess comparable economic capabilities.

One of the best indicators of a nation's power is the role of its currency. For over half a century, the U.S. dollar has been the world's major international unit of exchange, providing liquidity to countries facing balance of payments problems and serving as the unit of worth to which all the world's money aligned. Even after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the dollar served as the key currency of international trade, and at this late date over 80 percent of world's commercial and financial transactions are conducted in dollars.

Counterintuitively, as the American economy continues to shake out, international investors have been rushing into dollars as a safe-haven against risk. The Wall Street Journal has the report, "The Dollar Powers Through the Turmoil":

Amid the worst financial crisis in decades, the U.S. dollar has come roaring back to life.

Over the past four months, as investors around the world fled from risk, the dollar recouped more than two years' worth of losses against a broad group of currencies, including its swoon in the early part of this year.

Since the start of August, the dollar has strengthened 23% against the euro, 34% against the British pound, and still more against some currencies in developing countries ....

To the surprise of many observers, the greenback turned out to be a major beneficiary of the global flight from risky assets and the unwinding of bets based on borrowed cash, much of it in dollars. In a time of extreme financial stress, investors sought the relative safety of the world's reserve currency, and if possible, U.S. Treasury bonds.

The ever-widening scope of the crisis also helped the buck: It rapidly became clear that the U.S. is far from the only country with economic woes and hobbled banks.

For investors, the dollar's resurgence is proving a tricky puzzle. Some believe that the comeback will prove to be short-lived, given the enormous challenges facing the U.S. economy. But others say it's likely to endure well into next year as economies around the globe grapple with a sharp slowdown.

Read the whole thing, here.

The piece includes the usual discussion of the pros and cons of a rising dollar on exports and tourism. But what's fascinating is how this type of commentary is not much different from earlier times, whether the U.S. economy was booming or wheb facing a recession.

For America's detractors, the shift to a "multi-polar" world may have to wait a little longer.

The Obama Inauguration

Anticipation is high for the presidential inauguration Barack Obama.

The Los Angeles Times puts the event in historical perspective:

The inauguration has been forecast to draw anywhere from 1 million to 4 million. Whatever the actual number, for those who voted for him and even those who did not, there is little doubt that the Obama swearing-in will go down as a milestone in the nation's history, an American moment.

Elizabeth Scalia notes how Obama backers literally can't wait, with some pushing for the resignation of President Bush:

In this interregnum season of political transition, the whole nation is in a state of suspense; it watches a right-leaning government prepare to head out to a political wilderness as a left-leaning one processes in from same.

For fervent Democrats and the press — but I am redundant — it is a period of giddy impatience.

For the rest of the nation, this transition and its necessary waiting is a time of reflection. After the noise of an excruciating two-year campaign, those who voted for Obama in November — and especially those who did not — are taking advantage of the relative post-election calm to reflect on all of the fears and hopes that went with the hype. In a quintessentially American manner, they are — whether with joy or resignation — doing the introspective work needed to be opened to the man who will be their president on January 20, 2009. As they wait, they watch bright stars being plucked from the political constellations to serve the new administration and they wonder what is about to occur in their world.

Those who had counted on a President Obama moving herky-jerk away from capitalism and sovereignty are finding some surprisingly centrist cabinet selections at odds with their notion of “hope.” Others fear such selections constitute nothing more than plausible deniability in the face of an inexorable march toward Marxism, and “hope” feels — literally — like all they have.

There's more at the link.