I am very disappointed that Chancellor Michael Drake did not come out --- especially today --- and see and hear for himself what is going on on his campus especially in light of all the controversy that has given his university a very negative reputation when it comes to this issue. I would have hoped that Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who continues to deny anti-Semitism at UCI, would have come out and listened to Ali. Ditto for Vice Chancellor Manuel Gomez-wherever he was.
More coverage at Gary's blog.
At WSJ, "Public Still Backs Offshore Drilling":
Public support for expanding the offshore hunt for energy is sturdy, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll suggests, even as a damaged well continues to gush crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, the spill has taken a toll on support for offshore drilling among Senate Democrats, further hobbling the chances for climate-change legislation, which was unveiled by two senators Wednesday.
Six in 10 respondents to a survey carried out from May 6 to May 10 said they backed more drilling for oil off the U.S. coast. Some 34% said they "strongly" supported it, and 26% said they supported it "somewhat."
More than half of respondents —53%—also said they agreed with the statement that "the potential benefits to the economy outweigh the potential harm to the environment." Respondents in Gulf states were slightly more likely to support additional drilling offshore, with 63% of them saying they would approve of more rigs. The poll has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
"Stuff happens like that, you still have to press forward, in my opinion," said David Mundy, a retiree in Mitchell, Ind. "We've got to get out of this dependence on oil from foreign countries."
Jane Oakes, an attorney living near Asheville, N.C., said she didn't see that there was a greater risk of accidents involving oil rigs than with tankers importing oil from overseas.
Many respondents said they wanted to see offshore drilling "controlled" in some way, but appeared confident that the risk of future accidents could be reduced and any damage from them limited.
"I'm surprised that the problem hasn't been resolved already," said Linn McCormack, a homemaker in northern New Jersey.
The muted public response to the disaster is a blow for environmental groups as they ready themselves for the energy debate. "If this isn't what it takes, what would it take?" said Neil Shader, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society, which advocates for public-land protection.
The disaster in the Gulf has complicated the Obama administration's push for an energy bill that addresses climate change.
President Barack Obama, Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) had hoped to use support for more offshore drilling as a chip to win Republican votes for a broader bill aimed at cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions 80% by 2050.
Two days before the inauguration in 2009, PARADE published a letter from Barack Obama to his daughters about what he hoped for them and all the children of America. And on Father’s Day last year, PARADE asked the President to reflect on what fatherhood meant to him. This year, since he could not be at every high school and college commencement, PARADE asked the President what message he’d like to impart to all the graduates in the Class of 2010 in the U.S. Here is an excerpt of the original piece written by President Obama, which appears in full in this Sunday’s issue of PARADE:"'A Message to the Class of 2010," by President Barack Obama":
That is your charge as graduates—our future is in your hands. The United States is still a land of infinite possibilities waiting to be seized, if you are willing to seize them.RELATED: At Weasel Zippers, on the president's Michigan Commencement, "Obama Knocks Fox . . ‘Debate Over More Or Less Gov’t Doesn’t Fit Our Times’ . . . Says He’s Trying To Bring Civility To Politics." (Full text is here, "Remarks by the President at University of Michigan Spring Commencement.")
While government plays a role in making a more prosperous and secure future possible for America, the final outcome ultimately depends on you and the choices you make from here on out.
Of course, each of you has the right to take your diploma and seek the quickest path to the biggest paycheck or the highest title possible. But remember: You can choose to broaden your concerns to include your fellow citizens and country instead. By tying your ambitions to America’s, you’ll hitch your wagon to a cause larger than yourself. You can choose a career in public service or the nonprofit sector, or teach in an underserved school ....
When I left for Chicago after college to be a community organizer, I, like many of you, had no idea what the future would hold for me. What I did know was that somehow, in some way, I wanted to make an impact on the world around me.
RELATED: "Vilks website hacked as cyber hate grows."
Added: AOSHQ links with, "Plans Announced To Erect Islamic Culture Center On Lars Vilks' Decapitated Body."
At least eight people were killed and up to 121 injured during a day of violence between anti-government protesters and troops which drew months of stand-off in Bangkok closer to an endgame.More at the link.
Three of the wounded were journalists, including a Canadian cameraman shot three times and “gravely” injured during running battles in the streets of the Thai capital.
The violence was sparked by yesterday’s attack — possibly by a sniper — on a renegade army general, who is a key figure on the militant wing of the Red Shirt protests.
Dozens more were injured today, seven fatally, according to reports from hospitals, as troops used teargas and fired live and rubber bullets in an attempt to bring to an end two months of protests in which more than 30 people have died and more than 1,400 people have been injured.
And at NYT, "Thai General Shot; Army Moves to Face Protesters," and "Rogue General Shot During Thai Protests." Reports coming in that the general, Khattiya Sawatdiphol, has died. See, "Growing Anarchy in Thailand as Protesters Clash with Military," and "Rogue general killed in Thailand: Anti-government supporter is shot in the head while talking to a New York Times journalist."
The Women’s Emergency Human Rights Delegation, which includes civil and women’s rights leaders, journalists, union leaders and organizers from the AFL-CIO, National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), the National Domestic Worker Alliance (NDWA) and Jobs with Justice (JwJ), visited women at community centers in Phoenix on Mother’s Day to document the experiences of women in Arizona in the wake of the signing of the law. Ana Avendano, an assistant to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, was among the delegation.
Make no mistake: These groups are among the most hardline organizations on the radical left. NDLON is organizing the May 29th "NATIONAL CONVERGENCE TO STOP THE HATE." See also, "Unions Show How to Build a Boycott of Arizona."
Plus, AFL-CIO goons are pushing DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to yank Homeland Security from Arizona's border enforcement operations. See The Hill, "AFL-CIO wants DHS to stop working with Arizona state cops":
Labor group joins civil rights organization in callling on Napolitano to end programs because of immigration law.
One of the nation's most influential labor groups and a civil rights organization on Friday urged Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to end programs with Arizona law enforcement agencies over the state's controversial immigration law.
The AFL-CIO and the Leadership Conference penned a letter to Napolitano, saying that while the administration has said it is opposed to the law, they need to be doing more to protest it.
Decked out in red midriff-baring tops and hot pants, dancers at a recent competition earned whoops and praise for their skilled moves and obvious talent.There's a GMA video at the link.
But what was an exhilarating performance has turned into an Internet firestorm -- the dancers gyrating on a Los Angeles stage to Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies" were as young as 8.
The girls' parents defended their daughters' performance at the World of Dance, billed as the largest U.S. urban dance competition, saying their daughters' moves and outfits were appropriate for competition.
"This is taken completely out of context," Cory Miller, father of one of the girls, told "Good Morning America" today. "The girls weren't meant to be viewed by millions of people."
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.
Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.
"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.
Brewer's signature on the bill Tuesday comes less than a month after she signed the nation's toughest crackdown on illegal immigration — a move that ignited international backlash amid charges the measure would encourage racial profiling of Hispanics. The governor has said profiling will not be tolerated.
The measure signed Tuesday prohibits classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.
The Tucson Unified School District program offers specialized courses in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies that focus on history and literature and include information about the influence of a particular ethnic group.
For example, in the Mexican-American Studies program, an American history course explores the role of Hispanics in the Vietnam War, and a literature course emphasizes Latino authors.
Horne, a Republican running for attorney general, said the program promotes "ethnic chauvinism" and racial resentment toward whites while segregating students by race. He's been trying to restrict it ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta told students in 2006 that " Republicans hate Latinos."
District officials said the program doesn't promote resentment, and they believe it would comply with the new law.
Nope. No ethnic resentment here.
BONUS: An absolute doozy of an attack by Michael Eric Dyson on Arizona's State Schools Superintendent Tom Horne (who comes back quite well, thank you):
I've never understood why anyone could watch Gutman and Red Eye. It's supposed to be humor, but it's just stupid and obnoxious. Completely non-funny at all. I would think that anyone who watches it is as sick as Gutman.
Sometimes you just gotta give it up for the other side, but hey, the whole world is evil when Fox News tops the Nielson ratings.
Chalk this one up as yet another school district caught in the grip of an establishment that values leftism over learning and casually scorns the values and concerns of the community’s parents, viewing them instead as the ignorant rabble, little more than revenue sources to keep their bureaucratic boondoggles afloat. The same scene has been repeating itself in thousands of schools across the nation for years—it’s way past time for America to say “enough.”
As her undergraduate thesis topic, Kagan chose to write about the demise of the American socialist movement, a story which she called “a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.... In unity lies their only hope.”
She explained in the acknowledgements that her brother’s “involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”
And Michael Goldfarb has more, from May 8, 2010, "Elena Kagan, Radical?":
Yesterday THE WEEKLY STANDARD obtained a copy of Elena Kagan's senior thesis, written almost thirty years ago while an undergraduate at Princeton. The title of the thesis: "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933."
Big problems. Big achievements. Big costs.Cartoon Credit: Bosch Fawstin.
Historians say President Obama's legislative record during a crisis-ridden presidency already puts him in a league with such consequential presidents as Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. But polls show voters aren't totally on board with his achievements, at least not yet, and the White House acknowledges that his victories have carried huge financial and political costs.
"There are always costs in doing big things," Obama told USA TODAY.
Obama's ambitions are on display again this week as he prods the Senate toward passage of the most sweeping financial regulatory change since the aftermath of the Great Depression, a bill that aims to curtail the Wall Street risk-taking that fed the meltdown in 2008. The bill follows a string of laws and regulations that have reshaped the American landscape in fundamental ways: overhauling the health care system, rescuing U.S. automakers, imposing stricter rules on credit card companies, designating more than 2 million acres of public land as protected wilderness, expanding equal-pay protection for women and more.
"Even if he wasn't African-American, he'd have a considerable entry in the history books," says Princeton professor Fred Greenstein, author of The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama.
I love watching Horowitz, especially how easily he handles this woman, dismissing her at the end, "You don't get to make a speech."
Meg Whitman says she became one of the world's wealthiest CEOs by always asking, "What is the right thing to do?"A crooked RINO buying the governor's mansion. Golly Gee Wilikers! Just what California needs!
In her recently released autobiography, the front-runner for the GOP gubernatorial nomination disavows Wall Street "self-dealing and fraud" and rejects as myth the idea that successful executives must "step on people, stretch the truth . . . and make heartless decisions based only on the bottom line."
Several of Whitman's actions while in corporate office and as an investor, however, raise questions about whether her conduct has squared with the image she has created in the book, on the stump and through tens of millions of dollars' worth of campaign commercials. Her ethical compass was tested repeatedly as she went from young Harvard MBA to chief executive of the online auction giant EBay, and some shareholders, regulators and business partners found it wanting.
A lucrative deal that Whitman cut for herself with investment banking giant Goldman Sachs was called "corrupt" by the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. The partnership she forged between EBay and online rival Craigslist landed in court and is still there; Craigslist has accused EBay of stealing trade secrets and fraudulent advertising. At another company, her dismissal of a subordinate executive resulted in an age-discrimination lawsuit and a secret court settlement.
As an investor, she put millions of dollars into private equity firms with a reputation for callous business practices. Subsidiaries of one of the "distressed asset" firms in which she identifies herself as a limited partner foreclosed on dozens of victims of Hurricane Katrina.
"It's nice to say if you just behave ethically, you will make profits," said Meir Statman, a professor of finance at Santa Clara University who focuses on ethics. "If that were true, life would be really easy. But . . . there are tradeoffs. And if you are a politician, you have to account for them."
Whitman declined to be interviewed, referring questions to her campaign staff.
In December 2007, al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, made a little-noticed nod to the fact that his organization's popularity was taking a nosedive: He solicited questions from jihadi forum participants in an online question-and-answer session. It looked like a rather desperate gambit to win back al Qaeda’s dwindling support. And it was. Since the September 11 attacks, the terrorist organization and its affiliates had killed thousands of Muslims -- countless in Iraq, and hundreds more in Afghanistan and Pakistan that year alone. For a group claiming to defend the Islamic ummah, these massacres had dealt a devastating blow to its credibility. The faithful, Zawahiri knew, were losing faith in al Qaeda.
Zawahiri's Web session did not go well. Asked how he could justify killing Muslim civilians, he answered defensively in dense, arcane passages that referred readers to other dense, arcane statements he had already made about the matter. A typical question came from geography teacher Mudarris Jughrafiya, who asked: "Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri, but who is it who is killing with your excellency's blessing the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco, and Algeria? Do you consider the killing of women and children to be jihad?"
Like a snake backed into a corner, however, a weakened al Qaeda isn’t necessarily less dangerous. In the first comprehensive look of its kind, Foreign Policy offers the Almanac of Al Qaeda, a detailed accounting of how al Qaeda's ranks, methods, and strategy have changed over the last decade and how they might evolve from here. What emerges is a picture of a terrorist vanguard that is losing the war of ideas in the Islamic world, even as its violent attacks have grown in frequency.
It's not because the United States is winning -- most Muslims still have extremely negative attitudes toward the United States because of its wars in the Muslim world and history of abuses of detainees. It's because Muslims have largely turned against Osama bin Laden's dark ideology. Favorable ratings of the terrorist leader and the suicide bombings he advocates fell by half in the two most-populous Islamic countries, Indonesia and Pakistan, between 2002 and 2009. In Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's ruthless campaign of sectarian violence obliterated the support al Qaeda had enjoyed there, deeply damaging its brand across the Arab world.
The jihad has also dramatically failed to achieve its central aims. Bin Laden's primary goal has always been regime change in the Middle East, sweeping away the governments from Cairo to Riyadh with Taliban-style rule. He wants Western troops and influence out of the region and thinks that attacking the "far enemy," the United States, will cause U.S.-backed Arab regimes -- the "near enemy" -- to crumble. For all his leadership skills and charisma, however, bin Laden has accomplished the opposite of what he intended. Nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, his last remaining safe havens in the Hindu Kush are under attack, and U.S. soldiers patrol the streets of Kandahar and Baghdad.
If this looks like victory in the so-called war on terror, it is an incomplete one. The jihadi militants led by bin Laden have proved surprisingly resilient, and al Qaeda continues to pose a substantial threat to Western interests overseas. It could still pull off an attack that would kill hundreds, as the most recent plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009 attests. We know from history that small, determined groups can sustain their bloody work for years with virtually no public support. Al Qaeda's leaders certainly think that their epic struggle against the West in defense of true Islam will last for generations. -- Peter Bergen
One of Jasper Johns’s seminal Flag paintings, from 1960-1966, that had belonged to Michael Crichton, the best-selling writer, became the star of Christie’s post-war and contemporary art auction on Tuesday night when it brought $28.6 million ....RTWT.
The buyer was Richard Rossello, a dealer in American paintings based in Bryn Mawr, Pa., who could be seen with a cell phone glued to his ear during the bidding.
The Johns flag, in encaustic, an ancient technique in which pigment is suspended in wax, giving each brush stroke a distinct materiality, is a hot commodity in auction circles because few ever come for sale. And on Tuesday night five other bidders tried to buy the painting, which had been officially estimated to bring $10 million to $15 million.
In selecting Elena Kagan to be the country's next Supreme Court Justice, President Obama has tapped the legal world's version of himself: a skillful politician whose cautious public persona belies a desire to transform the court and shape a new Constitutional liberalism.Video Clip: Drill scene from Brian De Palma's "Body Double" (1984).
In announcing her appointment yesterday, Mr. Obama praised the Solicitor General as someone who had won kudos from "across the ideological spectrum" and proven that she could work with conservatives, even (gasp) hiring some while dean of Harvard law school. Known for her personal charm and politesse, Ms. Kagan is also a woman of the modern judicial left who is unlikely to break from the High Court's liberal bloc on any major legal dispute ....
Mr. Obama may also see in his nominee a reflection of his philosophy that judging cases should be guided as much by personal experience and "empathy" as by the plain words of the Constitution. Writing in 1993 in the Texas Law Review about Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked, Ms. Kagan provided a glimpse into her own jurisprudence.
Justice Marshall, she wrote admiringly, "allowed his personal experiences and the knowledge of suffering and deprivation gained from those experiences, to guide him." In his view, she explained, Constitutional interpretation demanded that the courts "show a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged . . . and however much some recent Justices have sniped at that vision, it remains a thing of glory."
Across her career, Ms. Kagan has also been a reliable legal partisan. While Harvard dean, she joined three other law school deans in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on detainee policy, arguing that "immunizing the executive branch from review of its treatment [of detainees] strikes at the heart of the idea of the rule of law." In a 2007 Harvard commencement speech, Ms. Kagan disparaged legal memos written by John Yoo as "expedient and unsupported legal opinions," that "failed to respect the law." So much for crossing the intellectual aisle.
Ms. Kagan is nonetheless likely to clear the Senate, barring some new development. The Senate confirmed her as Solicitor General last year 61-31, and at least as many will vote against her again for what is a lifetime appointment. But Republicans lack the votes to defeat her even if they were inclined to filibuster, and we doubt that they are.
"There's a lesson here: Society's obsession with eradicating bigotry has gone so far that even history's ultimate hatemongers apparently classify in the victim category -- much in the same spirit that "human rights" advocates (including, perversely, Jewish groups) champion "hate speech" laws that inhibit journalists such as Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant from criticizing militant, anti-Semitic Islamists lest such criticism be seen as "Islamophobic."Hat Tip: Blazing Cat Fur.
Photo by Adam Nemser/PHOTOlink, Courtesy JewsForSarah.com
RELATED: Donald Marron, at National Affairs, "America in the Red":
Some Americans prefer a large, active government that provides a broad range of services and redistributes income among individuals and families in order to diminish disparities in economic outcomes. Other Americans prefer a smaller, limited government that provides essential public services — defense, a legal system, and a basic social safety net — but leaves most other decisions to individuals, families, and the private sector. A smaller government makes the task of keeping spending — and therefore deficits — under control somewhat easier. But if we choose a larger government, Americans must recognize that we will have to pay for it through higher taxes. Unbridled borrowing is simply not a viable long-term option ....
President Obama has backed himself into an unsustainable position with his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on Americans who earn less than $250,000 a year. The difficulty of upholding that pledge has already been illuminated by the debate over how to pay for an expanded federal role in health insurance. Once we turn to our ongoing fiscal problems, it will become obvious that high-income Americans simply do not make enough money to bear all the costs of fixing the federal budget. Consider some recent analysis by the Brookings-Urban Tax Policy Center's Rosanne Altshuler, Katherine Lim, and Roberton Williams, whose calculations suggest that the top two marginal tax rates would have to be increased to at least 70% to bring the deficit under control through tax increases on high earners alone. And even that measure seems unlikely to work — since, as they note, these calculations do not take into account the negative economic consequences of such high tax rates ....
Lobbyists are already arguing that various temporary provisions in the 2009 stimulus bill should be made permanent. While the congressional committees with oversight of education spending have found a way to eliminate $80 billion from the federal student-loan program, they plan to use most of it to expand other spending, rather than to reduce the deficit. The committees in charge of energy and environmental policy are considering proposals that would create almost $1 trillion worth of carbon allowances over the next ten years — only to give away or spend 99% of that money. And then there is the Democrats' health-care initiative, which would make a series of cuts to the budget only to use the savings to expand the federal government's role in financing health care.
Hat Tip: Linkiest.
The selection of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick moderate candidates who often disappoint their liberal base.More at the link, plus related rants at Memeorandum.
Ms. Kagan is certainly too liberal for conservatives, who quickly criticized her nomination on Monday as a radical threat. But much like every other Democratic nominee since the 1960s, she does not fit the profile sought by the left, which hungers for a full-throated counterweight to the court’s conservative leader, Justice Antonin Scalia.
In many ways, this reflects how much the nation’s long war over the judiciary has evolved since Ms. Kagan was a child. While the American left back then used the Supreme Court to promote social change in areas like religion, race and abortion, today it looks at it more as a backstop to defend those rulings. The right, on the other hand, remains aggrieved and has waged an energetic campaign to make the court an agent of change reversing some of those holdings.
Along the way, conservatives have succeeded to a large extent in framing the debate, putting liberals on the defensive to the point where Sonia Sotomayor echoed conservatives by extolling judicial restraint in her confirmation hearings last year and even President Obama recently said the court had gone too far in the past. While conservatives have played a powerful role in influencing Republican nominations, liberals have not been as potent in Democratic selections.
In that vein, then, no Democratic nominee since Thurgood Marshall in 1967 has been the sort of outspoken liberal champion that the left craves, while Justice Scalia has been joined by three other solid conservatives in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. By all accounts, Mr. Obama did not even consider the candidates favored most by the left, like Harold Hongju Koh, his State Department legal adviser, or Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor.
President Barack Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, choosing a woman who has worked in elite legal and policy jobs but has never served as a judge, according to people familiar with the situation.Also at ABC News, "15 minutes ago AP: Elena Kagan is Obama's Pick for the Supreme Court" (via Memeorandum).
The selection is to be announced Monday. If confirmed by the Senate, she would succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, the 90-year-old leader of the court's liberal wing.
In making his choice, aides said the president looked for someone with not only a top legal mind but also the ability to bring people of differing views together. With the Supreme Court closely divided ideologically, the president is hoping his pick will be a leader who can build majorities in close cases.
He saw that quality in Ms. Kagan, who earned a reputation for bridging divides as a policy adviser in the Clinton White House and, in particular, over six years as dean of Harvard Law School. At Harvard, she aggressively recruited new faculty of all ideological stripes and went out of her way to make sure conservatives felt comfortable on the left-leaning campus. She won accolades from colleagues and students across the political spectrum.
Conservatives with whom she has worked are likely to endorse her nomination, providing helpful support as the Senate considers the matter. The White House has already lined up people willing to speak out on her behalf, including conservatives, women's groups and public interest law advocates.
Harvard is what comes to mind for me. Obama's a Harvard Law grad, and he knows the culture of that institution and perhaps has a feel for Kagan's administrative style as a result. More importantly, Kagan's not an ideological progressive, and while folks are saying the defeat of Utah Senator Bob Bennet is a victory for the tea parties, that's just as true with Kagan, especially since she's a national security centrist, which will likely help the administration avoid a more bruising confirmation battle than might otherwise be expected.
And of course, perhaps the president's interested in breaking more civil rights barriers. See, "Obama Will Pick That Rumored Lesbian Elena Kagan for Supreme Court."
AND PREVIOUSLY: "Is Elena Kagan Lesbian?"
