Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
From the New York Post, Charles Krauthammer, accepting the 2009 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism: "How Fox News Opened America":
When I left psychiatry to start writing, I did so not out of any regret for the seven years I had spent in medicine - years that I treasure for deepening and broadening my sensibilities - but because I felt history happening outside the examining-room door.
That history was being shaped by a war of ideas and I wanted to be in the arena. Not for its own sake. I enjoy intellectual combat, but I don't live for it. I wanted to be in the arena because some things matter, some things need to be said, some things need to be defended.
That little snippet tells a little about why I blog myself. But I'm no match for Charles Krauthammer's intellect.
Read the whole thing, here. Krauthammer speaks truth to power.
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan -- One at a time the government's top critics seemed to go to jail, or simply disappear.
Syrgak Abdyldayev, a local journalist, began to investigate whether the attacks had anything to do with a team of Russian-speaking specialists who arrived last year to advise the Kyrgyz government. He published several scathing articles accusing the government of shunting aside its opponents and turning to Moscow for financial support, including one in February that likened Russian aid to "oxygen for a sinking submarine."
Then Mr. Abdyldayev became a victim. Three men attacked him with metal pipes as he left his newspaper one evening in March, broke both his arms, his ribs and a leg, and stabbed him 26 times in the buttocks.
Times are changing in Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous Central Asian republic that not long ago was a hoped-for springboard for Western-style democracy in the former Soviet Union.
The president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has steered Kyrgyzstan sharply back into the orbit of Moscow. In January, Mr. Bakiyev jolted Washington by announcing he was evicting the U.S. from an air base that has been crucial to the supply of troops fighting in Afghanistan. And political freedom here, as in Russia, is in decline. The Kyrgyz and Russian governments deny any link to the attacks on Kyrgyz critics.
In the West, hopes were high that the global financial crisis would rein in Vladimir Putin's assertive foreign policy. But here, as in other parts of the former Soviet Union, hard times have had the opposite effect: The Russians are coming back.
Russia has been hit by the crisis, but remains far richer than its former satellites, and it has used its largess to regain clout near its borders, in what President Dmitry Medvedev calls the "zone of privileged interests."
This video's posted at Media Matters. Glenn Beck argues there's now a "witch hunt" against Jews and conservatives" in the current environment.
But check this from the comments at Media Matters:
-- The conservatives and the right-wing extremists are marching in lock-step.
-- ... the reaction from the Noise Machine proves that they are right-wing extremists and provocateurs of domestic terrorism. And should be investigated and prosecuted as such ...
The spin on the left is that the suspect, James Von Brunn, is an agent of the GOP's "Christian-fascist" base. The truth is, via Melissa Clouthier, this guy's a deranged Holocaust denier. He represents no one on the conservative right - not me, nor any of those with whom I associate.
That this shooting occurred shortly after President Obama's former mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, blamed "the Jews" for his lack of access to his former parishioner is a troubling confluence of events.
UPDATE III: Robert Stacy McCain links, and he's also got another post up, on Glenn Greenwald, "Pot, Meet Kettle." Greenwald's link is here. Ed Morrissey responds as well: "Glenn Greenwald calls me “fear stricken,” which is rather humorous from the man shrieking with fear over the Bush administration’s surveillance programs."
It's not immediately evident why Roy thinks he's got conservatives pinned down. Dan Collinsresponds:
I want to stress to you scum-sucking morons that I don’t care whether Letterman and his writers thought he was addressing the presence at the Yankees game of Bristol Palin or Willow Palin. Either way, his “joke” was a sick and assaultive act directed at a young woman who has done nothing to merit such treatment on national television, you gutter-dwelling hobgoblins of putrescence.
Interestingly, pinning blame for the deficits on Repuplicans actually helps Republicans. Conservatives in 2012 will be running against both the Bush legacy of government expansionism and the Obama disaster of Democratic big-handout liberalism.
The U.S. has monumental economic, fiscal, and social issues to address. Democrats and netrootsleftistsspin the data on the budget and Social Security as if it's all a Republican problem, that it's all the GOP's fault. But America's unsustainable economic commitments are bipartisan. We're going to need a presidential candidate committed to restoring the founding vision of real fiscal federalism in the United States. Anything else will be a harbinger for national collapse. Think California on a national scale.
A whispered 911 call from a cellphone early one January morning brought police to a home on West Columbine Drive in this Phoenix suburb. Inside, they found more than 30 half-naked and shivering men -- prisoners, police say, of a gang that had smuggled them in from Mexico.
Beaten and threatened with a 9-mm Beretta pistol, a local detective's report said, the men were being shaken down for as much as $5,000 apiece, a ransom above the $1,000 that each had agreed to pay before being spirited across the border.
Such cases are increasingly common in Phoenix, which is gaining notoriety as the kidnapping capital of America. Authorities blame forces ranging from Mexico's rising drug violence to a gang takeover of the immigrant-smuggling business.
Another factor: the volatile housing market in the city, which has left it strewn with thousands of rental houses on sometimes sparsely populated suburban blocks, handy places for smugglers to store either drugs or people. The police call these "drop houses." They say federal, state and local authorities discovered 194 such houses in 2007, then 169 last year and dozens more so far in 2009.
While most of Phoenix's abduction cases relate to the drug trade, as dealers snatch rivals to demand ransom or settle debts, increasing numbers involve undocumented migrants. "Of 368 kidnap cases last year, 78 were drop-house cases involving illegal aliens," says Sgt. Tommy Thompson of the Phoenix Police Department. Officials say that in 68 alleged drop houses identified in the first five months of 2009, authorities found 1,069 illegal immigrants.
What's happening here marks a shift in the people-smuggling business. A couple of decades ago, workers commonly traveled back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, going to the same American farm or construction job each year. To make the passages they often would use the same smuggler, called a "coyote," each time.
Now, organized gangs own the people-smuggling trade. According to U.S. and Mexican police, this is partly an unintended consequence of a border crackdown. Making crossings more difficult drove up their cost, attracting brutal Mexican crime rings that forced the small operators out of business. The Phoenix area also was affected because tougher enforcement at the border focused on traditional routes in Texas and California -- funneling more traffic through Arizona along desert corridors controlled by Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel.
Check out the lefties who're totally freaking, at Obidian Wings, over a two-month old graph which shows the gargantuan annual budget deficits the Obama administration will run through 2016.
Conservatives have practically killed and buried this story, but E.D. Kain, just now wiggin' out, asks, "Am I missing something here? Isn’t this years [sic] deficit owned by the Bush administration? Don’t the war expenses bring these numbers much higher?"
The Heritage report is here. It answers E.D.'s question:
Many Obama defenders in the comments are claiming that the numbers above do not include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years. They most certainly do. While Bush did fund the wars through emergency supplementals (not the regular budget process), that spending did not simply vanish. It is included in the numbers above. Also, some Obama defenders are claiming the graphic above represents biased Heritage Foundation numbers. While we stand behind the numbers we put out 100%, the numbers, and the graphic itself, above are from the Washington Post. We originally left out the link to WaPo. It has been now been added.
CLARIFICATION: Of course, this Washington Post graphic does not perfectly delineate budget surpluses and deficits by administration. President Bush took office in January 2001, and therefore played a lead role in crafting the FY 2002-2008 budgets. Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for the FY 2009 budget deficit that overlaps their administrations, before President Obama assumes full budgetary responsibility beginning in FY 2010. Overall, President Obama’s budget would add twice as much debt as President Bush over the same number of years.
While Ross Douthat's hardly a conservative favorite for me, I definitely appreciate his latest New York Times essay, "Not All Abortions Are Equal." I appreciate it not so much for his argument, but for the reaction it has engendered among radical abortion rights commentators.
There's a decent-sized thread in response at Memeorandum. What's interesting is the essential refusal of the pro-aborts to engage the most devasting aspect to Douthat's piece: that the pro-choice movement supports all manner of unlimited fetal termination; that pro-aborts not only advocate elective partial-birth abortions, but they'll fight to the death to preserve a woman's right to choose/kill.
I wrote on the renewed abortion debate the other day, "Late-Term Abortions Get New Scrutiny." Here I'm just providing a roundup of leftist opinion so readers can get an even fuller sense of not just how morally bereft are the pro-aborts, but also how abortion - along with gay marriage - really is the decisive sociopolitical issue of our time. How do we want to define society? As one that fails to protect its most vulnerable?
Note first that Scott Lemieux, at Lawyers, Guns and Money, is left impotent by Douthat's moral case for greater regulation. He's reduced to quibbling with what's essentially a debateable legal technicality rather than the larger existential issues at hand. I'm not even quoting Lemieux. The guy's questionable recent writings on abortion and public opinion have actually forced a spotlight on his competence.
So let's see what the netroots pro-aborts have to say ...
The left's overarching ideological (gendered) foundation is captured in this hypothetical scenario at Firedoglake:
Imagine a matriarchal society where, for example, men are expected to stay home and raise the children and keep the house, are paid 75¢ on the dollar, are continually passed over for promotions because they're not part of the "girls' club," and are solidly underrepresented in state and federal legislative bodies. Imagine a world where men's bodies are still considered chattel, and are subject to archaic and inhumane religious beliefs costumed as "law." And yes, it's a cliche, but imagine a world where men could get pregnant. Then imagine a world where a doctor is murdered for performing an abortion that man sought because he didn't want to carry the child to term for any number of reasons.
All this counterfactual does is play the pity-poor-me-oppressed-woman-tearjerk game. It avoids anything substantive on the moral depravity of baby killing. TBogg, a Firedoggerel member, titles his post thus, "Hand Over Your Uterus and Nobody Gets Hurt."
Also classic is the brutal clarity in Mahablog's post advocating the case for choice. Rejecting Douthat's suggestion that there are exceptional circumstances that may arguably necessitate abortion, Maha writes:
No, the argument for legal and medically safe abortions — which would still be regulated, as is any medical procedure — is that there are times when pregnancy and childbirth would place an unbearable burden on a woman’s life, and so women will seek abortions. Their reasons are as infinite as the details of their lives. If abortions are not legal, they will either abort themselves or they will find underground abortion providers, medically trained or not.
Nope, don't want to be "punished" with a child! Kill 'em!
And this notion of "underground abortion providers" is a myth in the U.S. There are untold clinics in the U.S. providing abortion services. Planned Parenthood's so hard up to kill babies that they refuse to report statutory rape in favor of pushing "choice" on a minor.
But check out Echidne's post, "Every Sperm Is Sacred." As you can tell, there's a religious angle here:
So Ross Douthat has written a beautiful, almost elegiac, column on abortion, with the title "Not All Abortions Are Equal." The title is meant to make you subconsciously think that women's equality is irrelevant for this topic which is defined by Mr. Douthat and concerns the way we can save people like Dr. Tiller from getting murdered.
That way is to give in to the demands of extreme anti-abortion fanatics so that they stop killing people:
If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.
The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases — and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller's murder.
God willing, indeed. Let's apply the same arguments to the Islamic terrorists: If we only gave them what they want they would stop terrorist acts against the West! Let's do that! Surely Osama bin Laden would allow us to micromanage some parts of our own lives as women? Surely?
Now, there's not much argumentation at Athenae's post, but she does call Douthat a "sanctimonious garden weasel"!
But let me conclude here with Kathleen Reeves' longer discussion. To be fair, it's probably the more thoughtful of the bunch. But utlimately, Reeves' critique is just one more example of how leftists, in their abortion-as-gender-equality-meme, cannot appreciate the beauty and sanctity in the lives of the unborn:
The pro-life movement wants abortion gone not only from our health clinics, but from our memories. The movement focuses, at times, on late-term abortion because it’s easier to sensationalize and mischaracterize. For example, the PR genius who came up with the phrase “partial-birth abortion” ensured that in addition to the originally targeted procedure, intact dilation and extraction, all late-term abortions are now legally questionable. With a clever turn of phrase—calling it something that it was not—the pro-life movement attached a gruesome association to an entire set of procedures, all of which are employed to save women’s lives.
But again, the pro-life movement wants abortion gone, and it sees late-term abortions as a promising inroad. Douthat argues that our laws on abortion can avoid the all-or-nothing question, “Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn’t,” and can be more responsive to the many different types of abortion in America. He writes that the law is “the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense.”
While Douthat takes a well-considered, cool-headed tone in his writing, and while he implies at the beginning of the op-ed that he identifies with abortion rights supporters, his disdain for women who choose to have abortions is fairly apparent. It’s all too clear that the “common sense” he’d like to see in our abortion laws is Ross Douthat’s common sense, which makes little room for experiences that aren’t his own.
I can't speak for Douthat, although I must admit that I share this "disdain for women who have abortions." Well, not so much all women (there may indeed be medical circumstances whereby fetal termination should be available as a last resort). I'm disdainful of women who talk about abortions as happy day sharing opportunites. I'm disdainful of women who make decisions about pregnancy as if the "choice" at issue is no more significant than "paper or plastic." And I'm disdainful of women who advocate a feminist totalitarianism that demonizes men as "forced-childbirth barbarians."
I don't really have much interest in defending Nick Griffin. And I especially can't stand a Holocaust denier. But the guy did win a seat to the European Parliament. And on the basis of his free-speech rights, the man should be allowed to discuss his program, whatever that is. So it's disturbing that Griffin was egged byan angry mob at the College Green in front the British Parliament on Tuesday.
Make no mistake - the BNP is a semi-criminal conspiracy. Many of its key activists have convictions for racist violence. One of its new MEPs - Andrew Glans- has a conviction that arises from an incident in which he was discovered shouting “Kill the Jews” in the street, before having a go at a police officer.
The BNP know that their reputation for violence is their weakness.
That is why Nick Griffin’s spin is that it is the BNP that they are the victims of far Left thuggery. It is the best he can do, to distract public attention from the vicious nature of his own party.
And Unite Against Fascism play right into his hands.
Seriously - what is the value of egging Nick Griffin? Does it make SWP activists feel good? Do they think that the sight of an egg-covered Nick Griffin will encourage would-be BNP voters to reject his politics of hatred?
This wasn’t a spontaneous outburst of anger. This was a planned assault. It was illegal, reprehensible, and counterproductive.
The first step towards defeating the BNP is to take the fight against the far Right out of the hands of the far Left.
So where does that place Charles Johnson? I imagine he's "delighted" that Griffin got egg on his face. It's all anti-BNP all the time over at LGF nowadays. So, leftist thuggery is okay? Anything that helps his campaign against Pamela, Robert, and Sammy?
Here we have Stuart Rothenberg writing a commentary on how he'll never "accept another invitation to appear" on Hardball with Chris Matthews. So, we're set up to expect a hard-hitting centrist analysis on the decline of objective journalism on the air. And then, well, not so much:
Chris Matthews is a smart, politically astute observer of politics, but my last appearance convinced me that "Hardball" has evolved from a straight political news program with quality guests to one that has more in common with its network's prime-time slant. Like most of the evening programming on MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, "Hardball" has become a partisan, heavily ideological sledgehammer clearly intended to beat up one party and one point of view.
During the show on which I appeared, Matthews referred more than once to Republicans as "Luddites" and took every opportunity imaginable to portray them as crackpots. The show's topics inevitably pander to the most liberal Democratic viewers and present Republicans and conservatives in the least flattering of terms.
I don't mean to single out Matthews for criticism because he actually understands politics and I believe that he would prefer to do a serious political show. Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and the newest addition to MSNBC's unfortunate lineup, Ed Schultz, are far worse than "Hardball."
Depending on your politics, Fox's one-two prime-time punch of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity is either just as bad as the MSNBC crowd or much worse. They can't talk about Democrats without labeling them as socialists or unpatriotic. O'Reilly's obsession with General Electric and that company's CEO is bizarre, though any program that treats Dick Morris seriously as an independent analyst obviously has major problems.
When I surf the channels and pause for a moment on O'Reilly or Hannity, I rarely see guests who aren't openly partisan. But MSNBC's left-leaning shows do use political reporters and columnists who would bridle at the notion that they are ideologues or favor one party over the other. This is particularly true of "Hardball," which at one time seemed to want to fill the void left by the cancellation of CNN's terrific daily political program "Inside Politics."
That's got to be a novel twist to partisan demonization: Announce you'll never be on Chris Matthews' show again, and then say O'Reilly and Hannity are the worst.
Dating is an evolution of the courtship ritual; it became common for young couples — like this pair at a soda fountain in the 1960s — to go out for a movie or a meal as part of a courtship.
Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.
"The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening," Bogle says. "In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating."
Young people from high school on are so preoccupied with friends, getting an education and establishing themselves, they don't make time for relationships.
New Goal: Fun, Not Marriage
"Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing," says 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh, who graduated from college in 2005 and now lives in Boston. She says that among her friends, dating is a joke. "Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliche — isn't that funny?"
Signing up voters isn't a new activity for Tricia Cunningham, but the people she is encouraging to register these days might be surprised to know she is a die-hard Republican.
"We're non-partisan," Tricia said on June 5 in the living room of her home in the Hunters Ridge community off Forestbrook Road. "I think I'm the only Republican in the group. We don't even discuss political party affiliations."
The "we" she refers to is a recently organized political activist group called HELP, which stands for Help Eliminate Lousy Politicians. Tricia met HELP's founder, Trevor Tarleton, the day before the Harley-Davidson 2009 spring rally began in Myrtle Beach on May 8.
HELP was formed in response to City of Myrtle Beach elected officials' actions to end motorcycle rallies. Tricia is now the group's media spokesperson, and is comfortable in the role. She got her first taste of media notoriety as a young child.
On March 30, 1981, Tricia was 8 years old and lived in Pennsylvania. She was recovering from an ear operation, and while sitting on her living room couch watching television, she saw President Ronald Reagan shot in an assassination attempt.
"I started crying," she said. "It affected me so much. I wrote a letter to the president in crayon. The next thing I know, he was standing outside the hospital reading my letter."
In her letter, Tricia told President Reagan she was praying for his speedy recovery. In addition to having her letter read by the president on national television, she received a hand-signed thank-you note which she has framed with the envelope bearing a return address that reads only "The White House."
"That affected me," she said. "That's why I got into politics. I am Republican, conservative."
Tricia says she has volunteered to work on "every major campaign" since she was 9 years old. In Pennsylvania, she went door to door asking people to register to vote.
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