TAMPA, Fla. — Twenty years ago, Patrick J. Buchanan rocked the Republican convention in Houston by declaring there was a “cultural war” taking place for the soul of America, denouncing the Democratic Party as one that supported abortion, radical feminism and the “homosexual rights movement.”More at the link.
“The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat — that’s change, all right,” said Mr. Buchanan, a conservative commentator who was a rival to President George Bush in the 1992 campaign. “But it is not the kind of change America wants.”
The speech — along with similarly sharp-edged addresses by the evangelist Pat Robertson and Marilyn Quayle, the wife of Vice President Dan Quayle — pushed issues like abortion, gay rights, religion and the role of women in society to the front of the stage, often loudly. Supporters of Mr. Bush pointed to the tone of the convention as one of the reasons he lost the election that November to Bill Clinton.
Yet Republicans gathered here to nominate Mitt Romney suggest that those speeches would hardly give them pause today. What many viewed as the fringes of the Republican Party 20 years ago have moved closer to the mainstream — evidence, Mr. Buchanan said, of the extent to which a Republican establishment that was once relatively moderate on social issues has been pushed rightward by grass-roots conservatives.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Buchanan, who is not attending the convention here, said he was struck by what he described as the warm reception in the hall in 1992. He said that Mr. Bush’s aides were similarly praiseworthy after he walked off the stage. The temperature soon cooled but, he said, he had no doubt the speech was the right speech for the right audience in 1992 — and even more so today.
“That speech was then, and is now, consistent with the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” Mr. Buchanan said. “The country-club and the establishment Republicans recoil from the social, cultural and moral issues which many conservatives and evangelicals have embraced.”
Mr. Buchanan said Mr. Bush would have been well served had he seized on the issues Mr. Buchanan raised and used them in his campaign against Mr. Clinton.
“The issue on which they were most vulnerable was social and cultural issues,” Mr. Buchanan said. “That is what they could have won on.”
TAMPA, Fla. – While California residents are justly proud of many elements of life in the Golden State, when it comes to public policy, California would do well to follow the lead of New Jersey.More at the link.
The Garden State's tell-it-like-is governor, Chris Christie, has taken on public employee unions, overcome a significant state budget gap and advocated for lower taxes and fees. He recounted his successes to a breakfast gathering Monday hosted by the California Republican Party's delegation to the Republican National Convention.
Gov. Christie's approach is perhaps the polar opposite of that taken by California Gov. Jerry Brown. Gov. Brown has remained closely aligned with the state's powerful public employee unions, which did much to get him elected. He also is pushing to raise taxes via his Proposition 30 on the November ballot.
The states themselves share many political similarities. Both are longtime strongholds of the Democratic Party, which controls the legislatures, in concert with government-employee unions, and enjoys an advantage in voter registration.
As Gov. Christie told a room full of convention-goers, California and New Jersey face "similar challenges." He pointed to debt and deficits, people trying to get back to work and trouble with home mortgages. He chastised Gov. Brown's policies, while rejecting the notion that California is ungovernable.
"When I became governor of New Jersey, they said the same things to me. I heard people in California saying ... we don't know if it can be fixed; the problems are too big, the challenges are now too grave. Maybe we have just given California away to the public sector unions, to the masters of huge spending and huge government. But it doesn't have to be that way," Gov. Christie said.
"California and New Jersey made two very different choices," and "California made a bad choice" in electing Gov. Brown. "I have to sit at the National Governors Association with this guy and have him come up to me and say, 'Gov. Christie, stop telling people that I want to raise taxes. I am not trying to raise taxes.' And I said, 'Yes you are, Jerry.' And he says, 'No, I am going to put it on the ballot, and let the people decide.' Hey, that's leadership, isn't it?
"If you made a different choice ... California would be moving in a different direction today," he said. "I hear California is blue, but it's no bluer than New Jersey is. What matters is leadership," reminding his audience that New Jersey "hadn't elected a Republican in 12 years statewide" until his victory in November 2009...
JERUSALEM — Nine years after their daughter was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, the parents of American activist Rachel Corrie lost their legal bid Tuesday to hold Israel responsible for her death and force authorities to reopen the investigation.Continue reading.
A Haifa judge rejected the parent's negligence lawsuit, calling Corrie's death an accident that she brought upon herself by refusing to leave what had been declared a closed military zone. "It was a very regrettable accident and not a deliberate act," said Judge Oded Gershon.
Family members vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court and accused the Israeli government of covering up the truth.
"I believe this was a bad day not only for our family, but for human rights, for humanity, for the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel," said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, after the verdict was announced.
The court rejected the family's request for a symbolic $1 in damages and legal expenses.
Members of the Corrie family, who live in Olympia, Wash., have traveled to Israel for sporadic hearings over the last two years, listening to graphic testimony about how Rachel Corrie, then 23, was run over by a slow-moving bulldozer in Rafah near the border with Egypt.
Corrie, a college student, traveled to Gaza with the group International Solidarity Movement to act as a human shield to prevent Israeli soldiers from demolishing Palestinian homes and farms.
During the trial, the Israeli bulldozer driver, who was never identified, testified that he did not see Corrie standing in front of his vehicle. He ran over the young woman, than backed up and drove over her a second time, witnesses said.
Activists testified that the driver must have seen Corrie, who was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket and standing just a few feet away. They said it appeared Corrie became trapped in the dirt and debris and was unable to escape at the last moment.
The court agreed with an Israeli military investigation that concluded that the driver's field of vision was limited, and blamed Corrie and other activists for putting themselves in harm's way.
"She did not move away as any reasonable person would have done," Gershon ruled. "But she chose to endanger herself ... and thus found her death."
NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Isaac made landfall along the Gulf Coast on Tuesday night as a Category 1 storm, smaller than initially feared, forecasters said.And also video from CNN, "See new images of Isaac from space."
The National Hurricane Center announced at about 8 p.m. Eastern that Hurricane Isaac had hit southeastern Louisiana with sustained winds of 80 miles per hour. The storm was moving northwest at a slow pace of 8 m.p.h., making serious flooding more likely as the storm lingers over land. There have already been reports of flooding and power failures in several areas along the Gulf Coast.
The National Hurricane Center said in a statement that a storm surge of eight feet was recorded at Shell Beach in Louisiana.
“Now is the time to hunker down,” Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, said in a televised news conference as the storm came to shore.
The coast — and areas extending inland from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle — was bracing throughout the day for strong winds, heavy rain and flooding. The threat of tornadoes has also increased with the approach of the storm.
A hurricane warning was in effect for areas east of Morgan City, which sits on the Atchafalaya River in south-central Louisiana, and extending into Mississippi. That stretch of coast includes New Orleans.
Because most campuses are dominated by liberal adminstrators, faculty, and student activists, conservative/libertarian students often feel isolated and alone, and up against seemingly insurmountable forces which wield power over their lives.More at the link.
For many students, the risk/reward ratio says to shut up and just go along so as not to be singled out and targeted.
In reality, they are not alone. They are the silenced majority. They are a youthful Army of Davids. They just don’t know it yet.
So the next project will be …
Col·lege In·sur·rec·tion
Dear IDF: If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla -- well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me.
— Joshua Treviño (@jstrevino) June 25, 2011
The Guardian’s August 15 announcement that Joshua Treviño would be joining its US politics team provoked predictable outrage by some of the most virulent Israel-haters.There's more at the link.
One of the first screeds published on the appointment of Treviño was by “one-stater” racist Ali Abunimah, himself a contributor at the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” through June 2009, who wrote a piece for Al Jazeera, as well as several others at his own Electronic Intifada site, to protest the Guardian’s apostasy.
MJ Rosenberg and Richard Silverstein also condemned the appointment. On August 19, the Guardian published a letter criticizing the appointment of Treviño, by a who’s who of anti-Israel campaigners, chastising the Guardian for employing someone they characterized as holding “extremist views.”
The main complaint of all Treviño’s critics is the now-famous flotilla-related tweet by Treviño in June 2011 – 106 characters which, according to Abunimah and his anti-Zionist friends, represent “incitement to murder”....
The hypocrisy of this group of hardcore Israel-haters and apologists for Islamist extremists — who comically wear the mantle of “anti-racists” — is staggering. None of these sensitive souls was the least bit bothered by “Comment is Free” publishing, for instance, Azzam Tamimi – who supports suicide bombing against Israelis.
Indeed, in 2011, Guardian editors published a letter by a UK professor explicitly endorsing, on ethical grounds, deadly terrorist attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians — a decision which was later defended by Guardian readers’ editor Chris Elliott. And none of those protesting Treviño’s appointment have seen fit, of course, to object to the fact that the Guardian has repeatedly published articles by Hamas leaders....
The Guardian’s recent addition to its stable of writers of anti-Zionist blogger Glenn Greenwald, who has a long record of advancing explicitly anti-Semitic tropes on his blog at Salon, about the power of the Jewish lobby over the US government, is another example of the institution’s selective tolerance of bigotry.
Sure enough, the Guardian fired Treviño, citing a completely bogus conflict of interest as the cause, when the fact is that the paper gave in to pressures from extremists and those who wish the Guardian to remain an echo-chamber for shrill and malign anti-Zionist rhetoric.
The supreme hypocrisy of the Guardian has been laid bare, as it demonstrates that it is morally unburdened by hideously anti-Semitic, pro-terror commentators and journalists but will cravenly give in to arguments by extremists suggesting that those on the mainstream American right — commentators who take the threat to Western values posed by Islamist terrorism seriously — are beyond the pale.
AURORA, Colo. — The text message, sent to another graduate student in early July, was cryptic and worrisome. Had she heard of “dysphoric mania,” James Eagan Holmes wanted to know?More at that link. It's a lengthy piece.
The psychiatric condition, a form of bipolar disorder, combines the frenetic energy of mania with the agitation, dark thoughts and in some cases paranoid delusions of major depression.
She messaged back, asking him if dysphoric mania could be managed with treatment. Mr. Holmes replied: “It was,” but added that she should stay away from him “because I am bad news.”
It was the last she heard from him.
About two weeks later, minutes into a special midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20, Mr. Holmes, encased in armor, his hair tinted orange, a gas mask obscuring his face, stepped through the emergency exit of a sold-out movie theater here and opened fire. By the time it was over, there were 12 dead and 58 wounded.
The ferocity of the attack, its setting, its sheer magnitude — more people were killed and injured in the shooting than in any in the country’s history — shocked even a nation largely inured to random outbursts of violence.
But Mr. Holmes, 24, who was arrested outside the theater and has been charged in the shootings, has remained an enigma, his life and his motives cloaked by two court orders that have imposed a virtual blackout on information in the case and by the silence of the University of Colorado, Denver, where Mr. Holmes was until June a graduate student in neuroscience.
Unlike Wade M. Page, who soon after the theater shooting opened fire at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing six people, Mr. Holmes left no trail of hate and destruction behind him, no telling imprints in the electronic world, not even a Facebook page.
Yet as time has passed, a clearer picture has begun to surface. Interviews with more than a dozen people who knew or had contact with Mr. Holmes in the months before the attack paint a disturbing portrait of a young man struggling with a severe mental illness who more than once hinted to others that he was losing his footing.
Readers might be aware that Tropical Storm Isaac appears to be bypassing the Republican National Convention in Tampa and is instead headed.... right for New Orleans. It's scheduled to his the NOLA area on Wednesday. This is a wee problem for political scientists because, well, the American Political Science Association annual meeting is scheduled to be held in - wait for it -- New Orleans from Thursday to Sunday. APSA has already cancelled all Wednesday pre-meeting activities, and based on the storm path, I'd place a 50/50 bet on the whole convention being scrubbed (the other possibility is APSA Hunger Games, which would end badly for all the post-materialists).Okay. Makes sense, right? Perhaps Drezner's the calm, cool observer of convention scheduling protocols? I'd believe it myself, except when it comes to hurricanes, you'd think Dr. Drezner might withhold judgment, considering his epic blogging blunder from 2005, "We interrupt normal blogging about the rest of the world to freak out about THE BIG STORM!!!!" You have to read the post to believe it. Two days later, on August 29th, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the rest is history. Needless to say, Drezner f-ked up, "Hurricane Porn Open Thread":
This gives rise to a very simple question of mine: why, in the name of all that is holy, did any political scientist think it was a good idea to have the annual meeting in a hurricane zone... DURING HURRICANE SEASON??!!
CROW-EATING UPDATE: The post below was written 24 hours before the waters of Lake Ponchatrain broke through the levee, devastated New Orleans, and video footage came in on damage to the Mississippi Gulf coast. I must concur with James Joyner that the coverage of this hurricane was not overhyped in the end, and at this point is a rather trivial issue compared to the damage at hand...See? There's more of that chutzpah, trying to save your hypothesis whilst one of the country's deadliest hurricanes was destroying New Orleans really takes a lot. Talk about not taking political scientists seriously.
