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June 23rd is an infamous date. It was three years ago the Supreme court issued the Kelo decision. Susette Kelo is here with a request.
My name is Susette Kelo.
On Monday, June 23, 2008, I need your help in making a little bit of history.
June 23 is the third anniversary of the infamous Kelo eminent domain case, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed perfectly well-maintained private homes like mine to be taken by the government and handed over for someone else’s private use. Under that ruling, any home could be taken and destroyed to make way for high-end condos. Any small business could be bulldozed to make way for a big box store. And, tragically, that is what is happening in too many parts of our country.
The Captain is here from Pickings of June 24, 2005 commenting on the Kelo case.
Karl Rove says Obama’s right, words do mean something. So, he writes about Obama’s words to AIPAC.
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter!” Sen. Barack Obama thundered at a Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner in February. He should have remembered that at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference last week.
There, Mr. Obama defended the outrageous promise he made last July to meet, during his first year as president and without precondition, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Mr. Obama’s eagerness to undertake a “World Tyrants Tour” is both naive and foolhardy, and how he dealt with those concerns at AIPAC raises the question of whether he’s done his homework.
Mr. Obama knew the audience was wondering what could come from such meetings, except propaganda victories for thugs and a loss of prestige for America. He tried to mitigate the damage of his promised meetings. But the man who criticizes George W. Bush for unilateralism ended up denouncing a multilateral approach to Iran, saying it would “outsource the sustained work to our European allies.” …
David Warren says the terrible thing about the Steyn trial in Canada is not Mark’s problems, but the ones that don’t make the news.
… My own political education was provided in part by several impressive Czech exiles from communism, with whom I fell in as a young man. What I learned from them is that under an ideological regime, the best men live in jail, or are assigned to work in tanneries and collieries, where other good men may be found. The worst men live in luxury and power.
As free speech disappears in Canada, one looks, for instance, not at the more celebrated cases of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, but at the much less publicized fate of Rev. Stephen Boisson, convicted by an Alberta kangaroo court (“human rights tribunal”) last November for publicly expressing the Christian and Biblical view of homosexuality, on the say-so of an anti-Christian activist from his home town.
Rev. Boisson has now been ordered to desist from communicating his views on this subject “in newspapers, by e-mail, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet” so long as he should live. He has been ordered to pay compensation to Darren Lund, the anti-Christian activist in question, and further to make a public recantation of beliefs he still holds.
Meanwhile, Fr. Alphonse de Valk, editor of the magazine Catholic Insight, is being prosecuted by a gay rights activist in Edmonton, for having upheld both sides of the Catholic teaching on homosexuality in the pages of his magazine over more than a decade: that homosexual behaviour is sinful, but that we are nevertheless to love the sinner. …
Ann Coulter with a full-throated defense of W’s record.
In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised.
I generally don’t write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.
Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I’ll consider downgrading Bush from “Great” to “Really Good.”
Merely taking out Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons Uday and Qusay (Hussein family slogan: “We’re the Rape Room People!”) constitutes a greater humanitarian accomplishment than anything Bill Clinton ever did — and I’m including remembering Monica’s name on the sixth sexual encounter.
But unlike liberals, who are so anxious to send American troops to Rwanda or Darfur, Republicans oppose deploying U.S. troops for purely humanitarian purposes. We invaded Iraq to protect America.
It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That’s 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK — or a landmark building, for that matter.
We are, in fact, fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them at, say, the corner of 72nd and Columbus in Manhattan — the mere mention of which never fails to enrage liberals, which is why you should say it as often as possible. …
WaPo’s Jim Hoagland on Obama’s Jim Johnson mess.
Say this for Sen. Barack Obama: He is a lot quicker in these post-Jeremiah Wright days to walk away from controversy caused him by others. By the time he finished distancing himself from Jim Johnson, his former vice presidential vetter, Johnson must have felt like he was on Mars.
After Johnson was portrayed in the Wall Street Journal as having received favorable treatment from Countrywide Financial Corp., a mortgage company Obama has frequently attacked, the Democratic presidential candidate immediately labeled Johnson as being only “tangentially related to our campaign.”
Shifting into overdrive, Obama added that “these aren’t folks who are working for me,” referring to Johnson and his two associates on the vice presidential vetting team, Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder.
It was enough to make you wonder if the three had somehow broken into Obama’s office, stolen his letterhead stationery and appointed themselves to interview the capital’s good and great about who should join Obama on the Democratic ticket.
But that was not all. “First of all, I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages. . . . I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters.” He was equally dismissive of questions about Holder’s role in Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich.
Johnson got the message and yesterday announced his resignation from what I guess had become his non-job.
Jennifer Rubin with a couple of great Contentions posts summarizing the Jim Johnson flap.
… It is becoming easier to understand how Obama got swept into the orbit of Tony Rezko: he seems to lack basic common sense about the appearance of ethical improprieties and possesses the arrogance to believe no one will question his motives. It’s a deadly combination. As the Wall Street Journal editors put it:
As for Mr. Obama, Mr. Johnson now joins an intriguing and growing list of Mr. Obama’s ex-associates that includes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and former terrorist bomber William Ayers. We might call this list eclectic, except that there is a consistent pattern of bad judgment followed by an initial defense, then followed by rapid disassociation and regret that none of them were the men Mr. Obama “knew.” We can only wonder if Eric Holder, who is also among Mr. Obama’s veep vetters, will be the next to join this club. As Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, he played a role in the Marc Rich pardon that also deserves to be fully vetted – all the more so if Mr. Holder is on the short list to be Mr. Obama’s Attorney General.
And, finally, can you imagine the Clintons’ reaction–this is Mr. Clean-Hands-Pure-Heart? At least with Hillary Clinton expectations would have been low and a character like Johnson would have elicited only yawns.
Ed Morrissey gets his Jim Johnson swipes
It’s probably silly to waste ink or electrons on anything written by Madeline Albright, but her latest gets the full treatment from James Taranto.