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Don’t forget, Monday is Kelo Day at the Institute for Justice.
David Warren reduces Israel’s current problem to one simple right, that of self-defense.
It will be recalled, by readers who follow world news, that the President of Iran has on many occasions unambiguously declared both the desire to annihilate Israel, and the expectation that Israel will soon be annihilated. It will also be recalled, that on the balance of evidence, the Iranian state has been working assiduously to acquiring the means for this act of genocide. Iran is in direct defiance of UN resolutions to stop enriching uranium, and playing Saddam-like games with UN inspectors.
If a man were threatening to kill you, and declaring that you will soon be dead, while reaching for a gun, I think most readers would allow you were within your rights to kick that gun out of his reach. …
Watching Obama throw campaign finance reform under a bus, David Brooks compares the two Obamas we have seen so far.
… The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.
I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.
All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.
Mark Shields, the liberal pundit on PBS ripped into Obama. Ed Morrissey with details.
Dick Morris points out Obama’s fatal prosecutorial flaw.
In an ABC interview on Monday, Sen. Barack Obama urged us to go back to the era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
It was key to his attack on the Bush administration, which he charged, has “been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution . . . It is my firm belief that we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. . .
“In previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.”
This is big — because that prosecution, and the ground rules for it, had more to do with our inability to avert 9/11 than any other single factor.
Because we treated the 1993 WTC bombing as simply a crime, our investigation was slow, sluggish and constrained by the need to acquire admissible evidence to convict the terrorists. …
David Harsanyi on the Marines slimed by John Murtha.
Now that foreign terrorist suspects have the right to habeas corpus, maybe U.S. Marines will be extended the courtesy of a trial before being smeared as cold-blooded murders.
A surprising number of Americans are eager to believe the worst about our fighting men and women. In the case of the infamous Haditha “massacre,” their motives are transparently political, ugly and deceitful.
The Haditha story — reminiscent of some twisted Oliver Stone fantasy — was first reported by Time magazine. According to reports, Marines were allegedly involved in a firefight on Nov. 19, 2005, murdering 24 civilians in retribution for a roadside bombing that killed a fellow Marine.
For power-hungry Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha, the tide of negative public opinion on Iraq made Haditha the perfect self-serving political opportunity. After all, other than being the focus of corruption investigations, Murtha had never been bequeathed such extravagant attention. And when Murtha, a former Marine, spoke about Haditha, he spoke with certitude — and the national headlines mirrored it. …
American Spectator reminds us how much we owe Tim Russert.
Polls in late October showed Sen. Hillary Clinton comfortably leading the Democratic presidential field. For all his talk of “hope” and “change,” Sen. Barack Obama was trailing Hillary by ten points in the most recent Iowa poll, and the “inevitability” argument was still on the side of the front-running former First Lady.
And then Tim Russert asked a simple question.
“Senator Clinton, Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has proposed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants,” the NBC host said in an Oct. 30 Democratic debate at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. “You told the Nashua, New Hampshire editorial board it makes a lot of sense. Why does it make a lot of sense to give an illegal immigrant a driver’s license?”
Those three sentences — 46 words — arguably transformed the entire campaign. Clinton’s initial answer was evasive, saying that Spitzer’s plan was an attempt to “fill the vacuum” created by the failure of Congress to enact “comprehensive immigration reform.” …
AdamSmith.org reminds us of the benefits of failure. Joseph Schumpeter of “creative destruction” fame would approve.
Capitalism is based on failure. But that’s no problem, since life is based on failure. That’s the view of Professor Paul Ormerod, who outlined the idea at an Economic Research Council meeting I attended in London.
Ormerod points out that over 99.99% of all known species are dead. And roughly 10% of all US companies disappear each year too. …
Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage” had done endless mischief. Michael Medved notes our American version.
Political correctness portrays untamed America before European invasion as a natural paradise, where Indians maintained an exquisite ecological balance, living in a harmonious, idyllic relationship to the natural world. According to conventional wisdom, this pre-Columbian Eden flourished for peaceful millenia until brutal disruption by thoughtless, menacing and mercenary white colonists. Stewart Udall, one-time Arizona Congressman and later Secretary of the Interior for President Kennedy, became an early advocate of this point of view in his influential 1973 article, “Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists,” urging modern citizens to follow the native example of treating the landscape with love and respect.
Udall’s arguments received powerful support from the popularization of the moving speech of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish elder who addressed a meeting in 1854 in the raw settlement in Washington Territory that ultimately took his name. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people,” Seattle supposedly told his listeners. “Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.” Later, the aged sage assaulted the insensitive ways of the new arrivals. “There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities,” he lamented. “The clatter only seems to insult the ears…I’ve seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a train.”
Actually, it’s unlikely that Chief Seattle ever saw even a single buffalo, either rotting or otherwise, or ever looked at a train for that matter, since buffalo never lived in his verdant corner of the Pacific Northwest, and railroads (along with “the clatter” of white the man’s cities) only arrived several decades after the alleged speech. His poetic remarks (immortalized in a bestselling children’s book, “Brother Eagle, Sister Sky”) represent an internationally influential hoax– a more or less whole-cloth invention by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a now-forgotten 1972 TV documentary, based very, very loosely on an account in a Seattle newspaper (twenty years after the kindly chief’s death) of a real talk he may (or may not) have delivered in his largely indecipherable native language to the drenched but respectful pioneers. …
Jim Taranto notes another global warming hoax.
Remember Alan Sokal? He’s the physicist who, in 1996, submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text in which he claimed that “physical ‘reality,’ ” including gravity, “is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” The whole thing was a hoax aimed at exposing postmodernism as fundamentally nonsensical.
It appears global warmism has found its Alan Sokal, a man named Tom Chalko. Our friends at NewsBusters.org note a story that appeared on both the CBS News Web site and MSNBC claiming that global warming causes the earth to move: …