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At the end of next week there will be happy news – pitchers and catchers report, and the baseball season starts anew. It was baseball that gave us Ladies Day, and we’ll celebrate with our own;
Noemie Emery on Caroline Kennedy
Jennifer Rubin on various subjects
Anne Bayefsky on UN rot
Debra Saunders on CA craziness
Dorothy Rabinowitz on Obama’s self regard
Star Parker on Obama priorities
Pickerhead’s # 4 daughter on getting organized
Melanie Kirkpatrick reviews book about Suzette Kelo
Our last day like this was Dec. 24th 2007. http://www.pickerhead.com/?p=633 Interestingly enough, Claudia Rosett was there talking about the UN’s plans for another trash Israel conference like Durban in 2001. Anne Bayefsky carries that torch with her offering today.
Noemie Emery is well qualified to give us the Caroline Kennedy back-story.
Political dynasties die in different ways, and the ends are not pretty. The Adamses eased themselves out by degrees, becoming more self-absorbed and less consequential over four generations. Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest son Ted made an effort to follow his father, but was displaced early on by his fifth cousin Franklin and sank into a bitterness that was relieved only when he returned to his first love, the Army, and died a great hero in the Second World War. His oldest son, as unsuited as he was for politics, was wooed in his turn by his state’s Republican party but bowed out when he discovered campaigns made him sick. Would this had happened to three of the sons of Franklin and Eleanor, who used public life to disparage their parents, becoming in the end such colossal embarrassments that no Roosevelt has since held high public office. But nothing can match what the Kennedys did over eight weeks this winter, when they torpedoed what may be their last hope for a comeback in a mishandled effort to regain their lost power. …
… On her own, she would not have been considered by anyone as an appointee to the Senate, but it was her identity as a Kennedy heir that made her valuable to family members most interested in extending their line: They wanted her back story and her standing as the rare Kennedy who was both scandal free and (more or less) above politics to stir public sentiment, quell opposition, and make it difficult for a Democratic governor in a Democratic state in which her uncle had served at the time of his murder to reject her appointment.
The evidence seems to suggest that this was not her idea, and that she was ambivalent, but that she finally succumbed to the burden of family duty. On December 3, she called Governor David Paterson expressing her interest in becoming the senator, and the game was on. …
… ”Caroline Kennedy would like to be a Senator. I don’t blame her. So would I!” Katha Pollitt wrote in the Nation. “Especially if Governor Paterson could just waft me into office, and I didn’t have to, um, you know, campaign.” If Marcus saw this as a fairy tale come true for America’s princess, others saw a toxic combination of very high powered money and muscle, masked by an effort to play on the family tragedies for all their political worth. “The forces behind Caroline . . . are too powerful and too well-heeled to be resisted,” said Joel Kotkin. In the New York Post, Fred Dicker warned Paterson, “Let’s just say there’ll be hell to pay from Uncle Teddy, Cousin Robert Jr., and a dozen other Kennedy family members . . . if you end up picking someone other than their current favorite to carry on the Camelot dream.”
Caroline’s candidacy enraged the dozen or more New York politicians who saw themselves as more than well-qualified for the job that she wanted, and mocked her as a know-nothing dilettante trying to trade on the family name; it became a nightmare in the life of the governor, who had been tempted to pick state attorney general Andrew Cuomo, son of the former governor, to get him out of the way as a possible rival for reelection. Now he had to choose between enraging the Kennedys (and Mayor Bloomberg) and enraging the Cuomos. As Dicker warned Paterson, “If you don’t offer [Cuomo] the Senate job, you’ll have delivered a major public humiliation to New York’s only statewide elected state official. . . . Not a good thing to do for a hard-driving guy who rides a Harley, hunts with a shotgun . . . and would like to follow in the footsteps of a father named Mario.”
As if to rub in all the more what it was she was doing, Caroline used as a principal spokesman her cousin Kerry, ex-wife of Andrew Cuomo, who had blown up the marriage five years earlier when she had an affair with one of his friends.
Caroline might have pulled all this off if she had charmed the press and the public, or wowed them with a dazzling display of depth on the issues. Instead, she bombed.
We couldn’t have Ladies Day without gobs of stuff from Jennifer Rubin. Here’s her take on the stimulus package.
… Well, then we will see just how assertive the President can be and how effective Rahm Emanuel is in corralling his former colleagues. And we will get a glimpse of Harry Reid’s statesmanship. Then we will see if they can put the spending genie back in the bottle. I tend to think they will fake it — try some cosmetic changes, remove some more egregious elements, and try to jam it through again. But Republicans, at least in the House, learned an important lesson last week: political courage, steady tone, and a principled stand can win praise. The President’s personal popularity does not earn him a pass with the American people. …
And the Daschle mess.
… And the President? He (along with Max Baucus) doubles down on Daschle and expresses his continued support. This merely heightens the nagging sense that he and his team have a tin-ear for corruption and venality. They, who marinated in the juices of Chicago, seem dense when it comes to this sort of thing. They didn’t know enough to stay away from Blago, nix Bill Richardson, stick to their own lobbyist rules, dump Geithner and now lose Daschle. And this comes from the campaign that ran against the Clintons and the Washington tradition of sleazy dealing. …
And the growing evidence of Obama’s cluelessness.
… President Obama wanted to keep his blackberry to prevent being sealed in the presidential bubble. Someone needs to email him — quick! — and urge him to stop underestimating how tuned in the American people are. If he keeps this up, he’ll tax the ability of the MSM to maintain the storyline that he is the smartest, savviest, least ideological president ever.
Anne Bayefsky continues the work of exposing the rot at the United Nations.
The United Nations “anti-racism” forum, known as Durban II, is becoming a more important test for President Obama’s multilateralist ambitions with each passing day. Durban I was the anti-Semitic hatefest that ended three days before 9/11. Durban II – the UN equivalent of the Son of Sam – will take place in April in Geneva. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has called on Obama not to legitimize the meeting, or its message, and not to attend. Canada has decided to stay away. But Obama has still not decided whether the United States will go. This Wednesday, however, the stakes got a lot higher with the UN’s release of the latest negotiating text.
Negotiators have now put on the table claims that (1) a homeland for the Jewish people is racism – a “racially based law of return,” (2) Israel is guilty of “apartheid” and (3) the veracity of the murder of one-third of the Jewish people during the Holocaust is subject to question. …
If you’ve ever wondered why California is broke, Debra Saunders’ piece on proposals to build seven hospitals at a total cost of 8 billion dollars for the CA prison system will provide some hints.
Dorothy Rabinowitz thinks Americans might get tired of Obama telling the world how terrible our country was BO (Before Obama).
… His view of America’s new position in the world — following the announcement of those orders — was amply clear, its tone familiar. America had entered upon a new day — we once were lost and now we’re found, a people restored to the paths of principle and honor. Hillary Clinton, speaking as secretary of state, would a few days later add her voice to the general thanksgiving for our rebirth, declaring, “There is a great exhalation of breath going on in the world.”
To hear Mr. Obama speak now on matters like the national defense is to recognize that the leader now in the White House is in every respect the person he seemed on the campaign trail: a man of immense moral certitude, prone to an abstract idealism, and pronouncements that range between the rational and the otherworldly.
That’s not counting the occasional touches of pure rubbish. Having, on the second day of his presidency, issued executive orders effectively undermining efforts to extract (from captured al Qaeda operatives) intelligence essential to the prevention of terror attacks — and in addition seriously hampering the prosecution of terrorist detainees — Mr. Obama argued that it was just by such steps that we strengthened our security. In his own words: “It is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world.”
What can this mean? What moral high ground, exactly, would have enabled us to deter the designs of the religious fanatics in search of martyrdom and the slaughter of as many Americans as possible on September 11? …
Star Parker has similar thoughts.
The Obama administration, completing its first full week, wasted no time getting priorities in order. First, issue formal apologies to the world, and then begin advancing massive, intrusive government at home.
The president chose Arab television, Al Arabiya, to give his first sit down interview. He took the opportunity to confirm the long held Arab view that the real problem is America and President Obama apologized on our behalf.
“…America was not born as a colonial power,” he told the Arab viewing audience – implying we are now. And he regretfully confessed that “We sometimes make mistakes. We are not perfect.”
Sorry, but weren’t we the ones that were attacked? Do we not stand in long lines and disrobe in airports because of them? Does anyone recall anywhere, anytime hearing apologies from any Arab or Muslim leader? …
Virginia Tech student, and Pickerhead’s number four daughter, wants you to think about getting organized.
… According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, there are almost 100,000 people currently awaiting transplants. And 18 people die everyday waiting for organs in America. While this is happening, tens of thousands of usable organs are buried or cremated each year.
The truth is none of us anticipate the worst happening to us.
Neither did Greg.
But because of a choice he made that he probably thought would never matter, four people are alive. And we shouldn’t take that decision lightly. Not only because it brings hope and joy to the harsh reality of death, but because we never know when one of those four lives could be one we want saved.
A good book is out on the most notorious Supreme Court ruling on the last few years; Kelo. Melanie Kirkpatrick reviews for the Journal.
Roughly 70% of Americans own their own homes, a statistic that goes a long way toward explaining why the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2005 in Kelo v. City of New London was so widely reviled. Before Kelo, most Americans probably took it for granted that their home was their castle, protected by the Constitution from arbitrary seizure by government. The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause says: ” . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
In Kelo, a majority of five justices came up with an extremely broad interpretation of “public use.” The high court’s four liberal members, joined by the ever-changeable Anthony Kennedy, ruled that government has the right to seize a private home for virtually any purpose — including handing it over to private developers.