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Besides Israel, Christopher Hitchens lists six more reasons why Iran can’t have nuclear weapons.
With Russia’s ever-helpful policy of assisting Iran to accelerate its reactor program, allied to the millimetrical progress of sanctions on the Ahmadinejad regime and the increasingly hopeless state of negotiations with the Palestinians, there is likely to be no let-up in the speculation about an Israeli “first strike” on Iran’s covert but ever-more-flagrant nuclear weapons installations. I have lost count of the number of essays and columns on the subject that were published this month alone. The most significant and detailed such contribution, though, came from my friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg in a cover story in the Atlantic. From any close reading of this piece, it was possible to be sure of at least one thing: The government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants it to be understood that, in the absence of an American decision to do so, Israel can and will mount such an attack in the not-too-distant future. The keyword of the current anguished argument—the word existential—is thought by a strategic majority of Israel’s political and military leadership to apply in its fullest meaning. To them, an Iranian bomb is incompatible with the long-term survival of the Israeli state and even of the Jewish people.
It would be a real pity if the argument went on being conducted in these relatively narrow terms. …
IBD editors review Thomas Sowell’s latest book.
Doomsters are a dime a dozen. But when a leading economist who’s been called “the nation’s greatest contemporary philosopher” sees serious trouble ahead, we’d better listen up.
Thomas Sowell’s 45th book, “Dismantling America,” is a collection of 100 of the Hoover Institution scholar’s best newspaper columns. For book purposes, they’re called essays — but they retain the brevity, clarity and simple profundity of the columns that have graced our “On The Right” column for years.
Like Sowell’s other books, they range over many political, economic, cultural and legal topics.
As a whole, they amount to a stern denunciation of America’s direction. Sowell sees the national equivalent of a “perfect storm,” a gathering of “dangerous forces (that) have been building .. . for at least a half-century.”
Yes, he says, our great nation has weathered many storms. But, he quickly notes, so did the Roman Empire before it collapsed. “Is that where America is headed?” Sowell asks upfront. “I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet — and that nothing is inevitable until it happens.”
Tunku Varadarajan has more thoughts on the Mosque Mess.
The November elections are very close to becoming—if they haven’t already so become—the first national elections in the United States whose results are determined by the location of a mosque. Call them, in fact, the “Mosque Elections.”
Forget health-care reform and unbridled stimulus spending; forget perceived errors in Iraq and Afghanistan; forget unemployment and our economy’s endless night; forget, if you can, the toxic questions of illegal immigration and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. If the promoters of the mosque near ground zero do not pack up their Korans and prayer mats within the next week or so, there is every danger that they will cause the Democrats grievous harm in November—in an election that is already one in which the Democrats are bracing for a rout.
And why is that? Because Barack Obama has made the mosque-near-ground zero an election issue, placing this house of Islamic worship bang-center on the electoral stage. …
Peter Wehner weighs in too.
… Prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues and one of the qualities that is most important for political leaders to have. It involves, among other things, the ability to anticipate the effects of one’s words and actions. What Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama have done is to undermine the very cause they say they are trying to defend. By implicitly and explicitly siding with Feisal Abdul Rauf’s effort and trying to turn this matter into a false debate about religious freedom, they are sharpening the divisions in our country in a way that is both unnecessary and harmful.
Well done, gentlemen.
The latest federal bail-out of state budgets had a poison pill attached. Editors of Las Vegas Review-Journal have the story.
President Obama and Congress sold their latest bailout of America’s public employees as an emergency measure needed to prevent the layoffs of 160,000 teachers.
“We can’t stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children,” the president said Tuesday.
Then news trickled out that the debt-growing legislation was a payday loan, not a charitable donation. Some $10 billion in federal handouts can’t be used to fill budget gaps created by recession-driven revenue shortfalls. No, the money must grow stretched education budgets, and as a condition of accepting the money, states must agree to maintain or increase education spending, as a percentage of total state revenues, next fiscal year.
It is, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said, a “federal government hijacking” of state budgets that will force lawmakers everywhere to raise taxes or slash spending elsewhere over the next year. …
According to a story in the LA Times, Ray Bradbury is a kindred soul.
… “I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury said. “There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”
The native of Waukegan, Ill., has never been shy about expressing himself — he described President Clinton with a word that rhymes with ”knithead” back in 2001 …
There is a breast cancer drug that costs $8,000 a month. That cost is part of the post by Ed Morrissey.
When Barack Obama and the Democrats spent most of a year pushing their deeply unpopular health-care system overhaul, they repeatedly insisted that government intervention in the market would not mean that treatment decisions would come down to cost issues — even while demonizing providers as Tonsil Vultures and amputation-happy predators. Today, however, the Washington Post reports on an effort at the FDA to decertify Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer and its implications for cost savings at Medicare:
“Federal regulators are considering taking the highly unusual step of rescinding approval of a drug that patients with advanced breast cancer turn to as a last-ditch hope.” …
A couple of pics from a photo essay on Russian fires in English Russia. The first is a dramatic scene at the front. The other is St. Basil’s which is at the southeastern edge of Red Square.