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The LA Times has a story from Warsaw that took place at the start of World War II.
She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name.
She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper.
Natalie Yazinska.
Her mother, Sima, sobbed.
“The little one must make it,” Leon Weinstein told his wife. “We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive.”
He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: “I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this.”
A cold wind cut at the skin that December morning, so Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.
He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us. …
Back to our time as the IBD editors celebrate the win over Wisconsin’s modern day Nazis. Think that is too strong? They don’t like secret ballots. They intimidate people by showing up at their homes. They occupy buildings in defiance of the law. etc. etc. …
Unions’ failure to recall four Republican state senators shows that their days of power through intimidation are over. If this was a rehearsal for 2012, the White House should start making other plans.
The natives are still restless, the pitchforks sharp and the Walker revolution safe. Portrayed by union leaders as an aberration fueled by a generic voter wrath against incumbents, the GOP grab of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature and the governor’s office in 2010 was predicted to fade once voters realized “workers’ rights” were at risk.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the polling booth, that shrine to the secret ballot so anathema to union leaders. Voters decided they liked a limited government that said there are things we just can’t afford. They also liked the idea that taxpayers had rights and could and should control how their money is spent.
It didn’t help the union cause when the city of Milwaukee announced it will save at least $25 million a year — and potentially as much as $36 million in 2012 — from health care benefit changes it didn’t have to negotiate with unions, as a result of provisions in a 2009-11 budget-repair measure that ended most collective bargaining for public-sector unions. …
Charles Krauthammer says forget the left’s claim that DC is broken. The system is working.
Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today’s Washington, the most lazy, stupid, and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken. On the contrary. Our political system is working well (I make no such claims for our economy), indeed, precisely as designed — profound changes in popular will translated into law that alters the nation’s political direction.
The process has been messy, loud, disputatious, and often rancorous. So what? In the end, the system works. Exhibit A is Wisconsin. Exhibit B is Washington itself.
The story begins in 2008. The country, having lost confidence in Republican governance, gives the Democrats full control of Washington. The new president, deciding not to waste a crisis, attempts a major change in the nation’s ideological trajectory. Hence his two signature pieces of legislation: a near–$1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in galactic history; and a health-care reform that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control.
In a country where conservatives outnumber liberals 2–1, this causes a reaction. …
Want to know more about Rick Perry? Toby Harnden traveled to West Texas to check our the origins of the GOP’s latest candidate.
So I decided to follow Paul Burka’s advice (See Pickings – July 28) and head down to Paint Creek, Texas, where Governor Rick Perry – due to announce his White House run on Saturday – grew up. It was an absolutely fascinating trip to West Texas (the 108-degree heat notwithstanding) and my news feature for the Telegraph can be found here.
Before George W. Bush was elected president, I made a similar journey to Midland, also in West Texas, where the then Lone State governor had spent his youth (the resultant post-election piece is still on the interweb here). But Bush, of course, was a scion of a patrician New England clan and was educated at Andover and Yale while Perry is Texas and Paint Creek through and through.
Despite the superficial similarities between the two (cowboy boots and a certain Texas braggadocio) the two men (who are said to have frosty relations) are very different.
But if the contrasts between Perry and Bush are strong, just think of those between Perry and Obama – you could not get two more dissimilar American life stories.
Harnden shares more of what he learned in West Texas.
… “There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church, and Boy Scouts,” Mr Perry said last year, looking back on the late 1950s. “That’s it. And it was plenty.” Paint Creek was “one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate” depending on the weather. As a child, he ventured, it was the home of “some of the most principled, disciplined people in the world, and faithful”.
Back in the late 1950s, he was known as Ricky Perry, a mischievous boy, always smiling, who lived with his parents and older sister Milla in a rented wooden house that lacked indoor plumbing. He wore a cowboy shirt hand sewn by his mother, a locally renowned quilter, and his highest ambition seemed to be to become an Eagle Scout.
Now 61 and governor of Texas since 2000, Mr Perry is the longest-serving chief executive of the state in its history and a man who has held elected office for almost 27 years. This weekend, he is expected to announce a bid for the American presidency, an office that until recently he had steadfastly maintained held no attraction for him.
Thus far, Mr Perry’s life has been characterised by uncanny good fortune and an ability to seize an opportunity and capitalise on it.
He left the Democratic Party in 1989 to run as a Republican against a prominent liberal who was the strong favourite to keep his post as Texas Agriculture Commissioner.
In 2000, he was a little-known lieutenant governor who was automatically elevated to the state’s top post when George W. Bush won the presidency. …
Democracy in America Blog has a bit on Perry.
… Can he win? I think he has a very good chance. In my view, he is a shrewd politician and not as much of a far-right ideologue as people tend to think. I’ve elaborated on that here, and gathered some of my recent takes on Mr Perry here. Our Lexington columnist also took a look at the governor last month, and concluded that a Perry-Obama general election “would offer an invigorating choice between different visions of America’s future.” I think that’s right. We’ll see how it goes. For now, I’ll just say that rivals who misunderestimate him do so at their peril.
James Pethokoukis has more.
Congratulations to Michele Bachmann, but the big political winner Saturday wasn’t in Ames, Iowa. That politician was half a country away in South Carolina, completely scrambling the Republican presidential race.
1) Online betting markets have already decided that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is no flash in the Panhandle — another Fred Thompson or Wesley Clark who sparks a flurry of interest but quickly fades. To bettors, it’s a two-horse race and a dead heat between Perry and Mitt Romney. But anyone listening to Perry’s well delivered, muscular, high-energy speech in Charleston, S.C., would probably draw the same political conclusion. He hit tea party-friendly themes and hit them well:
“The change we seek will never emanate out of Washington…it must come from the windswept prairies of Middle America…the farms and factories across this great land…the hearts and minds of God-fearing Americans who will not accept a future that is less than our past…who will not be consigned a fate of less freedom in exchange for more government. … And I will work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your lives as I can.” …
… Assuming no other heavy hitters join the race. Perry-Romney is shaping up to be an epic brawl between two aggressive candidates with impressive resumes, both able to raise boats loads of campaign cash. Let the Austin-Boston battle begin.