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Jay Nordlinger blogs that the Obama administration is still apologizing to the world.
We, the United States, have been having human-rights talks with China. Our side is apparently led by Michael Posner, an assistant secretary of state. I will quote from an Associated Press report:
“Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about problems with U.S. human rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.
He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its [their?] own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.”
I hope I have read that incorrectly, or am interpreting it incorrectly. Did we, the United States, talking to a government that maintains a gulag, that denies people their basic rights, that in all probability harvests organs, apologize for the new immigration law in Arizona? Really, really? …
If anyone was questioning whether Hollywood is in touch with the rest of America, read Jim Hoft’s post in Gateway Pundit.
Woody Allen wants Barack Obama to be dictator for a few years so that he can completely socialize America. The article published today, May 15, 2010, did not make it into any English-language paper. …
And, the money quote:
“…sería bueno…si pudiera ser un dictador durante algunos años, porque podría hacer un montón de cosas buenas rápidamente.”
The translated quote:
“…it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”
Of course, this comes as a complete shock.
What is it with these leftist loons and their passion for socialist dictators?
Michael Barone asks why our government can’t state the obvious. Barone’s answer leaves us wanting, but his review is interesting.
If you want to watch someone squirm, take a look at the two-minute videotape of Attorney General Eric Holder dodging Republican Rep. Lamar Smith’s question whether “radical Islam” motivated the Times Square bomber.
Holder, who last year called America “a nation of cowards” for refusing to talk frankly about race, plainly didn’t want to say what is plain to everyone else, that Faisal Shahzad, back from five months in Waziristan, launched his terror attack because of his Islamist beliefs.
…Why the reluctance to state the obvious truth, that we are under attack from terrorists motivated by a radical form of Islam?
My theory is that these well-intentioned folk see the American people as a howling mob. They think that if Americans find out that Islamists are attacking us, they will go out and slaughter innocent Muslims. They think that Americans are incapable of understanding the simple truth that while most terrorists are Islamists, the large majority of Muslims are not terrorists. …
Investor’s Business Daily Editors say it’s time for a new Attorney General.
…Just this week, Steve Emerson’s respected Investigative Project on Terrorism noted with concern that terrorist experts have detected a shift in terrorists’ attention — from weak spots overseas to the U.S. homeland. It’s only a matter of time.
Even so, there was Holder, in congressional testimony last week, virtually unable to make his mouth form the words “radical Islam” when queried if that was behind the recent upswing in terrorism. It is, of course, but the White House refuses to say so.
Anyone with a normal ration of common sense and intelligence can see that radical Islam is a serious problem. Why can’t Holder?
…By his own admission, Holder’s decision making is driven by politics — not by concerns for the Constitution or public safety. Rule of law depends on a nonpolitical attorney general. Holder must go.
In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes on a glimmer of hope in Philadelphia. Some people who otherwise are certifiable liberals are backing school vouchers.
…Three months ago, the executive committee of ADL’s Philadelphia chapter voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution endorsing vouchers. Now it is urging the entire organization to follow suit.
“We believe school choice to be an urgent civil rights issue,’’ the committee argued in a brief being circulated among ADL’s 30 regional offices. Despite decades of increased spending on K-12 education, “the evidence that our public education system is failing to educate our children is staggering.’’ ADL should reverse its longtime position “as a moral imperative,’’ the Philadelphia leadership urges, and “issue a resolution in favor of school choice.’’
As it happens, the ADL regional board isn’t the only liberal voice in Philadelphia calling for expanded school choice. State Senator Anthony Williams, a black Democrat and a candidate in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial primary this week, is the founder of a charter school, a champion of vouchers, and an ardent believer in the power of competition to improve the quality of education. His position puts him sharply at odds with the state’s largest teachers’ union, which opposes choice and has endorsed his main opponent. But Williams — like the local ADL leadership — sees school choice as the great civil rights battle of the day.
“Anybody who was for Brown v. Board of Education — it baffles me that they would be against vouchers,’’ he told me last week. “Brown condemned schools that were separate and unequal. Well, that’s exactly what we’re back to now — schools that are segregated by income, by ZIP code, by race.’’ …
In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has an amazing article on how the NY Times reports crime in New York City. We highlight the positive part of the article. How liberals are trying to mess this up constitutes the rest of the story.
…The proactive policing revolution that began under NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994 declared that the police would actually lower crime—an unheard-of idea in the annals of policing. To accomplish that feat, the department began rigorously scrutinizing crime data on a daily basis and deploying officers to crime hot spots. Once there, officers were expected to be on the look-out for suspicious behavior. If there had been a string of robberies at ATMs in East Flatbush, for example, and an officer saw two guys apparently casing an ATM user from across the street, who then walked quickly away when they spotted the uniform, the officer was expected to stop and question the two men. If thieves had been preying on senior citizens in Harlem, someone walking closely behind a retiree in the 28th precinct and looking furtively over his shoulder would likely be stopped by an officer deployed there in response to the crime spike. Those stops may not have resulted in an arrest, if no evidence of a crime were found, but they may have disrupted a crime in the making.
This data-driven, proactive style of policing, which came to be known as Compstat, led to the largest crime drop in recent memory. The biggest returns were in New York’s minority neighborhoods, because that’s where crime was and still is the highest. Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79 percent of the 78 percent decline in homicide victims since 1990. Over 10,000 black and Hispanic males are alive today who would have been dead had homicide rates remained at early 1990s levels. …
Robert Samuelson discusses how to deal with US budget issues, from the political center.
…In a classroom, limiting government debt in relation to GDP can be defended. The idea is to reassure investors (a.k.a. “financial markets”) that the debt burden isn’t becoming heavier so they will continue lending at low interest rates. But in real life, the logic doesn’t work. Governments inevitably face deep recessions, wars or other emergencies that require heavy borrowing. To stabilize debt to GDP, you have to aim much lower than the target in good times, meaning that you should balance the budget (or run modest surpluses) after the economy has recovered from recessions. …
…The virtue of balancing the budget is that it forces people to weigh the benefits of government against the costs. It’s a common-sense standard that people intuitively grasp. If the Deficit Commission is serious, it will set a balanced budget in 2020 as a goal, allowing time to phase in benefit cuts and tax increases. It will then invite think tanks (from the Heritage Foundation on the right to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the left) and interest groups (from the Chamber of Commerce to AARP) to present plans to reach that goal. Their competing visions could jump-start a long-overdue debate on government’s role. …
Historian H.W. Brands, in Forbes, writes about a time when America rebounded from bleak economic conditions.
Amid the current uncertainty about America’s future, it might be useful to recall a time when the country really was in trouble. At the end of the Civil War the nation was a wreck. The economy of the South had capsized, with billions of dollars of “property” erased upon the freeing of the slaves. Towns and cities had been burned and wide swaths of countryside ravaged. A large part of the labor force of the North had been drawn into the military, depriving shops and farms of their workers. The federal debt had quadrupled in just four years, reaching the unprecedented level of nearly a third of GDP. The financial crisis had forced the federal government off the gold standard; fiat greenbacks drove gold dollars into hiding. The country was deeply in debt to foreign lenders, who held the nation’s economic fate in their hands.
Things got worse. Speculators warred for control of railroads, deranging share prices and rail traffic. A cabal of financiers in 1869 tried to corner the gold market and nearly succeeded, panicking Wall Street in the process. In 1873 Jay Cooke & Co., the firm that had sold the bonds that kept the Union afloat during the war, went bust, triggering the worst panic yet and plunging the nation into its first full-blown industrial depression.
The country had nowhere to go but up.
And it did, during the final quarter of the 19th century, thanks to a revolutionary amalgam of technique, technology, geography and demography. …