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• Pickings :: May 27, 2007 (word)

• Pickings :: May 27, 2007 (pdf)

Joseph Skelly, history prof and army reserve officer, writes about Memorial Day in National Review.

… let us honor those who have defended our right to self-government with their last breaths. We can do so on Memorial Day by attending to their families. We have a moral obligation to comfort those who bear the brunt of the suffering, pain, and grief of our age. Let us reach out to them, with humility.

One day, history will judge our decisions to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has already judged the democratic fallen — as champions not just of our time, but of all time. The same holds true for their families. Perhaps this Memorial Day, as our nation honors the sacrifices of their sons and daughters, they can find consolation in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, who so poignantly said in his Second Inaugural, as our bitter Civil War consumed all in its path, “the Almighty has his own purposes.”

 

Mark Steyn, an immigrant to our country, tells the story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

… Henry Steele Commager called it “the one great song to come out of the Civil War, the one great song ever written in America.”

Whether or not that’s true, most of us understand it has a depth and a power beyond most formal national songs. When John F Kennedy was assassinated, Judy Garland insisted on singing it on her TV show – the producers weren’t happy about it, and one sneered that nobody would give a damn about Kennedy in a month’s time. But it’s an extraordinary performance. Little more than a year later, it was played at the state funeral of Winston Churchill at St Paul’s Cathedral. Among those singing it was the Queen. She sang it again in public, again at St Paul’s, for the second time in her life at the service of remembrance in London three days after September 11th 2001. That day, she also broke with precedent and for the first time sang another country’s national anthem – “The Star-Spangled Banner”. But it was Julia Ward Howe’s words that echoed most powerfully that morning as they have done since she wrote them in her bedroom in Washington 140 years earlier:

As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.

 

Back to the “I” bill. Yuval Levin has a thoughtful post in Contentions.

… In the current issue of COMMENTARY, I discuss why reforms to the legal immigration system (together with improvements in our approach to the assimilation of immigrants) matter more than what we do about the status of illegal immigrants, and I try to show how such reforms can help us remain a society that welcomes and appreciates immigrants. But these reforms are clearly secondary in the bill.

Washington has to take this issue up in the way the American public understands the problem—as a problem of respect for the law and of our future as a nation that can successfully integrate newcomers. Instead, the President and Congress have presented it in the most divisive way possible—treating the lawbreaker, not the law, as in need of protection.

A bill that included only the border-protection and legal-immigration reforms of the new proposal could be a unifying measure. But by assigning top priority to normalization, the new bill will only exacerbate concerns about immigration—and about the ability of our leaders to understand the public’s concerns. It has done serious damage to the prospects for meaningful change.

 

Instapundit says one of the big troubles with the I bill is the shabby way that people who want to come here legally are treated. He brings back one of his posts from January 2006 to explain. It is always worth remembering the bureaucrats who will be tasked with enforcing this new legislation. Since they are not equal to the job of preventing illegals, they justify their existence by making life miserable for people who try to follow the law.

 

Thomas Sowell writes his third piece on the bill.

… One of the remarkable aspects of the proposed immigration “reform” is its provisions for cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Employers are to be punished for not detecting and excluding illegal immigrants, when the government itself is derelict in doing so.

Employers not only lack expertise in law enforcement, they can be sued for “discrimination” by any of the armies of lawyers who make such lawsuits their lucrative specialty.

But no penalties are likely to be enforced against state and local politicians who openly declare “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. Officials sworn to uphold the law instead forbid the police to report the illegal status of immigrants to federal officials when these illegals are arrested for other crimes.

This is perfectly consistent for a bill that seeks above all to solve politicians’ problems, not the country’s.

 

 

Michael Gerson, former W speech writer uses his bi-weekly WaPo column to talk it up.

 

Power Line doesn’t like Gerson’s attitude.

 

John Fund gives us a peak at two new Hillary books.

 

Jeff Jacoby starts off the Carter section.

… It took Americans only four years to realize what a disaster Carter had been; they booted him out in 1980 by a 44-state landslide. …

 

IBD’s fourth Carter editorial.

… the former peanut farmer, who, on taking office, declared that advancing “human rights” was among his highest priorities. The shah was one of his first targets. As he’s done with our terror-war detainees in Guantanamo, Carter accused the Shah of torturing some 3,000 “political” prisoners. He chastised the shah for his human rights record and engineered the withdrawal of American support.

The irony here is that when Khomeini, a former Muslim exile in Paris, overthrew the shah in February 1979, many of the 3,000 were executed by the ayatollah’s firing squads along with 20,000 pro-Western Iranians.

According to “The Real Jimmy Carter,” a book by Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute: “Kho-meini’s regime executed more people in its first year in power than the Shah’s Savak had allegedly killed in the previous 25 years.” …

 

Power Line and Roger Simon with some campaign shorts.

 

Three good posts from Jim Taranto.

 

Something new on London’s skyline. WSJ with details.

 

Three great posts from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem.

 

NewsBiscuit says not only can’t Prince Harry serve in Iraq, he can’t serve in the royal family either.

Prince Harry will not be allowed to take up his position in the Royal Family, it was finally announced today. A spokesman for Buckingham Palace told a press conference that Harry’s inclusion would represent a ‘significantly increased risk’ to the future and respectability of the monarchy. …

 

Scrappleface explains Barack’s and Hillary’s votes against funds for the war.