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Interesting juxtaposition of two items. First a London Times story from Niger about a successful suit by a former slave against the Niger government.
Hadijatou Mani was sold into slavery at the age of 12. She was beaten, raped and even imprisoned for bigamy after she married a man other than her “master”.
Astonishingly her story is not that rare in Niger, but now it has a happy ending. In an historic ruling that will resonate across West Africa, where slavery is still rife, Ms Mani won a landmark case yesterday against the Niger Government for failing to protect her.
“I am very happy with this decision,” Ms Mani, 24, told reporters outside an international court in neighbouring Nigeria. “Nobody deserves to be enslaved. We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same.”
The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) ordered Niger to pay Ms Mani 10 million CFA francs (£12,400) in compensation. The judgment was embarrassing for a government that said it had done all it could to eradicate slavery, but it offered hope for thousands of other men and women in the Sahel region.
The ruling sent a strong message to other governments that more needed to be done to set slaves free. Niger’s neighbours, Mali and Mauritania, are also known to turn a blind eye to the practice. Chad and Sudan, which are not members of Ecowas, also use slaves.
The case against Niger was brought with the help of the British organisation Anti-Slavery International (ASI) as a test case to pressure African governments to end slavery. …
And from Forbes, Abby Thernstrom covers the newest wrinkle in the efforts to gerrymander more safe minority house districts. We are on the eve of electing a black president, but the black grievance culture will be with us always.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to wade into the turbulent waters of partisan gerrymandering–districting maps drawn to the advantage of one political party or the other. But through the back door, civil rights groups are trying to get the court to force states to increase the number of safe Democratic districts.
The seemingly unlikely vehicle to accomplish this aim is a proposed reinterpretation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Bartlett v. Strickland, heard by the court on Oct. 14, is the case the Congressional Black Caucus and other advocates need to win to remake the statute into a Democratic Protection Act, in effect. …
David Harsanyi tells us what McCain-Feingold is worth.
… John McCain, one of the authors of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, has undermined his own campaign by taking “clean government” public funding and allowing Obama to outspend him, in some places 6 to 1.
One of the promises of the bill was to stop the rich and powerful from wielding inequitable influence. So now, instead of giving to Joe Schmo’s campaign, the rich contribute to Joe Schmo’s presidential library and Joe Schmo’s wife’s charity and independent 527s that love Joe Schmo. So almost nothing has changed. Almost.
“In terms of corruption, the era of McCain-Feingold is the era of Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, and, what was it, 70 or 90 thousand dollars in Congressman Jefferson’s refrigerator in his office,” Brad Smith, former head of the Federal Election Commission, told Reason magazine. “You could say that the era of McCain-Feingold is an era of corruption in American politics as great as we’ve seen since Watergate.”
Could anyone say there is less negativity in politics today? Is there any less money involved in campaigns? Is there any less corruption in Washington?
No. There is only less liberty.
David Warren wishes to amend something from two columns back.
One writes these columns to a specific word-length, and I sometimes regret the last-minute omission of some quibbling qualification, or supplementary jab, from the need to eliminate words quickly. A good example of the former was in my Saturday column, on messianic pretensions in politics. I said somewhat mischievously that if Barack Obama completed one presidential term, it would be his longest steady job.
When the column touched the blogosphere, innumerable U.S. Democrats challenged this assertion, and a gentleman in Chicago was so kind as to forward a summary transcript of Mr. Obama’s employment record at the University of Chicago, proving he had taught there for more than four years, continuously. Not a full-time job, but hey.
I’d rather retract that sentence for a different reason: it did not make my point well enough. My point — and it is one worth frequent repetition when discussing politicians, especially on the left — is that the citizen-voter should look at a candidate’s life experience. Everyone has some, by the age of four, but the question is whether the candidate has done anything as an adult besides running for and holding political office — or, in the case of candidates farthest left, engaging in agitprop activities such as “community organizer,” or boffering in the academic trenches, which amount to the same thing.
There are “credentials,” and then there is “cred.” It is sometimes necessary to shorten or otherwise alter a word, to recover its original meaning. Here we are discussing not a job resumé, but what can be seen through it.
Of the four candidates on the two U.S. presidential tickets, it strikes me that both John McCain and Sarah Palin have some credible personal background to equip them in dealing with the interface between politics and life. By comparison, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden has ever done anything much, except master party political machinery. …
Our first post from The Daily Beast. Dem speechwriter on why she’s for McCain.
… I was dead wrong about the surge and thought it would be a disaster. Senator John McCain led when many of us were ready to quit. Yet we march on as if nothing has changed, wedded to an old plan, and that too is a long way from the Democratic Party.
I can no longer justify what this party has done and can’t dismiss the treatment of women and working people as just part of the new kind of politics. It’s wrong and someone has to say that. And also say that the Democratic Party’s talking points—that Senator John McCain is just four more years of the same and that he’s President Bush—are now just hooker lines that fit a very effective and perhaps wave-winning political argument…doesn’t mean they’re true. After all, he is the only one who’s worked in a bipartisan way on big challenges.
Before I cast my vote, I will correct my party affiliation and change it to No Party or Independent. Then, in the spirit of election 2008, I’ll get a manicure, pedicure, and my hair done. Might as well look pretty when I am unemployed in a city swimming with “D’s.”
Whatever inspiration I had in Chapel Hill two years ago is gone. When people say how excited they are about this election, I can now say, “Maybe for you. But I lost my home.”
Mark Steyn has been serial posting at The Corner on disabling of credit card safeguards at the Obama campaign. We have a sampling.
As readers may recall, a couple of days ago it became clear that the Obama website had intentionally disabled all the basic credit-card-processing security checks and thereby enabled multiple contributions from donors with fake names. The excuse offered in the New York Times story was that, ah, yes, the Obama gang may appear to accept contributions from “Mr Fake Donor” of “23 Fraudulent Lane”, but all those phony baloney contributions are picked up by their rigorous offline checking procedures. As many Obama supporters wrote to point out, simply because you get a message saying “Thank you for contributing to the Obama landslide, Mr S Hussein of 47 Spider-Hole Gardens (basement flat), Tikrit!” is no reason to believe any real money is actually leaving real accounts.
The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names “John Galt”, “Saddam Hussein”, “Osama bin Laden”, and “William Ayers”, all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it’s worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all – multiple names using a single credit card number – the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor. …
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… Meanwhile, last week a reader made a donation to the Obama campaign under the name “Adolfe Hitler” (Don’t ask me why the “e”) of “#1 Reichstag Building, Berlin, Germany”, charging it to his Mastercard and is now getting welcome-to-the-big-change emails:
Dear Adolfe,
Thanks for joining this movement. It will take all of us working together to bring change to this country, and we wanted to make sure you know about all the opportunities to get involved in your community and online.
Check out the resources below — learn how you can connect with fellow supporters, organize in your neighborhood, build our national grassroots organization, and stay informed with the very latest campaign news. …
Ed Morrissey is on the trail too.
… There is only one reason to deliberately choose to bypass those security processes, and that’s to facilitate fraud. Team Obama claims that they vet the donations after the fact, but that’s hogwash. It costs far more to do that than to screen for security codes and address verification up front, and everyone knows it. Obama counts on the fact that most of the fraud will fly under the radar of its victims, and the only cost they’ll incur is when they have to process refunds after getting a specific complaint.
This is a key, revelatory moment about Obama and his team. They have deliberately chosen to make it easier for people to defraud the public so that they can ring up millions more in a campaign that has already broken records for fundraising. It’s unethical, dishonest, and dangerous — especially since these will be the same people with their hands on tax records if Obama wins this election.
In her Spectator, UK blog, Melanie Phillips gives her impressions of the media in our presidential campaign.
… For all Obama’s laid-back, attractive appearance this election is being fought in an atmosphere of menace. Menace in the way ACORN is intimidating voters into multiple registrations. Menace in the way criminal donations to the Obama campaign have been institutionalised. Menace in the serial lies being told by Obama, Biden and the campaign rebuttal team. Menace in the way the few remaining proper journalists such as Stanley Kurtz are finding sources of information shut down and themselves shut out when they attempt to probe Obama’s deeply dubious associations. Menace in the smears and hysterical abuse directed at anyone who questions The One. Menace in the threat of violence if Obama doesn’t win. Menace in the pre-emptive smear that the only thing that could bring about an Obama defeat is the inherent racism of the American voters – a smear that potentially identifies all those who vote against him as public enemies.
Over the past seven years, the media has created the Big Lie that America is the biggest rogue state in the world, with Israel its proxy. Now it is ensuring that a man who will act on that very premise to crush America and destroy Israel will be placed in the White House to do so. It is not just that the west’s Big Media can no longer be trusted. It has become the most important weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of the free world