In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby responds to Al Gore’s recent opinion piece in the New York Times, where he continued his warnings of “unimaginable calamity” if we don’t take drastic steps to reduce human-based sources of “global-warming pollution.” (Gore himself happens to have invested enormously in carbon-offset schemes and other “green” ventures that are likely to thrive only with the kinds of government mandates he promotes.) [Read more →]
Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the terrorist group Hamas. He has recently told his story of both embracing Christianity and serving as a spy for Israel. He now lives in San Diego, California, and has been disowned by his father. He was interviewed for the Wall Street Journal by Matthew Kaminski.
Do you consider your father a fanatic? “He’s not a fanatic,” says Mr. Yousef. “He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don’t want to admit this is an ideological war.
“The problem is not in Muslims,” he continues. “The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to.”
Yousef has written his story in a book titled Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices.
With President Obama and the Democrats willing to use the reconciliation process in an attempt to by-pass their loss of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the focus is now on the House of Representatives. Despite optimistic stories in the press and Nancy Pelosi’s braggadocio, getting the House to pass the Senate bill in advance of reconciliation is going to be a steep and hopefully impossible mountain to climb. As Jeffrey Anderson writes in the Weekly Standard, nine Democrats who supposedly are considering switching their former “no” votes to “yes” have some awfully good reasons not to do so. And further:
An even bigger problem for the Democrats than somehow turning these members around is the strong likelihood that many other members are salivating at the thought of switching their votes to “no” and saving their careers. Clark Judge writes, “‘Blue Dogs want health care to come up again,’” said a long-time veteran of the House in a closed door briefing last Monday. ‘So they can vote against it.’”
From the LA Times: Justices signal they’re ready to make gun ownership a national right.
Most of the Supreme Court justices who two years ago said the 2nd Amendment protects individual gun rights signaled during arguments Tuesday that they are ready to extend this right nationwide and to use it to strike down some state and local gun regulations.
Since 1982, Chicago has outlawed handguns in the city, even for law-abiding residents who sought to keep one at home. That ordinance was challenged by several city residents who said it violated their right “to keep and bear arms” under the 2nd Amendment.
[...]
All signs Tuesday were that five justices saw the right to “bear arms” as national in scope and not limited to laws passed in Washington.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy described the individual right to possess a gun as being of “fundamental character,” like the right to freedom of speech. “If it is not fundamental, then Heller is wrong,” Kennedy said, referring to the decision two years ago that struck down the handgun ban in the District of Columbia. Kennedy was part of the 5-4 majority in that case.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called it an “extremely important” right in the Constitution. Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. echoed the theme that the court had endorsed an individual, nationwide right in their decision two years ago. The fifth member of the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas, did not comment during the argument, but he had been a steady advocate of the 2nd Amendment.
Well, it will be months before there is a decision here, and part of my breath will be held until this incredibly important ruling is actually issued, but, I must say, this is highly pleasurable stuff to contemplate.
Unfortunately, yes — it’s Frank Rich. His latest column in the New York Times (“The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged”) has all the hallmarks of offhand vituperation and contempt that we’ve come to expect from the butcher of Broadway. Ron Radosh takes on some of his distortions in a fine response: Frank Rich: An Embarrassment to the New York Times.
In Sunday’s New York Times, its far-left shotgun columnist Frank Rich has written a column with the title “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged,” which is ironic, since the title so well describes most of his own articles! In a paper whose editors think of themselves as moderates or centrists, but in which most of the columnists and many of the news stories tilt so far to the Left that it approximates the style and contents of the 60’s Village Voice, Rich stands out as the most extreme of their writers.
This time he goes after the tea party movement, and instead of a nuanced and balanced appraisal, he begins by trying to blame the murder suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, who flew his small plane into a building housing an IRS division in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 18th, on the new movement. Rich ignores what we know about Mr. Stack. He was furious about IRS rules that prohibited him from using knowledge he had as a software engineer to start his own business. In his rambling, sometimes incoherent letter, Stack attacks “organized religion” and different laws for the rich rather than the poor (standard leftist boilerplate), and goes after the late “neo-con” Senator Daniel P. Moynihan as his arch villain, all targets that distinguish him a great deal from today’s tea party advocates. George W. Bush, whom certainly Frank Rich did his share of attacking for months on end, is described by Stack as “the presidential puppet” of the rich who pull the strings.
Tea partier indeed! Oh, Rich covers himself by writing that he was obviously “a lone madman,” and that it would be “glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying tea partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.’” But then Rich, having made the accusation while pretending to disavow it, goes on to say that his manifesto is a “frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage” that “overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.” In other words, he was not formally a tea party member or advocate, but nevertheless well might have been because he shares their views! A distinction without a difference!
Read the rest.
Rich Lowry makes some great observations on the reaction of the American electorate to this past year of the Obama presidency and Democratic control in Washington that are not at all incompatible with my own from the other day (Rights versus “Benefits”). Lowry writes:
President Barack Obama learned from Bill Clinton’s mistakes in 1993-94. He ran, relative to Clinton, a buttoned-up transition. He sought to avoid Clinton’s tactical miscues on health care. And he steered clear of cultural land mines.
The backlash against Democrats in 1994 was famously attributed to “gays, guns and God.” Obama has mostly avoided stoking opposition around that hot-button triad, but faces a backlash almost indistinguishable in feel and intensity. Why?
Big government became a cultural issue. The level of spending, the bailouts and the intervention in the economy contemplated in health-care reform and cap-and-trade created the fear that something elemental was changing in the country — quickly, irrevocably, without notice.
Obama has run up against the country’s cultural conservatism as surely as Clinton did. But Obama is encountering its fiscal expression, the sense that America has always been defined by a more stringently limited government than other advanced countries. It’s an “American exceptionalism” backlash.
On another blog I just picked the album From Langley Park to Memphis
Here’s something to dwell upon
Now we’re living, next we’re gone
So if you’ve love please pass it on
’Cos it’s a disbelieving world
But sensitive as any girl …
According to Miss Manners:
Family dinner is a quaint old ritual by which everybody in the same household would gather nightly at a specific time, rather than each head for the microwave when hungry; sit around a table, rather than stand in front of an open refrigerator; share the same food, rather than argue for competing standards of nutrition, taste and morality; and be entertained by one another’s conversation, rather than by that of celebrities on television. Without in the least minimizing the demands of work, homework and working out, Miss Manners nevertheless argues that the chief ritual that binds family and civilization is sacrificed at too great a personal and social cost.
Indeed.
From Judith Martin’s book, Miss Manners’ Basic Training: Eating.
A good thing of which to take note, I would think.
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.
That’s C.S. Lewis (or rather, his character, Uncle Screwtape) from his remarkable book, The Screwtape Letters.
In the news from Ireland: Vomiting bug forces visitor restrictions at several hospitals.
Strict visitor restrictions are in place at a number of hospitals across the country due to outbreaks of the vomiting bug. [Read more →]
