From The New York Post Editorial Page:
BUSHIES BETRAY FREE SPEECH
Why did the Bush administration need to insert itself into the increasingly violent worldwide protests by Muslims upset by the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed?
And, having chosen to issue an opinion, why did the administration take a position that is, frankly, shameful and wholly antithetical to the basic freedoms that Americans hold dear?
Even as European and Asian leaders appealed for calm and understanding in the wake of escalating violence, the State Department yesterday came out foursquare in support of the demonstrators — and condemned the "offensive" cartoons.
"These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims," said department spokesman Kurtis Cooper. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility."
He'd have done better to call instead for respect for freedom of the press, rather than kowtow to rampaging mobs attempting to intimidate newspapers worldwide.
We don't doubt that many Muslims consider the caricatures, originally published in a Danish newspaper and later reprinted by other European papers in a show of free-press solidarity, offensive; Islamic law prohibits any physical portrayal of Mohammed.
But the 12 images in question — one showed the prophet wearing a bomb for a turban — are pretty benign, particularly when compared to the anti-American and anti-Jewish tripe that regularly appears in Arab-language news media.
As Roger Koeppel, editor of the German paper Die Welt, noted: "When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were silent."
Someone in the administration must have considered this a perfect opportunity to score some sensitivity points by sending a pointed reminder that the United States is waging war against terrorism, not the religion of Islam.
If so, it was a bad idea — because the State Department has, in effect, endorsed terrorism by expressing sympathy for the motives behind the current onslaught.
Sad to say, several European leaders also are caving in to the demands by Muslim leaders that someone "be held responsible." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw — whose government was forced this week to water down a bill banning incitement to religious hatred — criticized those papers that reprinted the cartoons, saying, "there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory."
A notable exception is Denmark — where Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared, "A Danish government can never apologize on behalf of a free and independent newspaper."
Again, this is a situation where an official reaction from Washington was unnecessary. But, having decided to go public, the administration should have shown some backbone.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Friday, February 03, 2006
From USA Today:
From church pew to recording studio
By Ken Barnes, USA TODAY
Alan Jackson wanted to surprise his mother for Christmas. Now he has the surprise album release of the new year.
Jackson originally recorded his CD of gospel music with just two fans in mind: his mom and his mother-in-law.
"I got a phone call from Alan's manager, saying he was going to do a recording of gospel songs for his mom," says RCA Label Group/Nashville chairman Joe Galante. "He was just going to make a CD copy for her. I said I'd love to hear it."
Jackson says: "It was something I wanted to do. My mom just wore me out, asking me to do some of the songs I heard in the Baptist church growing up, and my wife, Denise, asked me (to do some for her mother). I had all this pressure from the women in my life. But actually I loved these songs and was looking for an opportunity to do it. We just did a simple record, piano, acoustic guitar, harmony vocals."
Jackson surprised his mother, Ruth, with a copy at Christmas, and "she flipped out." So did Galante.
"Alan made it for Denise's mom and his mom. Unfortunately, he sent me a copy," Galante jokes.
"When I heard it I said, 'We want to release this.' It sounds like Alan recorded it in a church, it's so intimate and emotional."
Tracks on the record, titled Precious Memories and due Feb. 28, include such gospel standards as The Old Rugged Cross, How Great Thou Art and I'll Fly Away. Jackson says, "All the songs are songs we sang in church all my life. Those hymns are simple but elegant songs, and I've always felt close to them. It was so hard to narrow it down to 15. I was trying to do songs that my mom was familiar with, so I picked the old standard stuff we sang."
He made the recording process a family affair. "Denise and my daughters (Mattie and Ali) came in and sang on one of the songs, 'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus. My 8-year-old (Dani) wouldn't sing, so we credited her as 'assistant background vocals,' because she got me a bottle of water out of the refrigerator."
It has become increasingly rare for country stars to record gospel or inspirational albums. In the '60s and '70s, it was common practice for the likes of Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Charley Pride to intersperse a gospel album between more mainstream releases. But by the mid-'80s, the practice was almost extinct: Jackson is the first country superstar in at least 20 years to record an album of traditional gospel.
"I know a lot of country and R&B acts have always recorded gospel music," he says. "It's closely related to country music in the way it's written. (These songs) reminded me of good country songs."
Galante says most of the artists of the late '80s and '90s pursued "straight-ahead commercial country. (Gospel is) something we've all shied away from because everyone's focused on how do we get on the radio. Luckily, Alan's at a stage where he's one of those artists who will be looked on as an icon, and this record just fills out the picture.
"It's a great representation as an artist, but not a change in his career. It's a chance to show a different side. It's a labor of love."
It's too early to say whether Jackson's gospel release will start a trend, but Galante says it's not out of the question.
"I think the time has come. I do think that other artists will follow this path if it's successful."
From church pew to recording studio
By Ken Barnes, USA TODAY
Alan Jackson wanted to surprise his mother for Christmas. Now he has the surprise album release of the new year.
Jackson originally recorded his CD of gospel music with just two fans in mind: his mom and his mother-in-law.
"I got a phone call from Alan's manager, saying he was going to do a recording of gospel songs for his mom," says RCA Label Group/Nashville chairman Joe Galante. "He was just going to make a CD copy for her. I said I'd love to hear it."
Jackson says: "It was something I wanted to do. My mom just wore me out, asking me to do some of the songs I heard in the Baptist church growing up, and my wife, Denise, asked me (to do some for her mother). I had all this pressure from the women in my life. But actually I loved these songs and was looking for an opportunity to do it. We just did a simple record, piano, acoustic guitar, harmony vocals."
Jackson surprised his mother, Ruth, with a copy at Christmas, and "she flipped out." So did Galante.
"Alan made it for Denise's mom and his mom. Unfortunately, he sent me a copy," Galante jokes.
"When I heard it I said, 'We want to release this.' It sounds like Alan recorded it in a church, it's so intimate and emotional."
Tracks on the record, titled Precious Memories and due Feb. 28, include such gospel standards as The Old Rugged Cross, How Great Thou Art and I'll Fly Away. Jackson says, "All the songs are songs we sang in church all my life. Those hymns are simple but elegant songs, and I've always felt close to them. It was so hard to narrow it down to 15. I was trying to do songs that my mom was familiar with, so I picked the old standard stuff we sang."
He made the recording process a family affair. "Denise and my daughters (Mattie and Ali) came in and sang on one of the songs, 'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus. My 8-year-old (Dani) wouldn't sing, so we credited her as 'assistant background vocals,' because she got me a bottle of water out of the refrigerator."
It has become increasingly rare for country stars to record gospel or inspirational albums. In the '60s and '70s, it was common practice for the likes of Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Charley Pride to intersperse a gospel album between more mainstream releases. But by the mid-'80s, the practice was almost extinct: Jackson is the first country superstar in at least 20 years to record an album of traditional gospel.
"I know a lot of country and R&B acts have always recorded gospel music," he says. "It's closely related to country music in the way it's written. (These songs) reminded me of good country songs."
Galante says most of the artists of the late '80s and '90s pursued "straight-ahead commercial country. (Gospel is) something we've all shied away from because everyone's focused on how do we get on the radio. Luckily, Alan's at a stage where he's one of those artists who will be looked on as an icon, and this record just fills out the picture.
"It's a great representation as an artist, but not a change in his career. It's a chance to show a different side. It's a labor of love."
It's too early to say whether Jackson's gospel release will start a trend, but Galante says it's not out of the question.
"I think the time has come. I do think that other artists will follow this path if it's successful."
The Soulless Men of 'Match Point'
By Victor Morton
MOVIE: Match Point
DIRECTED BY: Woody Allen
STARRING: Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox
RATING: 9 out of 10
(R; 124 min)
"And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain ... (and) we are of all men most miserable ... what doth it profit me, if the dead rise not again? 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die'." – St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:14-32
The thing about great works of nihilistic art is that they can be indistinguishable from nihilism itself. Seemingly every critic in the world one has agreed that Woody Allen's "Match Point" is his best film in years. And it is. But it's also his most thematically uncompromised, and therefore on the surface morally compromised, film . . . maybe ever.
Think back to Allen's 1989 "Crimes and Misdemeanors," a film he had not since surpassed in terms of critical esteem. "Match Point" is a loose remake and fleshing out of the Martin Landau-Sam Waterston- Anjelica Huston thread of that film (the "serious" part). Here, Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a failed Irish tennis player who takes a job as a "pro" at a swanky London club, and worms his way into the family of one of his clients, Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). He pursues Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) unto marriage, all the while maintaining an interest in Tom's fiancée Nola (Scarlett Johansson), i.e., his future sister-in-law (what is it with Woody and inter-family romance?) By the end, there is a double murder (triple under "Connor's Law"). And ... WARNING: unpacking the film's morality requires more-detailed discussion of the ending later.
But just as a film, "Match Point" is a pure pleasure to watch for a few simple reasons. This is the first Allen film to have a male protagonist not played by Allen who isn't basically doing a Woody Allen impersonation (think Kenneth Branagh in "Celebrity" for the nadir of this). Meyers is a blank-faced amoralist – "Woody" might do something immoral but he could never not obsess over it with his shrink. The story is so much cleaner and crisper than any of his recent work. It wasn't simply, as many have suggested, the London setting that seems to have rejuvenated Allen the writer, in the same sense that a vacation in the Caribbean might "rejuvenate" you. But also the fact that in "Match Point" he's hardly making a comedy at all (there are laughs, but if this were a TV show and the director credit removed, it'd definitely be slotted at the Emmys and by the marketers as "drama" or at best a "dramedy"). Allen's comic gifts had sagged noticeably in recent years, but even when he had "it," "it" was so specifically tied to a particular place and milieu and how people speak, that he needed to leave it to avoid trying to do what he could no longer do. He had to learn a new trick to avoid trying to do the one he no longer could, basically.
One of the film's best features is how the supporting cast plays the Hewetts – particularly Emily Mortimer as Chloe and Brian Cox as patriarch Alec. These are contemporary Upper-Class Brits, who drive out to their country estate in a Mercedes and a BMW convertible. But Allen, again perhaps because he can't, never descends into explicit caricature – think Monty Python and the "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch, or perhaps more realistically Robert Altman's "Gosford Snark ... er ... Park," for a sense of how this could have gone wrong. The Hewetts are complacent but don't represent Complacency, instead being basically good according to their soulless lights (with one notable offstage exception). There are few laughs explicitly at their expense, mostly the matriarch Eleanor (who belongs more in the class-neutral category of disapproving mother-in-law), but even they are handled with a light touch. For example, there are a couple of references to her fondness for the sauce; none of her falling down. Her tongue just gets a bit sharper, but in vino veritas and all that. In almost the opposite way, Scarlett Johansson plays her struggling American actress at first as being as self-consciously femme fatale as femme fatale gets. But she gets progressively less "filmy" as she becomes more agitated, and more real. By comparison, we only see Anjelica Huston in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" at the "stalker" stage at end of the affair, a time by which it is impossible to have too much sympathy for her.
Oh yeah . . . the end. The spoilers now start.
"Match Point" is a movie that, by the end certainly, has pushed morals to the limit – having become explicitly set in a godless world among soulless men. Chris murders a pregnant Nola to hide their affair and commits a second near-simultaneous murder – of the kindly old lady who lives next door to Nola – to cover his tracks. Like Martin Landau's Judah in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (and unlike Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment," which Chris is shown reading at the start), he decides he can live with his homicidal spree, and the movie ends "happily" with the birth of Chris and Chloe's baby and the line said of the baby: "I'd rather he be lucky than great." The universe is run by luck, i.e., chance – also the point of the film's opening monolog and the image of a tennis ball on the net (an image rhymed twice – with a ping-pong net and Johansson; and a grating and a wedding ring).
There is one reference to religion as such, a dinner conversation in a swanky restaurant in which Chris says of his father, "After he lost both legs, he found Jesus." The brother-in-law jokes "that doesn't seem like a fair trade." There follows shallow dinner-party repartee – "scientists are confirming that it's all blind chance . . . but I'm enjoying every minute of it . . . despair is the path of least resistance . . . faith is the path of least resistance . . . stop talking about all this." If that is a man's idea of people engaging in profound spiritual talk, I can only pity him. This movie is set among those who know that Christ is not risen and so should not fight the beasts in Ephesus. "Give me Paul or give me Nietzsche," the Presbyterian evangelist R.C. Sproul once said.
There is also one late scene, the third-to-last, where Chris displays for basically the first time what one might call moral doubts. Alone at home one night, and drunk, he walks into the kitchen and talks to Nola and the old woman – communing with their ghosts. He says you learn to push guilt away – "you have to." The neighbor points out that she and the unborn child were innocent. Chris quotes Sophocles as saying "to never have been born is the greatest boon of all." He says it would be fitting if he was punished, but he's not going to turn himself in like Raskolnikov. The detectives are no Porfirys; there's no Sonya as an icon of God's love (Chris can acknowledge its fittingness, but without God not its reality). Then there's a new day and all is forgotten. This is what a long, dark night of the soul might look like if there were no soul in it.
Now I acknowledge that it's more than possible that Allen takes all this seriously, as My Profound Definitive Statement On The Meaningless Of Existence. The only thing I can say, really, is that if I were a nihilist, "Match Point" would not be my idea of a brief for nihilism. I won't suggest it's somehow subversive "meta" work either – the theme "you can get away with it" is too constant a feature of Allen's work, particularly since the Soon-Yi affair. I'd instead put it in the category of "work that says more than, or even contrary to, what it intends." After all, Allen is pushing the case for nihilism to a double (or triple) murder, with at least one (or two) of the victims innocent by any possible lights – all for the sake of maintaining "a certain style of living" to which Chris says he has grown accustomed. And further, the Sophocles quote explicitly says non-existence is a blessing, presumably for Chris too, if he really believes it. (Or is it just cultural window-dressing for him?) If that's a brief for nihilism, I have no idea what a brief against nihilism would even look like.
Is it possible to consume "Match Point" as "you can get away with murder"? Yes. (It's also an anthropological fact that people do.) It's also possible to come away from "Beavis and Butt-head" thinking "those guys are cool." In fact, Beavis and Butt-head themselves would probably think that. But it requires the steeling of one's conscience or the cauterization of one's soul. Allen opens "Match Point" with Chris reading Dostoyevsky, and it couldn't be more obvious that Chris (or Allen) either missed the point, doesn't think of such things, or concluded that Raskolnikov's mistake was having a conscience.
Allen Bloom once complained that contemporary American souls are "built without basements" and Chris, though British, seems to exemplify that. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers gives one of the greatest "bad" performances in movie history. He's not really acting – he's fairly blank and affectless for most of the movie. But his physical features – the wide mouth with the touch of a hidden sneer, the dark piercing eyes, like a more refined Joaquin Phoenix or a darker Malcolm McDowell in "Clockwork Orange" – provide the limited characterization of a very limited man. He shouldn't have too much conflict or character because that would presuppose a soul he doesn't have. Yes, he doesn't wrestle with his conscience as Landau did throughout "Crimes and Misdemeanors." But Judah is, in loose chronological terms, Chris's spiritual grandfather. Judah also had a rabbi as a brother, and one who is blind by the end of that movie, rhyming with Chris's legless father. Two generations after Judah, why should we think Chris would have much of a conscience with which to wrestle? Doesn't concupiscence blind the intellect and all that? The very brevity, lateness, and tossed-off quality of that night scene says everything there is to say about a soul without a basement.
Victor Morton is deputy national editor at the Washington Times and intermittently maintains his personal film blog Rightwing Film Geek.
From Carolina Blue:
Buying In
Adam Lucas on the win over Maryland.
Feb. 3, 2006
COLLEGE PARK, Md.--Officially, Roy Williams arrived at North Carolina on April 14, 2003.
Officially, he got his first win about seven months later.
Officially, he won his first championship in 2005.
There will be media guides and banners and record books that document all those achievements. They will be there in black-and-white. You can look them up.
Here is something you can't look up. Here is something only those of us privileged enough to watch the 2005-06 Tar Heels will know: this was the season that Roy Williams basketball truly arrived in Chapel Hill.
Don't misunderstand. That doesn't mean we didn't enjoy watching Raymond Felton and Sean May and Rashad McCants and Marvin Williams and Jawad Williams and Jackie Manuel and Melvin Scott. That doesn't mean St. Louis was any less of an accomplishment, doesn't mean--even though it's easy to try and compare teams--this team is "more fun" than that team.
Those players combined to make a terrific basketball team. But these players--there is no need to name them all, but it's everyone from David Noel right down to Surry Wood on the end of the bench--have combined to make a Roy Williams basketball team.
Remember way back in 2004 when "buying in" was the key catchphrase around Carolina basketball? Who has bought in? Why hasn't he bought in? Boy, Jackie has bought in. Why hasn't everyone else bought in?
Right now, that seems like a very long time ago, like a cute little relic from the days before they invented color TV.
No one ever asks if this team has bought in. They don't have to. It's plainly evident in the way they careen around 94 feet of hardwood.
The head coach would occasionally point out last year that his team won because they were more "gifted and talented" than the opposition. He has not used that phrase at all this year. His team has plenty of talent, but they are not outrageously talented by Atlantic Coast Conference standards. During one critical second-half stretch against Maryland, he had these five players on the floor: Danny Green, David Noel, Wes Miller, Quentin Thomas, and Byron Sanders.
Two former walk-ons, two players who played minimal roles last season, and a freshman. Those were the players he entrusted with a 3-point lead in one of the most hostile environments in the league.
He has to trust them because he doesn't have a choice, of course. He can't go out and sign a free agent. But he also trusts them because they have developed into what he appreciates most: a true team. This team doesn't particularly shoot well, doesn't particularly pass well, and doesn't always defend well.
But here's what it does well: play a relentless brand of basketball with heart and tenaciousness.
Maryland made a conscious effort to eliminate Tyler Hansbrough from the Carolina offense. They defended him with burly Travis Garrison and the double-team came instantly as soon as he caught the ball. The gameplan made sense. It's just that they didn't plan on Noel, the senior who has been through a rough stretch, turning into an offensive dynamo.
And they didn't count on Danny Green having the gumption to look down the barrel of a critical three-pointer with 5:30 remaining and never blinking. The Terps had just made use of a 4-point possession, drawing within 57-54. But then Hansbrough fed Reyshawn Terry for a dunk and Green got the ball on the wing, exactly where he likes it.
"I don't know how that happens," he said of his proclivity for having the ball when it's time to make a big shot. "I just try to stay in the line of vision of my teammates. I definitely knew it was going in. Shooters know when the ball is going in."
The implication, of course, is that Green is a shooter. He knows it now, but more impressively, he knew it even when he was scuffling through one of the toughest stretches of his career three weeks ago.
Fellow freshman Bobby Frasor has endured some similar struggles. His form has looked consistently good; it would be easier if it didn't, easier if it was as simple as adjusting an elbow or tweaking a follow-through. He had exactly zero points through 36 minutes of the game Thursday night. He had exactly zero reason to want the ball at a key juncture.
But he is a Roy Williams player. Williams gets lots of credit for recruiting very skilled players. But he does something else: he recruits players who want to play. Just like him, they get a kick out of going into a hostile environment and watching a crowd go silent.
So it shouldn't have been much of a surprise that with 4 minutes left, the Tar Heels ran the shot clock under 10. There was Frasor against D.J. Strawberry, one of the toughest man-to-man defenders in the league, twisting, spinning, shooting, and making a 17-footer for his first points of the game and a 10-point Tar Heel lead. Ninety seconds later, with the Heels needing a final dagger, they ran "Quick" off the inbounds play. The ball went back to Frasor in the corner, exactly as designed. It was a big shot, so--of course--he made it. That is what Roy Williams players do. They make big plays.
"Just for the young guys to take some of the shots they take is pretty impressive," Wes Miller said. "Not just making them, but taking them. That takes some guts. Those guys don't know any better. They just play basketball. They're big-time players."
Miller has that typical veteran perspective and he's exactly right--they don't know any better. Minutes after Green made his in-rhythm big three-pointer, he took an equally bad shot right in front of the Carolina bench. Almost as soon as the ball left his hand, he understood his mistake.
"I thought I was a little open," he said with the grin all shooters have when they're talking about missed shots. "But it was early in the shot clock and it was the first pass. It was a mistake, and I'll learn from it. Coach told me next time to think time and score. He knew I knew what I had done wrong."
That's the thing--Green does know. This team makes some of the most maddening turnovers in the history of college basketball, but then they come back and play a demonic second half defensively and beat a team that hadn't lost a single game in College Park since the last time the Tar Heels were here. The 77-62 win marks the first time since the 1996 and '97 seasons that Carolina has won back-to-back games at Maryland.
"I was real frustrated in the first half," Frasor said. "But in the second half we came out and played Carolina basketball. We played harder, played tougher, and played smarter."
Not shot better or jumped higher or ran faster. They just played harder, tougher, and smarter.
That, folks, is a Carolina basketball team. And it's something else, too, something we'll probably start taking for granted over the next decade--it's a Roy Williams basketball team.
Buying In
Adam Lucas on the win over Maryland.
Feb. 3, 2006
COLLEGE PARK, Md.--Officially, Roy Williams arrived at North Carolina on April 14, 2003.
Officially, he got his first win about seven months later.
Officially, he won his first championship in 2005.
There will be media guides and banners and record books that document all those achievements. They will be there in black-and-white. You can look them up.
Here is something you can't look up. Here is something only those of us privileged enough to watch the 2005-06 Tar Heels will know: this was the season that Roy Williams basketball truly arrived in Chapel Hill.
Don't misunderstand. That doesn't mean we didn't enjoy watching Raymond Felton and Sean May and Rashad McCants and Marvin Williams and Jawad Williams and Jackie Manuel and Melvin Scott. That doesn't mean St. Louis was any less of an accomplishment, doesn't mean--even though it's easy to try and compare teams--this team is "more fun" than that team.
Those players combined to make a terrific basketball team. But these players--there is no need to name them all, but it's everyone from David Noel right down to Surry Wood on the end of the bench--have combined to make a Roy Williams basketball team.
Remember way back in 2004 when "buying in" was the key catchphrase around Carolina basketball? Who has bought in? Why hasn't he bought in? Boy, Jackie has bought in. Why hasn't everyone else bought in?
Right now, that seems like a very long time ago, like a cute little relic from the days before they invented color TV.
No one ever asks if this team has bought in. They don't have to. It's plainly evident in the way they careen around 94 feet of hardwood.
The head coach would occasionally point out last year that his team won because they were more "gifted and talented" than the opposition. He has not used that phrase at all this year. His team has plenty of talent, but they are not outrageously talented by Atlantic Coast Conference standards. During one critical second-half stretch against Maryland, he had these five players on the floor: Danny Green, David Noel, Wes Miller, Quentin Thomas, and Byron Sanders.
Two former walk-ons, two players who played minimal roles last season, and a freshman. Those were the players he entrusted with a 3-point lead in one of the most hostile environments in the league.
He has to trust them because he doesn't have a choice, of course. He can't go out and sign a free agent. But he also trusts them because they have developed into what he appreciates most: a true team. This team doesn't particularly shoot well, doesn't particularly pass well, and doesn't always defend well.
But here's what it does well: play a relentless brand of basketball with heart and tenaciousness.
Maryland made a conscious effort to eliminate Tyler Hansbrough from the Carolina offense. They defended him with burly Travis Garrison and the double-team came instantly as soon as he caught the ball. The gameplan made sense. It's just that they didn't plan on Noel, the senior who has been through a rough stretch, turning into an offensive dynamo.
And they didn't count on Danny Green having the gumption to look down the barrel of a critical three-pointer with 5:30 remaining and never blinking. The Terps had just made use of a 4-point possession, drawing within 57-54. But then Hansbrough fed Reyshawn Terry for a dunk and Green got the ball on the wing, exactly where he likes it.
"I don't know how that happens," he said of his proclivity for having the ball when it's time to make a big shot. "I just try to stay in the line of vision of my teammates. I definitely knew it was going in. Shooters know when the ball is going in."
The implication, of course, is that Green is a shooter. He knows it now, but more impressively, he knew it even when he was scuffling through one of the toughest stretches of his career three weeks ago.
Fellow freshman Bobby Frasor has endured some similar struggles. His form has looked consistently good; it would be easier if it didn't, easier if it was as simple as adjusting an elbow or tweaking a follow-through. He had exactly zero points through 36 minutes of the game Thursday night. He had exactly zero reason to want the ball at a key juncture.
But he is a Roy Williams player. Williams gets lots of credit for recruiting very skilled players. But he does something else: he recruits players who want to play. Just like him, they get a kick out of going into a hostile environment and watching a crowd go silent.
So it shouldn't have been much of a surprise that with 4 minutes left, the Tar Heels ran the shot clock under 10. There was Frasor against D.J. Strawberry, one of the toughest man-to-man defenders in the league, twisting, spinning, shooting, and making a 17-footer for his first points of the game and a 10-point Tar Heel lead. Ninety seconds later, with the Heels needing a final dagger, they ran "Quick" off the inbounds play. The ball went back to Frasor in the corner, exactly as designed. It was a big shot, so--of course--he made it. That is what Roy Williams players do. They make big plays.
"Just for the young guys to take some of the shots they take is pretty impressive," Wes Miller said. "Not just making them, but taking them. That takes some guts. Those guys don't know any better. They just play basketball. They're big-time players."
Miller has that typical veteran perspective and he's exactly right--they don't know any better. Minutes after Green made his in-rhythm big three-pointer, he took an equally bad shot right in front of the Carolina bench. Almost as soon as the ball left his hand, he understood his mistake.
"I thought I was a little open," he said with the grin all shooters have when they're talking about missed shots. "But it was early in the shot clock and it was the first pass. It was a mistake, and I'll learn from it. Coach told me next time to think time and score. He knew I knew what I had done wrong."
That's the thing--Green does know. This team makes some of the most maddening turnovers in the history of college basketball, but then they come back and play a demonic second half defensively and beat a team that hadn't lost a single game in College Park since the last time the Tar Heels were here. The 77-62 win marks the first time since the 1996 and '97 seasons that Carolina has won back-to-back games at Maryland.
"I was real frustrated in the first half," Frasor said. "But in the second half we came out and played Carolina basketball. We played harder, played tougher, and played smarter."
Not shot better or jumped higher or ran faster. They just played harder, tougher, and smarter.
That, folks, is a Carolina basketball team. And it's something else, too, something we'll probably start taking for granted over the next decade--it's a Roy Williams basketball team.
Mexico's Lawless Border Presents Washington With Its Biggest Test
by Rep. Tom Tancredo
Posted Feb 03, 2006
Two events last month on the Mexican border, one in Texas and one in California, highlight the challenge the U.S. faces on our Southern border. They illustrate how not only vulnerable our border is but also why it is difficult to fix the problem. Mexico won’t or can’t control its side of the border, and the U.S. doesn’t want to embarrass Mexico by admitting that fact publicly.
On the afternoon of January 23, three SUVs crossed from Mexico into Texas 50 miles southeast of El Paso at a shallow place in the Rio Grande called Neely’s Crossing by the locals. The three SUVs were spotted two miles from the river near Interstate 10 by Hudspeth County sheriff deputies. When the deputies gave chase, the SUVs turned around and headed back to the river. This happened in broad daylight, not under the cloak of darkness.
At the river crossing, the sheriff deputies observed a military-style Humvee with a mounted 50-caliber machine gun waiting for the caravan on the U.S. side of the river. One SUV blew a tire short of the river and was abandoned by the smugglers. It was later found to contain 1477 pounds of marijuana. A second vehicle made it across the river, but the third got stuck. A dozen men in battle dress uniforms and automatic rifles appeared on the Mexican side and proceeded to help unload a dozen or more bales of contraband from the marooned SUV.
The Texas sheriff deputies and state highway patrol were helpless to stop the recovery of the contraband because they were outgunned and outmanned. After unloading their cargo, the Mexicans set fire to the SUV and left it burning in the riverbed. All of this was photographed by Hudspeth County sheriff deputies.
In Tijuana, Mexico, two days later, a sophisticated tunnel was found under the U.S.–Mexico border, running 800 yards from near the Tijuana airport to a warehouse on the U.S. side. The warehouse had two trucks and a van inside, and the tunnel contained several tons of marijuana. Authorities said that four tunnels had been uncovered in California in recent months. This latest one has a cement floor, lighting, and is large enough for people to walk through. We do not yet know how long the tunnel had been in operation.
Texas’s Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West is certain the Humvee with a mounted machine gun seen at Neely’s Crossing and the dozen men in military style uniforms were Mexican military. He has lived on the border all his life, speaks Spanish fluently and has had considerable interface with Mexican military and Mexican police over the years.
The U.S. Border Patrol has seen dozens of similar Mexican military incursions into the U.S., which often occur in connection with drug smuggling. Many of the sixteen county sheriffs who make up the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition can tell stories about similar incidents along the Rio Grande involving the Mexican military. There have been over 200 documented incursions by Mexican military or police from 1996 through 2005 according to the Department of Homeland Security, and several Border Patrol agents have been wounded in these encounters.
The reaction of the Mexican government to the reports of the incident was predictable -- a mixture of denial, confusion and evasion. At first, they said that there are no Humvees in the arsenal of the Mexican military in that region and that the smugglers were using stolen military equipment and uniforms. Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Derbez had the chutzpah to say the smugglers may have been U.S. military disguised as Mexicans.
The Mexican government also announced that military forces have now been ordered not to go within three kilometers of the border. This raises the question of who is supposed to be policing the border on the Mexican side if the military has been withdrawn. The municipal police departments in most Mexican border towns -- from Matamoros to Ciudad Juarez, Agua Prieta to Tijuana -- are riddled with individuals on the payroll of the drug cartels.
Equally disturbing was the official U.S. response. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chetoff downplayed the significance of the event by saying that most Mexican military incursions over the years have been "accidental." The Border Patrol station in El Paso was told by headquarters to avoid speculation on the identity of the smugglers, and the El Paso FBI office said it is not part of any investigation. Sheriff West said a week after the event that no one in the FBI or any federal agency had yet contacted him as part of any investigation.
Let’s think about the ramifications of the official reactions by these two governments, the Mexican and the American. First, does the Mexican government really want to say to the world that the drug cartels can operate freely along the border with stolen military weapons, uniforms and Humvees and the Mexican military is powerless to stop them? Does it make a big difference if they are off-duty military assisting the smugglers? Are we supposed to find that acceptable, that drug cartels can operate freely within a three kilometer radius of the1900-mile international border?
On the U.S. side, does DHS and the State Department want us to believe that Hudspeth County law enforcement eyewitnesses are ignorant or incapable of identifying Mexican military vehicles and uniforms? Is Secretary Chertoff and the federal government in a state of wholesale denial about the extent of Mexican military corruption and involvement in the multi-billion dollar drug smuggling business? Of course not. The sad truth is that the FBI, DEA and Border Patrol know exactly what’s going on, but our federal government is more concerned about saving face for the Mexican government than telling the truth to the American people.
Let’s get real, folks. If Mexico is now admitting that it is unable to control the smuggling activity on its side of the border, then it is time for the U.S. to recognize this reality and change our policies accordingly. The first step is for the Border Patrol and local law enforcement in our 26 border counties to be given weapons that match the firepower of the drug cartels. The “Operation Linebacker” program now functioning in Texas needs to be expanded to all four of our border states. The Border Patrol should adopt new rules of engagement for confrontations with armed drug smugglers -- it should at least be allowed to return fire when fired upon. Both the Border Patrol and local law enforcement should be allowed to engage in "hot pursuit" of smugglers caught in criminal activity on our side of the border.
Law enforcement officers should not have to endure the humiliation of standing by as mere observers while smugglers recover their cargo only 90 feet away, and Border Patrol agents must not be sitting ducks for snipers across the border. Texas law enforcement agencies are circulating intelligence reports that the drug cartels are preparing to become more aggressive in protecting their drug shipments from seizures by U.S. law enforcement. It is urgent that our first responders, the Border Patrol and local law enforcement, be given the tools and the weapons to defend themselves and accomplish their mission.
It is widely understood by local law enforcement agencies and the Border Patrol, as well as the FBI and the DEA, that high-ranking members of the the Mexican military in the border regions are often bribed to cooperate in the drug cartel’s smuggling operations. The corruption of law enforcement agencies within Mexico is pervasive in the border regions. Honest prosecutors, police officers and military commanders are under constant threat and are frequently the victims of assassinations.
With regard to the situation in Tijuana, a city long famous for "mordita" and deep-rooted corruption, it is hard to understand how 800-yard tunnels like the one discovered last week can be excavated, equipped and operated without the knowledge of Tijuana law enforcement. How many hundreds or thousands of illegal aliens of various nationalities are being smuggled into California through such tunnels? Blocking such tunnels is not only a matter of drug enforcement; it is a matter of national security. Perhaps the Border Patrol should have the right to search for tunnels jointly with Mexican authorities up to 1000 yards inside Mexico.
Local officials on the U.S. side of the border have begun to take steps to protect their communities from the incipient lawlessness spilling across the border as a direct result of the federal government’s neglect of border security. In Texas, sixteen border county sheriffs met in 2005 to organize the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition to combat smuggling and escalating criminal violence. They are now coordinating closely with the Border Patrol and doing joint operations. Federal support for the coalition’s “Operation Linebacker” is part of the border security bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December and now under consideration in the Senate.
The Mexican government must stop making excuses, stop treating crime as a public relations problem, and start dealing vigorously with the deep corruption in its border states. Perhaps the threat of an organized tourist boycott would get their attention. Americans could start spending their tourist dollars in Jamaica, Costa Rica and South Padre Island instead of Cancun, Acapulco and Cabo.
The most important thing is that our federal government must start leveling with the American people about the dangers and the scope of the problem. We must secure the border through whatever combination of physical barriers, technology and manpower that will get the job done. As a short-term solution, deploying the National Guard to back up the Border Patrol also makes a lot of sense.
Every U.S. law enforcement agency knows that many of these border incursions are not accidents. They are symptoms of a growing anarchy within Mexico and along our border. It is time for Secretary Chertoff and the President to wake up and confront the problem honestly.
by Rep. Tom Tancredo
Posted Feb 03, 2006
Two events last month on the Mexican border, one in Texas and one in California, highlight the challenge the U.S. faces on our Southern border. They illustrate how not only vulnerable our border is but also why it is difficult to fix the problem. Mexico won’t or can’t control its side of the border, and the U.S. doesn’t want to embarrass Mexico by admitting that fact publicly.
On the afternoon of January 23, three SUVs crossed from Mexico into Texas 50 miles southeast of El Paso at a shallow place in the Rio Grande called Neely’s Crossing by the locals. The three SUVs were spotted two miles from the river near Interstate 10 by Hudspeth County sheriff deputies. When the deputies gave chase, the SUVs turned around and headed back to the river. This happened in broad daylight, not under the cloak of darkness.
At the river crossing, the sheriff deputies observed a military-style Humvee with a mounted 50-caliber machine gun waiting for the caravan on the U.S. side of the river. One SUV blew a tire short of the river and was abandoned by the smugglers. It was later found to contain 1477 pounds of marijuana. A second vehicle made it across the river, but the third got stuck. A dozen men in battle dress uniforms and automatic rifles appeared on the Mexican side and proceeded to help unload a dozen or more bales of contraband from the marooned SUV.
The Texas sheriff deputies and state highway patrol were helpless to stop the recovery of the contraband because they were outgunned and outmanned. After unloading their cargo, the Mexicans set fire to the SUV and left it burning in the riverbed. All of this was photographed by Hudspeth County sheriff deputies.
In Tijuana, Mexico, two days later, a sophisticated tunnel was found under the U.S.–Mexico border, running 800 yards from near the Tijuana airport to a warehouse on the U.S. side. The warehouse had two trucks and a van inside, and the tunnel contained several tons of marijuana. Authorities said that four tunnels had been uncovered in California in recent months. This latest one has a cement floor, lighting, and is large enough for people to walk through. We do not yet know how long the tunnel had been in operation.
Texas’s Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West is certain the Humvee with a mounted machine gun seen at Neely’s Crossing and the dozen men in military style uniforms were Mexican military. He has lived on the border all his life, speaks Spanish fluently and has had considerable interface with Mexican military and Mexican police over the years.
The U.S. Border Patrol has seen dozens of similar Mexican military incursions into the U.S., which often occur in connection with drug smuggling. Many of the sixteen county sheriffs who make up the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition can tell stories about similar incidents along the Rio Grande involving the Mexican military. There have been over 200 documented incursions by Mexican military or police from 1996 through 2005 according to the Department of Homeland Security, and several Border Patrol agents have been wounded in these encounters.
The reaction of the Mexican government to the reports of the incident was predictable -- a mixture of denial, confusion and evasion. At first, they said that there are no Humvees in the arsenal of the Mexican military in that region and that the smugglers were using stolen military equipment and uniforms. Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Derbez had the chutzpah to say the smugglers may have been U.S. military disguised as Mexicans.
The Mexican government also announced that military forces have now been ordered not to go within three kilometers of the border. This raises the question of who is supposed to be policing the border on the Mexican side if the military has been withdrawn. The municipal police departments in most Mexican border towns -- from Matamoros to Ciudad Juarez, Agua Prieta to Tijuana -- are riddled with individuals on the payroll of the drug cartels.
Equally disturbing was the official U.S. response. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chetoff downplayed the significance of the event by saying that most Mexican military incursions over the years have been "accidental." The Border Patrol station in El Paso was told by headquarters to avoid speculation on the identity of the smugglers, and the El Paso FBI office said it is not part of any investigation. Sheriff West said a week after the event that no one in the FBI or any federal agency had yet contacted him as part of any investigation.
Let’s think about the ramifications of the official reactions by these two governments, the Mexican and the American. First, does the Mexican government really want to say to the world that the drug cartels can operate freely along the border with stolen military weapons, uniforms and Humvees and the Mexican military is powerless to stop them? Does it make a big difference if they are off-duty military assisting the smugglers? Are we supposed to find that acceptable, that drug cartels can operate freely within a three kilometer radius of the1900-mile international border?
On the U.S. side, does DHS and the State Department want us to believe that Hudspeth County law enforcement eyewitnesses are ignorant or incapable of identifying Mexican military vehicles and uniforms? Is Secretary Chertoff and the federal government in a state of wholesale denial about the extent of Mexican military corruption and involvement in the multi-billion dollar drug smuggling business? Of course not. The sad truth is that the FBI, DEA and Border Patrol know exactly what’s going on, but our federal government is more concerned about saving face for the Mexican government than telling the truth to the American people.
Let’s get real, folks. If Mexico is now admitting that it is unable to control the smuggling activity on its side of the border, then it is time for the U.S. to recognize this reality and change our policies accordingly. The first step is for the Border Patrol and local law enforcement in our 26 border counties to be given weapons that match the firepower of the drug cartels. The “Operation Linebacker” program now functioning in Texas needs to be expanded to all four of our border states. The Border Patrol should adopt new rules of engagement for confrontations with armed drug smugglers -- it should at least be allowed to return fire when fired upon. Both the Border Patrol and local law enforcement should be allowed to engage in "hot pursuit" of smugglers caught in criminal activity on our side of the border.
Law enforcement officers should not have to endure the humiliation of standing by as mere observers while smugglers recover their cargo only 90 feet away, and Border Patrol agents must not be sitting ducks for snipers across the border. Texas law enforcement agencies are circulating intelligence reports that the drug cartels are preparing to become more aggressive in protecting their drug shipments from seizures by U.S. law enforcement. It is urgent that our first responders, the Border Patrol and local law enforcement, be given the tools and the weapons to defend themselves and accomplish their mission.
It is widely understood by local law enforcement agencies and the Border Patrol, as well as the FBI and the DEA, that high-ranking members of the the Mexican military in the border regions are often bribed to cooperate in the drug cartel’s smuggling operations. The corruption of law enforcement agencies within Mexico is pervasive in the border regions. Honest prosecutors, police officers and military commanders are under constant threat and are frequently the victims of assassinations.
With regard to the situation in Tijuana, a city long famous for "mordita" and deep-rooted corruption, it is hard to understand how 800-yard tunnels like the one discovered last week can be excavated, equipped and operated without the knowledge of Tijuana law enforcement. How many hundreds or thousands of illegal aliens of various nationalities are being smuggled into California through such tunnels? Blocking such tunnels is not only a matter of drug enforcement; it is a matter of national security. Perhaps the Border Patrol should have the right to search for tunnels jointly with Mexican authorities up to 1000 yards inside Mexico.
Local officials on the U.S. side of the border have begun to take steps to protect their communities from the incipient lawlessness spilling across the border as a direct result of the federal government’s neglect of border security. In Texas, sixteen border county sheriffs met in 2005 to organize the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition to combat smuggling and escalating criminal violence. They are now coordinating closely with the Border Patrol and doing joint operations. Federal support for the coalition’s “Operation Linebacker” is part of the border security bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December and now under consideration in the Senate.
The Mexican government must stop making excuses, stop treating crime as a public relations problem, and start dealing vigorously with the deep corruption in its border states. Perhaps the threat of an organized tourist boycott would get their attention. Americans could start spending their tourist dollars in Jamaica, Costa Rica and South Padre Island instead of Cancun, Acapulco and Cabo.
The most important thing is that our federal government must start leveling with the American people about the dangers and the scope of the problem. We must secure the border through whatever combination of physical barriers, technology and manpower that will get the job done. As a short-term solution, deploying the National Guard to back up the Border Patrol also makes a lot of sense.
Every U.S. law enforcement agency knows that many of these border incursions are not accidents. They are symptoms of a growing anarchy within Mexico and along our border. It is time for Secretary Chertoff and the President to wake up and confront the problem honestly.
Bush Is Running Out of Alibis
by Patrick J. Buchanan
"The road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline," railed President Bush in his State of the Union. Again and again, Bush returned to his theme.
"America rejects the false comfort of isolationism. ...
"Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need. ...
"American leaders from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan rejected isolation and retreat."
Why would a president use his State of the Union to lash out at a school of foreign policy thought that has had zero influence in his administration? The answer is a simple one, but it is not an easy one for Bush to face: His foreign policy is visibly failing, and his critics have been proven right.
But rather than defend the fruits of his policy, Bush has chosen to caricature critics who warned him against interventionism. Like all politicians in trouble, Bush knows that the best defense is a good offense.
Having plunged us into an unnecessary war, Bush now confronts the real possibility of strategic defeat and a failed presidency. His victory in Iraq, like the wars of Wilson and FDR, has turned to ashes in our mouths. And like Truman's war in Korea and Kennedy's war in Vietnam, Bush's war has left America divided and her people regretting he ever led us in. But unlike the world wars, Korea and Vietnam, Bush cannot claim the enemy attacked us and we had no choice. Iraq is Bush's war. Isolationists had nothing to do with it. To a man and woman, they opposed it.
Now, with an army bogged down in Afghanistan and another slowly exiting Iraq, and no end in sight to either, Bush seeks to counter critics who warned him not to go in by associating them with the demonized and supposedly discredited patriots of the America First movement of 1940-41. His assault is not only non-credible, it borders on the desperate and pathetic.
"Abroad, our nation is committed to a historic long-term goal. We seek the end of tyranny in our world," said Bush. "Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends upon it."
Intending no disrespect, this is noble-sounding nonsense. Our security rests on U.S. power and will, and not on whether Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, Cuba or even China is ruled by tyrants. Our forefathers lived secure in a world of tyrannies by staying out of wars that were none of America's business. As for "the end of tyranny in our world," Mr. President, sorry, that doesn't come in "our world." That comes in the next.
"By allowing radical Islam to work its will, by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself, we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals or even in our own courage," said Bush.
But what has done more to radicalize Islam than our invasion of Iraq? Who has done more to empower Islamic radicals than Bush with his clamor for elections across a region radicalized by our own policies? It is one thing to believe in ideals, another to be the prisoner of some democratist ideology.
Bush has come to believe that the absence of democracy is the cause of terror and democracy its cure. But the cause of terror in the Middle East is the perception there that those nations are held in colonial captivity by Americans and their puppet regimes, and that the only way to expel both is to use tactics that have succeeded from Algeria in 1962 to Anbar province in 2005.
Given the franchise, Arab and Islamic peoples from Pakistan to Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Egypt have now voted for candidates with two credentials. They seemed to be devout Muslims, and they appeared dedicated to tossing America out of the region and the Israelis into the sea.
With opposition also rising to his free-trade policy, Bush reverted to the same tactic: Caricature and castigate critics of his own failed policies. "Protectionists," said Bush, pretend "we can keep our high standards of living, while walling off our economy."
But it was protectionists from Lincoln to Coolidge who gave us the highest standard of living on earth. And the record of Bush's merry band of free-traders? The largest trade deficits in history, a $200 billion trade surplus for Beijing at our expense in 2005, and 3 million lost manufacturing jobs since Bush first took the oath.
If America is angry over what interventionism and free trade have wrought, George Bush cannot credibly blame isolationists or protectionists. These fellows have an alibi. They were nowhere near the scene of the crime.
It is George W. Bush who is running out of alibis.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
"The road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline," railed President Bush in his State of the Union. Again and again, Bush returned to his theme.
"America rejects the false comfort of isolationism. ...
"Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need. ...
"American leaders from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan rejected isolation and retreat."
Why would a president use his State of the Union to lash out at a school of foreign policy thought that has had zero influence in his administration? The answer is a simple one, but it is not an easy one for Bush to face: His foreign policy is visibly failing, and his critics have been proven right.
But rather than defend the fruits of his policy, Bush has chosen to caricature critics who warned him against interventionism. Like all politicians in trouble, Bush knows that the best defense is a good offense.
Having plunged us into an unnecessary war, Bush now confronts the real possibility of strategic defeat and a failed presidency. His victory in Iraq, like the wars of Wilson and FDR, has turned to ashes in our mouths. And like Truman's war in Korea and Kennedy's war in Vietnam, Bush's war has left America divided and her people regretting he ever led us in. But unlike the world wars, Korea and Vietnam, Bush cannot claim the enemy attacked us and we had no choice. Iraq is Bush's war. Isolationists had nothing to do with it. To a man and woman, they opposed it.
Now, with an army bogged down in Afghanistan and another slowly exiting Iraq, and no end in sight to either, Bush seeks to counter critics who warned him not to go in by associating them with the demonized and supposedly discredited patriots of the America First movement of 1940-41. His assault is not only non-credible, it borders on the desperate and pathetic.
"Abroad, our nation is committed to a historic long-term goal. We seek the end of tyranny in our world," said Bush. "Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends upon it."
Intending no disrespect, this is noble-sounding nonsense. Our security rests on U.S. power and will, and not on whether Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, Cuba or even China is ruled by tyrants. Our forefathers lived secure in a world of tyrannies by staying out of wars that were none of America's business. As for "the end of tyranny in our world," Mr. President, sorry, that doesn't come in "our world." That comes in the next.
"By allowing radical Islam to work its will, by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself, we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals or even in our own courage," said Bush.
But what has done more to radicalize Islam than our invasion of Iraq? Who has done more to empower Islamic radicals than Bush with his clamor for elections across a region radicalized by our own policies? It is one thing to believe in ideals, another to be the prisoner of some democratist ideology.
Bush has come to believe that the absence of democracy is the cause of terror and democracy its cure. But the cause of terror in the Middle East is the perception there that those nations are held in colonial captivity by Americans and their puppet regimes, and that the only way to expel both is to use tactics that have succeeded from Algeria in 1962 to Anbar province in 2005.
Given the franchise, Arab and Islamic peoples from Pakistan to Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Egypt have now voted for candidates with two credentials. They seemed to be devout Muslims, and they appeared dedicated to tossing America out of the region and the Israelis into the sea.
With opposition also rising to his free-trade policy, Bush reverted to the same tactic: Caricature and castigate critics of his own failed policies. "Protectionists," said Bush, pretend "we can keep our high standards of living, while walling off our economy."
But it was protectionists from Lincoln to Coolidge who gave us the highest standard of living on earth. And the record of Bush's merry band of free-traders? The largest trade deficits in history, a $200 billion trade surplus for Beijing at our expense in 2005, and 3 million lost manufacturing jobs since Bush first took the oath.
If America is angry over what interventionism and free trade have wrought, George Bush cannot credibly blame isolationists or protectionists. These fellows have an alibi. They were nowhere near the scene of the crime.
It is George W. Bush who is running out of alibis.
February 3, 2006
Howard Dean’s Egregious Comments on Terrorist Surveillance
By Sen. Pat Roberts
I was recently apprised of your assessment of the President’s terrorist surveillance program – an “early warning” capability to intercept the international communications of al Qaeda terrorists to and from persons within the United States. With respect to this important program, you stated, “President Bush’s secret program to spy on the American people reminds Americans of the abuse of power during the dark days of President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.” As Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, I find your statements to be irrational and irresponsible.
Any suggestion that a program designed to track the movement, locations, plans, or intentions of our enemy – particularly those that have infiltrated our borders – is equivalent to abusive domestic surveillance of the past is ludicrous. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson approved the electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King, those Presidents were targeting American citizens based on activities protected by the First Amendment. When President Richard Nixon used warrantless wiretaps, they were not directed at enemies that had attacked the United States and killed thousands of Americans.
I believe Americans understand that the careful and targeted program authorized by President Bush has no relation to the abuses of the past. Indeed, its closest antecedent is the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Attorney General Robert H. Jackson on the eve of World War II. With war looming and reports of lurking enemy saboteurs, President Roosevelt ordered the use of domestic electronic surveillance to target “persons suspected of subversive activities.” As President Roosevelt noted, “It is too late to do anything about it after sabotage, assassinations and ‘fifth column’ activities are completed.” Significantly, President Roosevelt’s direction was issued despite a statute (Section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934) and Supreme Court precedent (United States v. Nardone, 302 U.S. 379 (1937)) that prohibited such wiretapping.
When President Bush exercised his constitutional authority and responsibility as Commander-in-Chief to target international communications between potential terrorists within this country and al Qaeda members overseas, he recognized, just like President Roosevelt, that after a terrorist attack occurs “[i]t is too late.” Our nation had been attacked on September 11, 2001, by foreign enemies. We were, and are still, at war with an enemy that Congress identified in an Authorization for Use of Military Force (Pub. L. No. 107-40 (Sept. 18, 2001)). Much of the war against al Qaeda is being fought overseas – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. But the war against terrorism is not confined to foreign lands. The war against terrorism is being fought every day in our own backyard. America is a battlefield.
In peacetime and especially when our nation is at war, our leaders, including the chairmen of our political parties, should be more careful and better informed before they criticize the intelligence programs that protect our nation. Vibrant debate is important in our free society, but that debate should be serious and rational, especially where national security is concerned. Too many are looking at national security issues through partisan lenses. I have seen it on the Intelligence Committee for the past three years. Our nation, and the men and women of the military, law enforcement, and the intelligence community, deserve better.
From E! Online News:
"Potter," "Narnia" Set for Sequels
by Gina Serpe
Feb 2, 2006
Welcome back, Potter...and Narnia, too.
The studios behind both the Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia series announced Thursday that the respective franchises' fifth and second installments have been are ready to roll cameras.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth adaptation of J.K. Rowling's beloved boy wizard adventures, is set to start filming in England next week, according to Warner Bros.
In this go-round, Potter returns for his fifth year of study at Hogwarts only to find the school turning a blind eye to his recent encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort. He decides to take matters into his own hands and begins to form an army of students, whom he trains to defend themselves against the Dark Arts.
Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson again reprise their roles as Harry, Ron and Hermione, while British director David Yates is on board to helm the adventure.
New to the cast is Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton, who stars as Ministry of Magic toadie Dolores Umbridge, The Interpreter's George Harris as the auror Kingsley Shacklebolt, Casanova's Helen McCrory as Voldemort lacky Bellatrix Lestrange and 14-year-old Irish newcomer Evanna Lynch, who beat out 15,000 hopefuls for the role Luna Lovegood, a Ravenclaw student who becomes an ally of Potter's.
The fourth installment, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, has grossed nearly $879.6 million worldwide, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. All of the previous Potter films have grossed upward of the $800 million mark, with the first adaptation, 2001's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, racking up a franchise-high $976.5 million to date.
And there's more where that came from.
Rowling released the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, last July, while the seventh and final installment is expected by the end of the year.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is slated for a 2007 release, but there is no word whether it will be a summer or holiday movie.
Seven is also the magic number for C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia series, though the sequence of the books is widely debated among fans. The first big-screen adaptation, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though the first of the Narnia books to be published, is chronologically the second book in the fantasy series.
It's just-announced sequel, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is often cited either the fourth or fifth book chronologically, though it was the second installment to be printed.
In any case, Disney and Walden Media have again hired Andrew Adamson to produce, direct and write the movie along with original scribes Christopher Markus and Steve McFeeley. The entire principal cast is also set to return.
"Making The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe couldn't have been a more rewarding experience, not just in terms of creative achievement and audience response, but also because of the family we formed during production," said Adamson in a press release.
"Prince Caspian not only gives me an opportunity to challenge my imagination with another classic story, it also allows me to work alongside the many talented artists who contributed to the first film, and of course to collaborate again with [the children]."
Much like Warner Bros. and Harry Potter, the Narnia brain trust is hoping to ramp up production on the sequels before the young lead stars outgrow their characters.
In Prince Caspian, the Prevensie siblings return to Narnia, where 1,000 years have passed since they last left. The children are enlisted to once again help ward off a villain, this time an evil king, and restore the rightful heir to the land's throne, Prince Caspian.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, released just before Christmas, has already grossed $634.4 million worldwide, per BoxOfficeMojo.com, and shows little signs of slacking. The film has yet to fall out of the top 10 at the North American box office. Earlier this week, the film nabbed three Academy Award nominations, for makeup, sound mixing and visual effects.
Prince Caspian is set for a Christmas 2007 release.
"Potter," "Narnia" Set for Sequels
by Gina Serpe
Feb 2, 2006
Welcome back, Potter...and Narnia, too.
The studios behind both the Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia series announced Thursday that the respective franchises' fifth and second installments have been are ready to roll cameras.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth adaptation of J.K. Rowling's beloved boy wizard adventures, is set to start filming in England next week, according to Warner Bros.
In this go-round, Potter returns for his fifth year of study at Hogwarts only to find the school turning a blind eye to his recent encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort. He decides to take matters into his own hands and begins to form an army of students, whom he trains to defend themselves against the Dark Arts.
Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson again reprise their roles as Harry, Ron and Hermione, while British director David Yates is on board to helm the adventure.
New to the cast is Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton, who stars as Ministry of Magic toadie Dolores Umbridge, The Interpreter's George Harris as the auror Kingsley Shacklebolt, Casanova's Helen McCrory as Voldemort lacky Bellatrix Lestrange and 14-year-old Irish newcomer Evanna Lynch, who beat out 15,000 hopefuls for the role Luna Lovegood, a Ravenclaw student who becomes an ally of Potter's.
The fourth installment, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, has grossed nearly $879.6 million worldwide, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. All of the previous Potter films have grossed upward of the $800 million mark, with the first adaptation, 2001's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, racking up a franchise-high $976.5 million to date.
And there's more where that came from.
Rowling released the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, last July, while the seventh and final installment is expected by the end of the year.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is slated for a 2007 release, but there is no word whether it will be a summer or holiday movie.
Seven is also the magic number for C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia series, though the sequence of the books is widely debated among fans. The first big-screen adaptation, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though the first of the Narnia books to be published, is chronologically the second book in the fantasy series.
It's just-announced sequel, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is often cited either the fourth or fifth book chronologically, though it was the second installment to be printed.
In any case, Disney and Walden Media have again hired Andrew Adamson to produce, direct and write the movie along with original scribes Christopher Markus and Steve McFeeley. The entire principal cast is also set to return.
"Making The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe couldn't have been a more rewarding experience, not just in terms of creative achievement and audience response, but also because of the family we formed during production," said Adamson in a press release.
"Prince Caspian not only gives me an opportunity to challenge my imagination with another classic story, it also allows me to work alongside the many talented artists who contributed to the first film, and of course to collaborate again with [the children]."
Much like Warner Bros. and Harry Potter, the Narnia brain trust is hoping to ramp up production on the sequels before the young lead stars outgrow their characters.
In Prince Caspian, the Prevensie siblings return to Narnia, where 1,000 years have passed since they last left. The children are enlisted to once again help ward off a villain, this time an evil king, and restore the rightful heir to the land's throne, Prince Caspian.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, released just before Christmas, has already grossed $634.4 million worldwide, per BoxOfficeMojo.com, and shows little signs of slacking. The film has yet to fall out of the top 10 at the North American box office. Earlier this week, the film nabbed three Academy Award nominations, for makeup, sound mixing and visual effects.
Prince Caspian is set for a Christmas 2007 release.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Fight the Bullies of Islam
by Michelle Malkin
Posted Feb 01, 2006
Something very important is happening in Denmark -- a showdown over freedom, tolerance, and their wolfish menaces in religious clothing. So, please, turn off "American Idol," put down the Game Boy for a moment, and pay attention. This does affect you.
Last October, a Danish newspaper called the Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The illustrations included various depictions of the prophet Muhammad, some innocuous (Muhammad walking in a pasture) and a few with provocative references to radical Islamic terrorism. One showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban; another had Muhammad wielding a sword in front of two, wide-eyed Muslim women covered in black abayas; another featured a cartoonist hunched over his desk, sweating in fear, as he drew Muhammad in suicide bomb-like apparel.
The newspaper was making a vivid editorial point about European artists' fear of retaliation for drawing any pictures of Muhammad at all. (Remember: It's been a little over a year since Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist gunman over his movie criticizing violence against women in Islamic societies.) A Danish author had reported last fall that he couldn't find an illustrator for a book about Muhammad; the Jyllands-Posten editors rose to the challenge by calling on artists to send in their submissions and publishing the 12 entries they received in response (available at michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm).
The reaction to the cartoons has resoundingly confirmed the fears those artists expressed about radical Islamic intolerance and violence. In fact, the Jyllands-Posten reported, two of the illustrators received death threats and went into hiding. The Pakistani Jamaaat-e-Islami party placed a 5,000-kroner bounty on the cartoonists' heads. A terrorist outfit called the "Glory Brigades" has threatened suicide bombings in Denmark over the artwork.
Despite how relatively tame the pictures actually are (compared not only to Western standards, but also to the vicious, anti-Semitic propaganda regularly churned out by Arab cartoonists), the drawings have literally inflamed the radical Muslim world and its apologists. Eleven Muslim ambassadors to Copenhagen immediately protested to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen demanding retractions from the newspaper. The ambassador of Turkey urged Rasmussen to call the Jyllands-Posten to account for "abusing Islam in the name of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression."
Rasmussen, in a rare show of European spine, steadfastly refused to appease the howlers.
As a result, anti-Denmark sentiment has simmered over the last four months, and it boiled over this past week. In Gaza City, masked Palestinian gunmen representing the so-called Religion of Peace raided a European Union office to protest the cartoons. Muslims burned Danish flags and banners depicting Rasmussen (American and Norwegian flags, as well as portraits of President Bush, were thrown into the fire for good measure). A Danish company, Arla Foods, reports that two of its employees in Saudi Arabia were beaten by angry customers. Danish aid workers are evacuating Gaza in fear for their lives.
The country now faces an international boycott from Muslim nations whose fist-clenched protesters led chants this week of "War on Denmark, Death to Denmark" while firing bullets in the air.
Soft-on-terror mouthpieces are blaming the messenger for the conflagration. Former appeaser-in-chief Bill Clinton condemned the cartoons as "appalling" and "totally outrageous." Where was Clinton's condemnation of the gun-wielding, death-threat-issuing, flag-burning bullies of Islam who have targeted Denmark for jihad?
On the Internet, supporters of free speech have launched a "Buy Danish" campaign in solidarity with the nation under siege. But this isn't just about Denmark. American-based Muslim activists are on an angry campaign to stifle the speech of talk show hosts (most recently, KFI morning host Bill Handel in Los Angeles) who offend their sensibilities. And on Tuesday afternoon in advance of the State of the Union address, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued an ultimatum warning President Bush to "avoid the use of hot-button terms such as 'Islamo-fascism,' 'militant jihadism,' 'Islamic radicalism' or 'totalitarian Islamic empire'" in his speech -- in other words, advising Bush not to identify our enemies for the sake of tolerance and diversity.
First, they came for the cartoonists. Then, they came for the filmmakers and talk show hosts and namers of evil. Next, who knows?
by Michelle Malkin
Posted Feb 01, 2006
Something very important is happening in Denmark -- a showdown over freedom, tolerance, and their wolfish menaces in religious clothing. So, please, turn off "American Idol," put down the Game Boy for a moment, and pay attention. This does affect you.
Last October, a Danish newspaper called the Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The illustrations included various depictions of the prophet Muhammad, some innocuous (Muhammad walking in a pasture) and a few with provocative references to radical Islamic terrorism. One showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban; another had Muhammad wielding a sword in front of two, wide-eyed Muslim women covered in black abayas; another featured a cartoonist hunched over his desk, sweating in fear, as he drew Muhammad in suicide bomb-like apparel.
The newspaper was making a vivid editorial point about European artists' fear of retaliation for drawing any pictures of Muhammad at all. (Remember: It's been a little over a year since Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist gunman over his movie criticizing violence against women in Islamic societies.) A Danish author had reported last fall that he couldn't find an illustrator for a book about Muhammad; the Jyllands-Posten editors rose to the challenge by calling on artists to send in their submissions and publishing the 12 entries they received in response (available at michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm).
The reaction to the cartoons has resoundingly confirmed the fears those artists expressed about radical Islamic intolerance and violence. In fact, the Jyllands-Posten reported, two of the illustrators received death threats and went into hiding. The Pakistani Jamaaat-e-Islami party placed a 5,000-kroner bounty on the cartoonists' heads. A terrorist outfit called the "Glory Brigades" has threatened suicide bombings in Denmark over the artwork.
Despite how relatively tame the pictures actually are (compared not only to Western standards, but also to the vicious, anti-Semitic propaganda regularly churned out by Arab cartoonists), the drawings have literally inflamed the radical Muslim world and its apologists. Eleven Muslim ambassadors to Copenhagen immediately protested to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen demanding retractions from the newspaper. The ambassador of Turkey urged Rasmussen to call the Jyllands-Posten to account for "abusing Islam in the name of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression."
Rasmussen, in a rare show of European spine, steadfastly refused to appease the howlers.
As a result, anti-Denmark sentiment has simmered over the last four months, and it boiled over this past week. In Gaza City, masked Palestinian gunmen representing the so-called Religion of Peace raided a European Union office to protest the cartoons. Muslims burned Danish flags and banners depicting Rasmussen (American and Norwegian flags, as well as portraits of President Bush, were thrown into the fire for good measure). A Danish company, Arla Foods, reports that two of its employees in Saudi Arabia were beaten by angry customers. Danish aid workers are evacuating Gaza in fear for their lives.
The country now faces an international boycott from Muslim nations whose fist-clenched protesters led chants this week of "War on Denmark, Death to Denmark" while firing bullets in the air.
Soft-on-terror mouthpieces are blaming the messenger for the conflagration. Former appeaser-in-chief Bill Clinton condemned the cartoons as "appalling" and "totally outrageous." Where was Clinton's condemnation of the gun-wielding, death-threat-issuing, flag-burning bullies of Islam who have targeted Denmark for jihad?
On the Internet, supporters of free speech have launched a "Buy Danish" campaign in solidarity with the nation under siege. But this isn't just about Denmark. American-based Muslim activists are on an angry campaign to stifle the speech of talk show hosts (most recently, KFI morning host Bill Handel in Los Angeles) who offend their sensibilities. And on Tuesday afternoon in advance of the State of the Union address, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued an ultimatum warning President Bush to "avoid the use of hot-button terms such as 'Islamo-fascism,' 'militant jihadism,' 'Islamic radicalism' or 'totalitarian Islamic empire'" in his speech -- in other words, advising Bush not to identify our enemies for the sake of tolerance and diversity.
First, they came for the cartoonists. Then, they came for the filmmakers and talk show hosts and namers of evil. Next, who knows?
From Human Events:
Bush Offers Conservatives a Reminder
by Chuck Muth
Posted Feb 01, 2006
If nothing else, this year's State of the Union speech, known inside the beltway as SOTU, served as a reminder to many conservatives why they are so darned displeased with much of President Bush's domestic agenda, but also why they had absolutely no choice but assure his re-election over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004.
Fear is a powerful motivator. And unhappy conservatives in 2004 harbored a double-dose it as they trudged to the ballot box. Fear that John Kerry would be in charge of the war on terrorists. And fear that John Kerry would get to appoint Supreme Court justices. Their fears were well-founded and their decision was affirmed in President Bush's speech Tuesday night.
First, the easy part: SCOTUS. Which is Washington-speak for Supreme Court of the United States. The nation's two newest justices were featured and highlighted during the speech. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are clearly superior, well-qualified selections who will not be inclined to "legislate from the bench."
Had John Kerry been elected president in 2004, nothing close to these intellectual and philosophical judges would have been allowed within 200 miles of Democrat's short-list. We need no other evidence of this than the fact that John Kerry declared a filibuster on Sam Alito -- from, as a White House spokesman noted with tongue planted firmly in cheek, a five-star ski resort in Switzerland. Because of George W's re-election, the Supreme Court has now decidedly moved a large step in the "right" direction. That alone was probably worth the vote in 2004.
But more importantly, there's the war on terrorists. After 9-11, there was a very real danger that the American public, absent any immediate or further attacks, would be lulled back into a sense of complacency about terrorism. And it has. Fortunately, the president and his administration have NOT. It would be very easy for George Bush, faced with both public apathy and public opposition, to "go wobbly" on the war on terrorists. To his great credit, he hasn't. And he doesn't apologize for it either. That's the primary reason conservatives sucked it up and cast their ballot for him in 2004. And it was the right decision.
Can you just imagine John Kerry saying the following things in his State of the Union address had he been elected POTUS, which is Washington-speak for President of the United States?
"If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone."
"There is no peace in retreat. And there is no honor in retreat."
"Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning."
"The road to victory is the road that will take our troops home."
"(Decision to) decrease our troop levels (in Iraq)...will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, DC."
"Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy."
".(O)ur nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies, and stand behind the American military in its vital mission."
"If there are people inside our country who are talking with al-Qaeda, we want to know about it -- because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again."
Contrast those statements with John Kerry's professed belief that the United States should only use military force to protect its interests and citizens if it gets permission from the United Nations. Kerry is the king of "retreat and defeat" crowd. He's the head moonbat. Cut-and-run would have become official U.S. policy. The Kerry doctrine would be, to paraphrase a line by actor Jim Carey in the "Liar, Liar" movie, "Hit me again, bin Laden...and this time put some stank on it!"
So yes, this year's SOTU was a clear reminder of the wisdom of keeping Teresa Heinz's "squeeze" out of the Oval office. But it also reminded conservatives of what is driving them nuts with this White House.
Let's start with immigration.
Or I should say, ILLEGAL immigration. The "illegal" part is the key part. And while President Bush talked tough about tightening our borders, he continued to insist that any such legislation include an amnesty component, though he also continues to insist his "guest worker" program is NOT an amnesty program.
The White House doesn't have a tin ear on this issue; it's DEAF. And it isn't just conservatives who want stricter border control without the amnesty...er, guest worker program. Citizens from sea to shining sea of all political stripes simply won't support any kind of "guest worker" program until they FIRST see serious and dramatic changes in how the nation's immigration laws are enforced. Period. End of story.
But there was an even more outrageous statement made by the president on this issue in the speech -- and it shows that this White House still doesn't "get it," or doesn't want to get it. "We hear claims that immigrants are somehow bad for the economy," the president said.
Bull! This is a dishonest cheap shot at opponents of his amnesty proposal. No one has said that immigrants are bad for the economy. However, quite a few folks have said that ILLEGAL immigrants are a drain on local, state and the national economies. And they are. That one word makes a BIG difference. The president clearly was trying to infer that anyone who opposed ILLEGAL immigration is ipso facto anti-immigrant. That kind of false statement and tactic should be below the President of the United States. But it wasn't. How disappointing.
Then there's the spending issue.
The president said, "I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform," a comment which caused Sen. John McCain to clap and bounce his head like Goofy on crack. "And we can tackle this problem together, if you pass the line-item veto.
No, Mr. President. We can tackle this problem if you would just use the veto power you ALREADY possess. You have yet to veto a single spending bill, including that earmark-loaded Porkapalooza highway bill last summer. You didn't need a line-item veto to erase the Bridge to Nowhere. All you needed was a Bic pen. You could have borrowed mine.
Then there was Social Security reform.
"Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," the president said, receiving a hootin'-and-hollerin' standing "O" from the Democrats; his best line of the evening from their perspective. So what does the president propose to do about it THIS year? What any red-blooded politician would do in a similar situation, of course: Kick the can down the street by "creating a commission" to do the job our congress-critters were elected to do. That's leadership?
Back to spending.
Let's see, the president called for "a 22-percent increase in clean energy research," "to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences," a new training program for "70,000 high school teachers, to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science," "add resources to encourage young people to stay in school" and "provide new funding to states" for AIDS medicines.
All fine-sounding programs. But here's the gazillion dollar question: Exactly how much are these new programs going to cost us, and what are the "offsets" going to be to pay for them? Or are we just going to keep adding new spending programs on top of new spending programs without cutting out some old spending programs? Which will mean one of two things: (1) Higher taxes down the road to pay for the new programs, or (2) Bigger and bigger deficits. Neither or which are acceptable to conservatives. So again, where are the offsets?
And finally, education.
The president called for math and science course which are "rigorous enough to compete with other nations." Laudable goal. But does he really believe our government-run public schools can accomplish that? As John Stossel ("Stupid In America") would say, "Gimme a break."
If the president wants "schools that teach every child;" if he wants American students to excel and be able to compete with their peers in other countries; if he wants to assure that American kids get the kind of education which will help them "succeed in life" and thereby "ensure that America succeeds in the world," then he has no choice but to abandon his top-down No Child Left Behind program and push for true, meaningful school choice which empowers parents and breaks up the monopoly and stranglehold the educrats and teachers unions have on our school systems.
And that includes vouchers for EVERYBODY'S kids, not just the kids in the worst of the worse public schools. No matter what Teddy Kennedy says.
So yes, this year's State of the Union speech was a big reminder. A reminder of why we didn't elect John Kerry in 2004. And a reminder of what conservatives need to look for in a new presidential candidate in 2008.
Bush Offers Conservatives a Reminder
by Chuck Muth
Posted Feb 01, 2006
If nothing else, this year's State of the Union speech, known inside the beltway as SOTU, served as a reminder to many conservatives why they are so darned displeased with much of President Bush's domestic agenda, but also why they had absolutely no choice but assure his re-election over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004.
Fear is a powerful motivator. And unhappy conservatives in 2004 harbored a double-dose it as they trudged to the ballot box. Fear that John Kerry would be in charge of the war on terrorists. And fear that John Kerry would get to appoint Supreme Court justices. Their fears were well-founded and their decision was affirmed in President Bush's speech Tuesday night.
First, the easy part: SCOTUS. Which is Washington-speak for Supreme Court of the United States. The nation's two newest justices were featured and highlighted during the speech. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are clearly superior, well-qualified selections who will not be inclined to "legislate from the bench."
Had John Kerry been elected president in 2004, nothing close to these intellectual and philosophical judges would have been allowed within 200 miles of Democrat's short-list. We need no other evidence of this than the fact that John Kerry declared a filibuster on Sam Alito -- from, as a White House spokesman noted with tongue planted firmly in cheek, a five-star ski resort in Switzerland. Because of George W's re-election, the Supreme Court has now decidedly moved a large step in the "right" direction. That alone was probably worth the vote in 2004.
But more importantly, there's the war on terrorists. After 9-11, there was a very real danger that the American public, absent any immediate or further attacks, would be lulled back into a sense of complacency about terrorism. And it has. Fortunately, the president and his administration have NOT. It would be very easy for George Bush, faced with both public apathy and public opposition, to "go wobbly" on the war on terrorists. To his great credit, he hasn't. And he doesn't apologize for it either. That's the primary reason conservatives sucked it up and cast their ballot for him in 2004. And it was the right decision.
Can you just imagine John Kerry saying the following things in his State of the Union address had he been elected POTUS, which is Washington-speak for President of the United States?
"If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone."
"There is no peace in retreat. And there is no honor in retreat."
"Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning."
"The road to victory is the road that will take our troops home."
"(Decision to) decrease our troop levels (in Iraq)...will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, DC."
"Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy."
".(O)ur nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies, and stand behind the American military in its vital mission."
"If there are people inside our country who are talking with al-Qaeda, we want to know about it -- because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again."
Contrast those statements with John Kerry's professed belief that the United States should only use military force to protect its interests and citizens if it gets permission from the United Nations. Kerry is the king of "retreat and defeat" crowd. He's the head moonbat. Cut-and-run would have become official U.S. policy. The Kerry doctrine would be, to paraphrase a line by actor Jim Carey in the "Liar, Liar" movie, "Hit me again, bin Laden...and this time put some stank on it!"
So yes, this year's SOTU was a clear reminder of the wisdom of keeping Teresa Heinz's "squeeze" out of the Oval office. But it also reminded conservatives of what is driving them nuts with this White House.
Let's start with immigration.
Or I should say, ILLEGAL immigration. The "illegal" part is the key part. And while President Bush talked tough about tightening our borders, he continued to insist that any such legislation include an amnesty component, though he also continues to insist his "guest worker" program is NOT an amnesty program.
The White House doesn't have a tin ear on this issue; it's DEAF. And it isn't just conservatives who want stricter border control without the amnesty...er, guest worker program. Citizens from sea to shining sea of all political stripes simply won't support any kind of "guest worker" program until they FIRST see serious and dramatic changes in how the nation's immigration laws are enforced. Period. End of story.
But there was an even more outrageous statement made by the president on this issue in the speech -- and it shows that this White House still doesn't "get it," or doesn't want to get it. "We hear claims that immigrants are somehow bad for the economy," the president said.
Bull! This is a dishonest cheap shot at opponents of his amnesty proposal. No one has said that immigrants are bad for the economy. However, quite a few folks have said that ILLEGAL immigrants are a drain on local, state and the national economies. And they are. That one word makes a BIG difference. The president clearly was trying to infer that anyone who opposed ILLEGAL immigration is ipso facto anti-immigrant. That kind of false statement and tactic should be below the President of the United States. But it wasn't. How disappointing.
Then there's the spending issue.
The president said, "I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform," a comment which caused Sen. John McCain to clap and bounce his head like Goofy on crack. "And we can tackle this problem together, if you pass the line-item veto.
No, Mr. President. We can tackle this problem if you would just use the veto power you ALREADY possess. You have yet to veto a single spending bill, including that earmark-loaded Porkapalooza highway bill last summer. You didn't need a line-item veto to erase the Bridge to Nowhere. All you needed was a Bic pen. You could have borrowed mine.
Then there was Social Security reform.
"Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," the president said, receiving a hootin'-and-hollerin' standing "O" from the Democrats; his best line of the evening from their perspective. So what does the president propose to do about it THIS year? What any red-blooded politician would do in a similar situation, of course: Kick the can down the street by "creating a commission" to do the job our congress-critters were elected to do. That's leadership?
Back to spending.
Let's see, the president called for "a 22-percent increase in clean energy research," "to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences," a new training program for "70,000 high school teachers, to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science," "add resources to encourage young people to stay in school" and "provide new funding to states" for AIDS medicines.
All fine-sounding programs. But here's the gazillion dollar question: Exactly how much are these new programs going to cost us, and what are the "offsets" going to be to pay for them? Or are we just going to keep adding new spending programs on top of new spending programs without cutting out some old spending programs? Which will mean one of two things: (1) Higher taxes down the road to pay for the new programs, or (2) Bigger and bigger deficits. Neither or which are acceptable to conservatives. So again, where are the offsets?
And finally, education.
The president called for math and science course which are "rigorous enough to compete with other nations." Laudable goal. But does he really believe our government-run public schools can accomplish that? As John Stossel ("Stupid In America") would say, "Gimme a break."
If the president wants "schools that teach every child;" if he wants American students to excel and be able to compete with their peers in other countries; if he wants to assure that American kids get the kind of education which will help them "succeed in life" and thereby "ensure that America succeeds in the world," then he has no choice but to abandon his top-down No Child Left Behind program and push for true, meaningful school choice which empowers parents and breaks up the monopoly and stranglehold the educrats and teachers unions have on our school systems.
And that includes vouchers for EVERYBODY'S kids, not just the kids in the worst of the worse public schools. No matter what Teddy Kennedy says.
So yes, this year's State of the Union speech was a big reminder. A reminder of why we didn't elect John Kerry in 2004. And a reminder of what conservatives need to look for in a new presidential candidate in 2008.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Some US troops question Woodruff coverage
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The American media stood up and took notice when an improvised explosive device grievously injured an ABC News crew Sunday.
In Iraq, and throughout the military, there is sympathy and concern for anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, but there is also this question:
"Why do you think this is such a huge story?" wrote an officer stationed in Baqubah, Iraq, Monday via e-mail. "It's a bit stunning to us over here how absolutely dominant the story is on every network and front page. I mean, you'd think we lost the entire 1st Marine Division or something.
"There's a lot of grumbling from guys at all ranks about it. That's a really impolite and impolitic thing to say ... but it's what you would hear over here."
At least 2,242 troops have died in Iraq since the war's start, 1,753 of them killed in action. Another 16,000 have been injured, half of them seriously enough to require evacuation from the battlefield. According to the Pentagon, 60 percent of the deaths are the result of IEDs. IEDs have injured more than 9,200 troops, nine times more than gunshots.
"The point that is currently being made (is that) that press folks are more important than mere military folks," a senior military officer told UPI Tuesday.
The unavoidable consequence of war is this: People are savagely wounded and killed. Soldiers in Iraq watching the coverage on satellite television and reading the news on the Internet are getting the impression that the press has only just discovered this fact.
It's not quite as simple as that, of course. Military personnel often express frustration that the media harps on military casualty reports at the expense of what they consider their successes in Iraq.
However, as it promoted its story on Woodruff and Vogt Monday evening, the local ABC News affiliate in Washington showed a montage of exploding vehicles in Iraq -- footage culled largely from insurgents, who videotape the attacks and post them on Web sites to advertise or magnify their successes.
The families of the 76 troops killed and 533 wounded in action in Iraq from the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland might say the war had already come home.
"It's just a bit frustrating to see something so dramatized that happens every day to some 20-year-old American -- or worse to 10, 30-year-old Iraqi soldiers or cops alongside us. Some of the stories don't even mention the Iraqi casualties in this attack, as if they're meaningless," wrote the officer in Baqubah.
Kathryn Montgomery, a professor at American University's School of Communication, has been thinking the same thing.
"When you see the kind of coverage this story is getting it draws attention to the lack of coverage that hundreds of cases don't get," said Montgomery.
Having a personal connection to someone injured or killed on the battlefield is a relatively rare experience for journalists. Fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population is part of the military; very few reporters have served. The war is comfortably distant, until a fellow journalist is affected. It could have been me, we think. The full weight of war is hard to comprehend until it happens to you, or someone you know, or someone like you.
Incidents like the serious wounding of Woodruff are rare. It has never before happened to any anchorperson for any of the U.S. television networks. Consequently, the event had significant news value.
But many journalists have been injured and killed covering the current conflict in Iraq: According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 61 have died from hostile action since March 2003, many of them Iraqi or Arab and therefore unfamiliar. That compares to 66 journalists killed during the entire Vietnam War, according to the Freedom Forum.
Modern American celebrity culture has certainly magnified the latest incident: Woodruff is recognizable, relatable, respectable. He was selected for his job as co-anchor not just for his undoubted journalistic credentials but also because ABC decided he was the kind of person Americans would want to welcome into their homes every night. His injury, therefore, feels personal to many viewers.
"He's the kind of celebrity we feel we know. That's the mature of these anchors. But we feel we know these people and we care what happens to them," Montgomery said.
That leaves the uncomfortable question about how much the media, or the American public, cares about the injured who are less well known, but in just as dire straits.
ABC News' national broadcast Monday ran coverage on the extremely well equipped field and manned hospital at Balad Air Base, a transportable emergency room with not one but two neurosurgeons on duty, better than most emergency rooms in the United States.
It was a story ABC News became aware of because that was where Woodruff and Vogt were treated. It was not a story ABC necessarily had reason to do before; there was no news hook. However, this was where hundreds of wounded soldiers and Marines had previously been stabilized before being moved to Landstuhl Air Base.
"As we are hearing the details of Bob Woodruff's medical care and how he was shipped to Germany, and we go inside the operating room, (we realize) it's a part of the war that the press has basically ignored," said Montgomery.
In the midst of a two-month reporting trip in Iraq in 2005, I stopped at the Balad emergency hospital, toured it for an hour and interviewed a dozen doctors and nurses. I couldn't find a news hook to write about it, so I didn't.
Woodruff volunteered for the assignment, and he was where he ought to have been because he wanted to report with authority on Iraq. But reporters' trips to Iraq are brief by comparison to soldiers, and we calculate the risks before going out on a mission. Soldiers and Marines do not have the option of demurring, and they are almost guaranteed to see colleagues maimed and killed during their seven to 12 months deployed there. They are as much volunteers as Woodruff in Iraq, and less well paid.
Here is an incomplete list of American service members who were killed by hostile fire in Iraq that same week that Woodruff and Vogt were hit. The Pentagon does not release the names of the injured.
Spc. Brian J. Schoff, 22, of Manchester, Tenn., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 28, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV.
Sgt. David L. Herrera, 26, of Oceanside, Calif., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 28, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
Lance Cpl. Billy D. Brixey Jr., 21, of Ferriday, La., died Jan. 27 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, from wounds received as a result of an improvised explosive device while traveling in a convoy in Afghanistan on Jan. 25.
Lance Cpl. Hugo R. Lopez, 20, of La Habra, Calif., died Jan. 27 at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, from wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Rawah, Iraq, on Nov. 20, 2005.
Staff Sgt. Jerry M. Durbin Jr., 26, of Spring, Texas, died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 25, when an improvised explosive device exploded near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Joshua A. Johnson, 24, of Richford, Vt., died in Ramadi, Iraq, on Jan. 25, when a rocket propelled grenade struck his vehicle during combat operations.
Staff Sgt. Lance M. Chase, 32, of Oklahoma City, Okla., and Pfc. Peter D. Wagler, 18, of Partridge, Kan., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 23, of wounds sustained that day when an improvised explosive device detonated near their M1A2 Abrams tank during patrol operations.
Sgt. Sean H. Miles, 28, of Midlothian, Va., was killed in action Jan. 24 from small arms fire while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Karmah, Iraq.
Sgt. Matthew D. Hunter, 31, of Valley Grove, W.Va., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 23, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Sean H. Miles, 28, of Midlothian, Va., was killed in action Jan. 24 from small arms fire while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Karmah, Iraq.
Tech. Sgt. Jason L. Norton, 32, of Miami, Okla. and Staff Sgt. Brian McElroy, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, were killed Jan. 22, when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device while conducting convoy escort duties in the vicinity of Taji, Iraq.
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The American media stood up and took notice when an improvised explosive device grievously injured an ABC News crew Sunday.
In Iraq, and throughout the military, there is sympathy and concern for anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, but there is also this question:
"Why do you think this is such a huge story?" wrote an officer stationed in Baqubah, Iraq, Monday via e-mail. "It's a bit stunning to us over here how absolutely dominant the story is on every network and front page. I mean, you'd think we lost the entire 1st Marine Division or something.
"There's a lot of grumbling from guys at all ranks about it. That's a really impolite and impolitic thing to say ... but it's what you would hear over here."
At least 2,242 troops have died in Iraq since the war's start, 1,753 of them killed in action. Another 16,000 have been injured, half of them seriously enough to require evacuation from the battlefield. According to the Pentagon, 60 percent of the deaths are the result of IEDs. IEDs have injured more than 9,200 troops, nine times more than gunshots.
"The point that is currently being made (is that) that press folks are more important than mere military folks," a senior military officer told UPI Tuesday.
The unavoidable consequence of war is this: People are savagely wounded and killed. Soldiers in Iraq watching the coverage on satellite television and reading the news on the Internet are getting the impression that the press has only just discovered this fact.
It's not quite as simple as that, of course. Military personnel often express frustration that the media harps on military casualty reports at the expense of what they consider their successes in Iraq.
However, as it promoted its story on Woodruff and Vogt Monday evening, the local ABC News affiliate in Washington showed a montage of exploding vehicles in Iraq -- footage culled largely from insurgents, who videotape the attacks and post them on Web sites to advertise or magnify their successes.
The families of the 76 troops killed and 533 wounded in action in Iraq from the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland might say the war had already come home.
"It's just a bit frustrating to see something so dramatized that happens every day to some 20-year-old American -- or worse to 10, 30-year-old Iraqi soldiers or cops alongside us. Some of the stories don't even mention the Iraqi casualties in this attack, as if they're meaningless," wrote the officer in Baqubah.
Kathryn Montgomery, a professor at American University's School of Communication, has been thinking the same thing.
"When you see the kind of coverage this story is getting it draws attention to the lack of coverage that hundreds of cases don't get," said Montgomery.
Having a personal connection to someone injured or killed on the battlefield is a relatively rare experience for journalists. Fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population is part of the military; very few reporters have served. The war is comfortably distant, until a fellow journalist is affected. It could have been me, we think. The full weight of war is hard to comprehend until it happens to you, or someone you know, or someone like you.
Incidents like the serious wounding of Woodruff are rare. It has never before happened to any anchorperson for any of the U.S. television networks. Consequently, the event had significant news value.
But many journalists have been injured and killed covering the current conflict in Iraq: According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 61 have died from hostile action since March 2003, many of them Iraqi or Arab and therefore unfamiliar. That compares to 66 journalists killed during the entire Vietnam War, according to the Freedom Forum.
Modern American celebrity culture has certainly magnified the latest incident: Woodruff is recognizable, relatable, respectable. He was selected for his job as co-anchor not just for his undoubted journalistic credentials but also because ABC decided he was the kind of person Americans would want to welcome into their homes every night. His injury, therefore, feels personal to many viewers.
"He's the kind of celebrity we feel we know. That's the mature of these anchors. But we feel we know these people and we care what happens to them," Montgomery said.
That leaves the uncomfortable question about how much the media, or the American public, cares about the injured who are less well known, but in just as dire straits.
ABC News' national broadcast Monday ran coverage on the extremely well equipped field and manned hospital at Balad Air Base, a transportable emergency room with not one but two neurosurgeons on duty, better than most emergency rooms in the United States.
It was a story ABC News became aware of because that was where Woodruff and Vogt were treated. It was not a story ABC necessarily had reason to do before; there was no news hook. However, this was where hundreds of wounded soldiers and Marines had previously been stabilized before being moved to Landstuhl Air Base.
"As we are hearing the details of Bob Woodruff's medical care and how he was shipped to Germany, and we go inside the operating room, (we realize) it's a part of the war that the press has basically ignored," said Montgomery.
In the midst of a two-month reporting trip in Iraq in 2005, I stopped at the Balad emergency hospital, toured it for an hour and interviewed a dozen doctors and nurses. I couldn't find a news hook to write about it, so I didn't.
Woodruff volunteered for the assignment, and he was where he ought to have been because he wanted to report with authority on Iraq. But reporters' trips to Iraq are brief by comparison to soldiers, and we calculate the risks before going out on a mission. Soldiers and Marines do not have the option of demurring, and they are almost guaranteed to see colleagues maimed and killed during their seven to 12 months deployed there. They are as much volunteers as Woodruff in Iraq, and less well paid.
Here is an incomplete list of American service members who were killed by hostile fire in Iraq that same week that Woodruff and Vogt were hit. The Pentagon does not release the names of the injured.
Spc. Brian J. Schoff, 22, of Manchester, Tenn., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 28, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV.
Sgt. David L. Herrera, 26, of Oceanside, Calif., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 28, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
Lance Cpl. Billy D. Brixey Jr., 21, of Ferriday, La., died Jan. 27 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, from wounds received as a result of an improvised explosive device while traveling in a convoy in Afghanistan on Jan. 25.
Lance Cpl. Hugo R. Lopez, 20, of La Habra, Calif., died Jan. 27 at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, from wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Rawah, Iraq, on Nov. 20, 2005.
Staff Sgt. Jerry M. Durbin Jr., 26, of Spring, Texas, died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 25, when an improvised explosive device exploded near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Joshua A. Johnson, 24, of Richford, Vt., died in Ramadi, Iraq, on Jan. 25, when a rocket propelled grenade struck his vehicle during combat operations.
Staff Sgt. Lance M. Chase, 32, of Oklahoma City, Okla., and Pfc. Peter D. Wagler, 18, of Partridge, Kan., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 23, of wounds sustained that day when an improvised explosive device detonated near their M1A2 Abrams tank during patrol operations.
Sgt. Sean H. Miles, 28, of Midlothian, Va., was killed in action Jan. 24 from small arms fire while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Karmah, Iraq.
Sgt. Matthew D. Hunter, 31, of Valley Grove, W.Va., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 23, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations.
Sgt. Sean H. Miles, 28, of Midlothian, Va., was killed in action Jan. 24 from small arms fire while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Karmah, Iraq.
Tech. Sgt. Jason L. Norton, 32, of Miami, Okla. and Staff Sgt. Brian McElroy, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, were killed Jan. 22, when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device while conducting convoy escort duties in the vicinity of Taji, Iraq.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Angelina Not Jolie: Starlet "Absolutely Ashamed" of U.S.
By Debbie Schlussel
Hmmm . . . Maybe she should stay there.
Angelina Jolie--new face of St. John fashions and old face of support for Palestinian kiddie terrorists-in-training--said she's "absolutely ashamed" of America at this weekend's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Accompanied by skank-o-phile Mr. Angelina Jolie (Brad Pitt), the actress told the self-absorbed international rich-and-famous beautiful people lefties at the pontification/navel-focusing gathering, that she's hopping mad that the U.S. Congress hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Daily Telegraph quotes the tattoo-notched human bedpost, thusly:
"I am absolutely ashamed" Washington has not formally ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child," she said.
"Being an American I think it's horrible. I think Congress should ratify that. If we really care about that how dare we not ratify it?"
But the treaty is more of the same old Angelina Jolie BS that will make our country--among other things--impotent in fighting illegal aliens. For example, it would force our country to pay for ACLU-style attorneys for the kids of illegal aliens and kid terrorists.
As we've written here, skank-in-chief Jolie has already toured our illegal alien holding facilities demanding lawyers for the kiddies. She did the same in a meeting with then-Secretary of State/Jolie groupie Colin Powell. She pushed for establishment of a National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children and lobbied for the Alien Child Protection Act that provides the same. That's why she was honored at a reception for "kid" refugees at the KUWAITI Embassy.
And, as we've also detailed, she toured Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, cheering on Palestinian kids' songs and plays about getting "revenge" on Jews and "taking back Jerusalem."
And SHE is ashamed of US?! . . . .
By Debbie Schlussel
Hmmm . . . Maybe she should stay there.
Angelina Jolie--new face of St. John fashions and old face of support for Palestinian kiddie terrorists-in-training--said she's "absolutely ashamed" of America at this weekend's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Accompanied by skank-o-phile Mr. Angelina Jolie (Brad Pitt), the actress told the self-absorbed international rich-and-famous beautiful people lefties at the pontification/navel-focusing gathering, that she's hopping mad that the U.S. Congress hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Daily Telegraph quotes the tattoo-notched human bedpost, thusly:
"I am absolutely ashamed" Washington has not formally ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child," she said.
"Being an American I think it's horrible. I think Congress should ratify that. If we really care about that how dare we not ratify it?"
But the treaty is more of the same old Angelina Jolie BS that will make our country--among other things--impotent in fighting illegal aliens. For example, it would force our country to pay for ACLU-style attorneys for the kids of illegal aliens and kid terrorists.
As we've written here, skank-in-chief Jolie has already toured our illegal alien holding facilities demanding lawyers for the kiddies. She did the same in a meeting with then-Secretary of State/Jolie groupie Colin Powell. She pushed for establishment of a National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children and lobbied for the Alien Child Protection Act that provides the same. That's why she was honored at a reception for "kid" refugees at the KUWAITI Embassy.
And, as we've also detailed, she toured Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, cheering on Palestinian kids' songs and plays about getting "revenge" on Jews and "taking back Jerusalem."
And SHE is ashamed of US?! . . . .
From Opinion Journal:
Our Right to Security
Al Qaeda, not the FBI, is the greater threat to America.
BY DEBRA BURLINGAME
Monday, January 30, 2006
One of the most excruciating images of the September 11 attacks is the sight of a man who was trapped in one of the World Trade Center towers. Stripped of his suit jacket and tie and hanging on to what appears to be his office curtains, he is seen trying to lower himself outside a window to the floor immediately below. Frantically kicking his legs in an effort to find a purchase, he loses his grip, and falls.
That horrific scene and thousands more were the images that awakened a sleeping nation on that long, brutal morning. Instead of overwhelming fear or paralyzing self-doubt, the attacks were met with defiance, unity and a sense of moral purpose. Following the heroic example of ordinary citizens who put their fellow human beings and the public good ahead of themselves, the country's leaders cast aside politics and personal ambition and enacted the USA Patriot Act just 45 days later.
A mere four-and-a-half years after victims were forced to choose between being burned alive and jumping from 90 stories, it is frankly shocking that there is anyone in Washington who would politicize the Patriot Act. It is an insult to those who died to tell the American people that the organization posing the greatest threat to their liberty is not al Qaeda but the FBI. Hearing any member of Congress actually crow about "killing" or "playing chicken" with this critical legislation is as disturbing today as it would have been when Ground Zero was still smoldering. Today we know in far greater detail what not having it cost us.
Critics contend that the Patriot Act was rushed into law in a moment of panic. The truth is, the policies and guidelines it corrected had a long, troubled history and everybody who had to deal with them knew it. The "wall" was a tortuous set of rules promulgated by Justice Department lawyers in 1995 and imagined into law by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Conceived as an added protection for civil liberties provisions already built into the statute, it was the wall and its real-world ramifications that hardened the failure-to-share culture between agencies, allowing early information about 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi to fall through the cracks. More perversely, even after the significance of these terrorists and their presence in the country was known by the FBI's intelligence division, the wall prevented it from talking to its own criminal division in order to hunt them down.
Furthermore, it was the impenetrable FISA guidelines and fear of provoking the FISA court's wrath if they were transgressed that discouraged risk-averse FBI supervisors from applying for a FISA search warrant in the Zacarias Moussaoui case. The search, finally conducted on the afternoon of 9/11, produced names and phone numbers of people in the thick of the 9/11 plot, so many fertile clues that investigators believe that at least one airplane, if not all four, could have been saved.
In 2002, FISA's appellate level Court of Review examined the entire statutory scheme for issuing warrants in national security investigations and declared the "wall" a nonsensical piece of legal overkill, based neither on express statutory language nor reasonable interpretation of the FISA statute. The lower court's attempt to micromanage the execution of national security warrants was deemed an assertion of authority which neither Congress or the Constitution granted it. In other words, those lawyers and judges who created, implemented and so assiduously enforced the FISA guidelines were wrong and the American people paid dearly for it.
Despite this history, some members of Congress contend that this process-heavy court is agile enough to rule on quickly needed National Security Agency (NSA) electronic surveillance warrants. This is a dubious claim. Getting a FISA warrant requires a multistep review involving several lawyers at different offices within the Department of Justice. It can take days, weeks, even months if there is a legal dispute between the principals. "Emergency" 72-hour intercepts require sign-offs by NSA lawyers and pre-approval by the attorney general before surveillance can be initiated. Clearly, this is not conducive to what Gen. Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence, calls "hot pursuit" of al Qaeda conversations.
The Senate will soon convene hearings on renewal of the Patriot Act and the NSA terrorist surveillance program. A minority of senators want to gamble with American lives and "fix" national security laws, which they can't show are broken. They seek to eliminate or weaken anti-terrorism measures which take into account that the Cold War and its slow-moving, analog world of landlines and stationary targets is gone. The threat we face today is a completely new paradigm of global terrorist networks operating in a high-velocity digital age using the Web and fiber-optic technology. After four-and-a-half years without another terrorist attack, these senators think we're safe enough to cave in to the same civil liberties lobby that supported that deadly FISA wall in the first place. What if they, like those lawyers and judges, are simply wrong?
Meanwhile, the media, mouthing phrases like "Article II authority," "separation of powers" and "right to privacy," are presenting the issues as if politics have nothing to do with what is driving the subject matter and its coverage. They want us to forget four years of relentless "connect-the-dots" reporting about the missed chances that "could have prevented 9/11." They have discounted the relevance of references to the two 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego. But not too long ago, the media itself reported that phone records revealed that five or six of the hijackers made extensive calls overseas.
NBC News aired an "exclusive" story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda "switchboard" inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, "The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn't deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying." Back then, the NBC script didn't describe it as "spying on Americans." Instead, it was called one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives."
Another example of opportunistic coverage concerns the Patriot Act's "library provision." News reports have given plenty of ink and airtime to the ACLU's unsupported claims that the government has abused this important records provision. But how many Americans know that several of the hijackers repeatedly accessed computers at public libraries in New Jersey and Florida, using personal Internet accounts to carry out the conspiracy? Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi logged on four times at a college library in New Jersey where they purchased airline tickets for AA 77 and later confirmed their reservations on Aug. 30. In light of this, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Justice Department has the time, resources or interest in "investigating the reading habits of law abiding citizens."
We now have the ability to put remote control cameras on the surface of Mars. Why should we allow enemies to annihilate us simply because we lack the clarity or resolve to strike a reasonable balance between a healthy skepticism of government power and the need to take proactive measures to protect ourselves from such threats? The mantra of civil-liberties hard-liners is to "question authority"--even when it is coming to our rescue--then blame that same authority when, hamstrung by civil liberties laws, it fails to save us. The old laws that would prevent FBI agents from stopping the next al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were built on the bedrock of a 35-year history of dark, defeating mistrust. More Americans should not die because the peace-at-any-cost fringe and antigovernment paranoids still fighting the ghost of Nixon hate George Bush more than they fear al Qaeda. Ask the American people what they want. They will say that they want the commander in chief to use all reasonable means to catch the people who are trying to rain terror on our cities. Those who cite the soaring principle of individual liberty do not appear to appreciate that our enemies are not seeking to destroy individuals, but whole populations.
Three weeks before 9/11, an FBI agent with the bin Laden case squad in New York learned that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were in this country. He pleaded with the national security gatekeepers in Washington to launch a nationwide manhunt and was summarily told to stand down. When the FISA Court of Review tore down the wall in 2002, it included in its ruling the agent's Aug. 29, 2001, email to FBI headquarters: "Whatever has happened to this--someday someone will die--and wall or not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems. Let's hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, \[bin Laden\], is getting the most 'protection.'"
The public has listened to years of stinging revelations detailing how the government tied its own hands in stopping the devastating attacks of September 11. It is an irresponsible violation of the public trust for members of Congress to weaken the Patriot Act or jeopardize the NSA terrorist surveillance program because of the same illusory theories that cost us so dearly before, or worse, for rank partisan advantage. If they do, and our country sustains yet another catastrophic attack that these antiterrorism tools could have prevented, the phrase "connect the dots" will resonate again--but this time it will refer to the trail of innocent American blood which leads directly to the Senate floor.
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Our Right to Security
Al Qaeda, not the FBI, is the greater threat to America.
BY DEBRA BURLINGAME
Monday, January 30, 2006
One of the most excruciating images of the September 11 attacks is the sight of a man who was trapped in one of the World Trade Center towers. Stripped of his suit jacket and tie and hanging on to what appears to be his office curtains, he is seen trying to lower himself outside a window to the floor immediately below. Frantically kicking his legs in an effort to find a purchase, he loses his grip, and falls.
That horrific scene and thousands more were the images that awakened a sleeping nation on that long, brutal morning. Instead of overwhelming fear or paralyzing self-doubt, the attacks were met with defiance, unity and a sense of moral purpose. Following the heroic example of ordinary citizens who put their fellow human beings and the public good ahead of themselves, the country's leaders cast aside politics and personal ambition and enacted the USA Patriot Act just 45 days later.
A mere four-and-a-half years after victims were forced to choose between being burned alive and jumping from 90 stories, it is frankly shocking that there is anyone in Washington who would politicize the Patriot Act. It is an insult to those who died to tell the American people that the organization posing the greatest threat to their liberty is not al Qaeda but the FBI. Hearing any member of Congress actually crow about "killing" or "playing chicken" with this critical legislation is as disturbing today as it would have been when Ground Zero was still smoldering. Today we know in far greater detail what not having it cost us.
Critics contend that the Patriot Act was rushed into law in a moment of panic. The truth is, the policies and guidelines it corrected had a long, troubled history and everybody who had to deal with them knew it. The "wall" was a tortuous set of rules promulgated by Justice Department lawyers in 1995 and imagined into law by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Conceived as an added protection for civil liberties provisions already built into the statute, it was the wall and its real-world ramifications that hardened the failure-to-share culture between agencies, allowing early information about 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi to fall through the cracks. More perversely, even after the significance of these terrorists and their presence in the country was known by the FBI's intelligence division, the wall prevented it from talking to its own criminal division in order to hunt them down.
Furthermore, it was the impenetrable FISA guidelines and fear of provoking the FISA court's wrath if they were transgressed that discouraged risk-averse FBI supervisors from applying for a FISA search warrant in the Zacarias Moussaoui case. The search, finally conducted on the afternoon of 9/11, produced names and phone numbers of people in the thick of the 9/11 plot, so many fertile clues that investigators believe that at least one airplane, if not all four, could have been saved.
In 2002, FISA's appellate level Court of Review examined the entire statutory scheme for issuing warrants in national security investigations and declared the "wall" a nonsensical piece of legal overkill, based neither on express statutory language nor reasonable interpretation of the FISA statute. The lower court's attempt to micromanage the execution of national security warrants was deemed an assertion of authority which neither Congress or the Constitution granted it. In other words, those lawyers and judges who created, implemented and so assiduously enforced the FISA guidelines were wrong and the American people paid dearly for it.
Despite this history, some members of Congress contend that this process-heavy court is agile enough to rule on quickly needed National Security Agency (NSA) electronic surveillance warrants. This is a dubious claim. Getting a FISA warrant requires a multistep review involving several lawyers at different offices within the Department of Justice. It can take days, weeks, even months if there is a legal dispute between the principals. "Emergency" 72-hour intercepts require sign-offs by NSA lawyers and pre-approval by the attorney general before surveillance can be initiated. Clearly, this is not conducive to what Gen. Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence, calls "hot pursuit" of al Qaeda conversations.
The Senate will soon convene hearings on renewal of the Patriot Act and the NSA terrorist surveillance program. A minority of senators want to gamble with American lives and "fix" national security laws, which they can't show are broken. They seek to eliminate or weaken anti-terrorism measures which take into account that the Cold War and its slow-moving, analog world of landlines and stationary targets is gone. The threat we face today is a completely new paradigm of global terrorist networks operating in a high-velocity digital age using the Web and fiber-optic technology. After four-and-a-half years without another terrorist attack, these senators think we're safe enough to cave in to the same civil liberties lobby that supported that deadly FISA wall in the first place. What if they, like those lawyers and judges, are simply wrong?
Meanwhile, the media, mouthing phrases like "Article II authority," "separation of powers" and "right to privacy," are presenting the issues as if politics have nothing to do with what is driving the subject matter and its coverage. They want us to forget four years of relentless "connect-the-dots" reporting about the missed chances that "could have prevented 9/11." They have discounted the relevance of references to the two 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego. But not too long ago, the media itself reported that phone records revealed that five or six of the hijackers made extensive calls overseas.
NBC News aired an "exclusive" story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda "switchboard" inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, "The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn't deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying." Back then, the NBC script didn't describe it as "spying on Americans." Instead, it was called one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives."
Another example of opportunistic coverage concerns the Patriot Act's "library provision." News reports have given plenty of ink and airtime to the ACLU's unsupported claims that the government has abused this important records provision. But how many Americans know that several of the hijackers repeatedly accessed computers at public libraries in New Jersey and Florida, using personal Internet accounts to carry out the conspiracy? Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi logged on four times at a college library in New Jersey where they purchased airline tickets for AA 77 and later confirmed their reservations on Aug. 30. In light of this, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Justice Department has the time, resources or interest in "investigating the reading habits of law abiding citizens."
We now have the ability to put remote control cameras on the surface of Mars. Why should we allow enemies to annihilate us simply because we lack the clarity or resolve to strike a reasonable balance between a healthy skepticism of government power and the need to take proactive measures to protect ourselves from such threats? The mantra of civil-liberties hard-liners is to "question authority"--even when it is coming to our rescue--then blame that same authority when, hamstrung by civil liberties laws, it fails to save us. The old laws that would prevent FBI agents from stopping the next al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were built on the bedrock of a 35-year history of dark, defeating mistrust. More Americans should not die because the peace-at-any-cost fringe and antigovernment paranoids still fighting the ghost of Nixon hate George Bush more than they fear al Qaeda. Ask the American people what they want. They will say that they want the commander in chief to use all reasonable means to catch the people who are trying to rain terror on our cities. Those who cite the soaring principle of individual liberty do not appear to appreciate that our enemies are not seeking to destroy individuals, but whole populations.
Three weeks before 9/11, an FBI agent with the bin Laden case squad in New York learned that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were in this country. He pleaded with the national security gatekeepers in Washington to launch a nationwide manhunt and was summarily told to stand down. When the FISA Court of Review tore down the wall in 2002, it included in its ruling the agent's Aug. 29, 2001, email to FBI headquarters: "Whatever has happened to this--someday someone will die--and wall or not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems. Let's hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, \[bin Laden\], is getting the most 'protection.'"
The public has listened to years of stinging revelations detailing how the government tied its own hands in stopping the devastating attacks of September 11. It is an irresponsible violation of the public trust for members of Congress to weaken the Patriot Act or jeopardize the NSA terrorist surveillance program because of the same illusory theories that cost us so dearly before, or worse, for rank partisan advantage. If they do, and our country sustains yet another catastrophic attack that these antiterrorism tools could have prevented, the phrase "connect the dots" will resonate again--but this time it will refer to the trail of innocent American blood which leads directly to the Senate floor.
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
From The Boston Globe:
Hamas victory is good news
By Jeff Jacoby
WESTERN reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.
In the first category was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who moaned that the Hamas defeat of Fatah was a ''very, very, very bad result." In New York, the Anti-Defamation League pronounced the results ''a tremendous setback."
Others insisted that the significance of the election couldn't be known until Hamas decides whether or not to abandon its foremost objective: the liquidation of Israel. In the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller, ''Hamas has a choice to make." It was a line echoed everywhere, from the British Foreign Office to the New York Times editorial page.
Well, put me in a third camp: I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by far the best result that could have been hoped for.
I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched terrorist group, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about the Palestinians.
Some of that delusion was on display at the White House on Thursday, when President Bush painted the Palestinian election as a ''healthy" exercise in civic reform:
''Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo," Bush explained. ''The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories. . . . There's something healthy about a system that does that."
Spare us, Mr. President. If a slate of neo-Nazi skinheads swept to power in a European election, would you say that the voters were seeking ''honest government" and ''services"? Palestinians are not stupid, and it insults their intelligence to pretend that when they vote to empower a genocidal organization with a platform straight out of ''Mein Kampf," what they're really after is better healthcare. Islamist extremism isn't needed to fix Palestinian hospitals any more than fascism was needed to make Italian trains run on time in the 1920s. If Palestinians turned out en masse to elect a party that unapologetically stands for hatred and mass murder, it's a safe bet that hatred and mass murder had something to do with the turnout.
By the same token, Hamas's new duties are not going to turn it into a moderate group of diligent civil servants. When violent Islamists win political power, their brutality and zealotry do not diminish. (See Khomeini, Ayatollah and Taliban, Afghan). The notion that Hamas now has ''a choice to make" is just another example of the delusional thinking that is so pervasive when it comes to the Palestinian Authority.
In his remarks on Thursday, Bush went on to say that he didn't ''see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform" or ''if your party has got an armed wing" and that Hamas is therefore ''a party with which we will not deal." If that means that the Bush administration will shun the new Hamas government as it once shunned Yasser Arafat, well and good. But why was Mahmoud Abbas treated any differently? Like Hamas, Fatah -- the PLO faction Abbas and Arafat co-founded 45 years ago -- advocates Israel's destruction in its basic charter. Like Hamas, Fatah has an ''armed wing" -- the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- that is guilty of horrific terror attacks. Fatah's emblem shows crossed rifles against a map of ''Palestine" that depicts all of Israel; on the Hamas emblem, the map is the same, but the crossed weapons are swords. The only important difference between the ousted Fatah party and the incoming Hamas leadership is that for PR purposes the former sometimes pretended to accept Israel's right to exist, while the latter is openly and unabashedly committed to Israel's elimination.
Yet that is why the Hamas landslide is good news. It will now be much harder to wish away the unpleasant fact that after a dozen years of PLO misrule, Palestinian society is deeply dysfunctional, steeped in hatred and violence. All but the willfully blind can now see that the Palestinian Authority is no ''partner in peace." Until it is decisively defeated and thoroughly detoxified, the Palestinian people will never enjoy the blessings of liberty and decent governance. Ironically, the ascendancy of Hamas may have brought that day a little closer.
Hamas victory is good news
By Jeff Jacoby
WESTERN reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.
In the first category was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who moaned that the Hamas defeat of Fatah was a ''very, very, very bad result." In New York, the Anti-Defamation League pronounced the results ''a tremendous setback."
Others insisted that the significance of the election couldn't be known until Hamas decides whether or not to abandon its foremost objective: the liquidation of Israel. In the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller, ''Hamas has a choice to make." It was a line echoed everywhere, from the British Foreign Office to the New York Times editorial page.
Well, put me in a third camp: I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by far the best result that could have been hoped for.
I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched terrorist group, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about the Palestinians.
Some of that delusion was on display at the White House on Thursday, when President Bush painted the Palestinian election as a ''healthy" exercise in civic reform:
''Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo," Bush explained. ''The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories. . . . There's something healthy about a system that does that."
Spare us, Mr. President. If a slate of neo-Nazi skinheads swept to power in a European election, would you say that the voters were seeking ''honest government" and ''services"? Palestinians are not stupid, and it insults their intelligence to pretend that when they vote to empower a genocidal organization with a platform straight out of ''Mein Kampf," what they're really after is better healthcare. Islamist extremism isn't needed to fix Palestinian hospitals any more than fascism was needed to make Italian trains run on time in the 1920s. If Palestinians turned out en masse to elect a party that unapologetically stands for hatred and mass murder, it's a safe bet that hatred and mass murder had something to do with the turnout.
By the same token, Hamas's new duties are not going to turn it into a moderate group of diligent civil servants. When violent Islamists win political power, their brutality and zealotry do not diminish. (See Khomeini, Ayatollah and Taliban, Afghan). The notion that Hamas now has ''a choice to make" is just another example of the delusional thinking that is so pervasive when it comes to the Palestinian Authority.
In his remarks on Thursday, Bush went on to say that he didn't ''see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform" or ''if your party has got an armed wing" and that Hamas is therefore ''a party with which we will not deal." If that means that the Bush administration will shun the new Hamas government as it once shunned Yasser Arafat, well and good. But why was Mahmoud Abbas treated any differently? Like Hamas, Fatah -- the PLO faction Abbas and Arafat co-founded 45 years ago -- advocates Israel's destruction in its basic charter. Like Hamas, Fatah has an ''armed wing" -- the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- that is guilty of horrific terror attacks. Fatah's emblem shows crossed rifles against a map of ''Palestine" that depicts all of Israel; on the Hamas emblem, the map is the same, but the crossed weapons are swords. The only important difference between the ousted Fatah party and the incoming Hamas leadership is that for PR purposes the former sometimes pretended to accept Israel's right to exist, while the latter is openly and unabashedly committed to Israel's elimination.
Yet that is why the Hamas landslide is good news. It will now be much harder to wish away the unpleasant fact that after a dozen years of PLO misrule, Palestinian society is deeply dysfunctional, steeped in hatred and violence. All but the willfully blind can now see that the Palestinian Authority is no ''partner in peace." Until it is decisively defeated and thoroughly detoxified, the Palestinian people will never enjoy the blessings of liberty and decent governance. Ironically, the ascendancy of Hamas may have brought that day a little closer.
Democracy as Spinach
By William F. Buckley
So ... Democracy rides again.
What disconcerts so is the obstinacy of the democratists in believing that good, heavy doses of democracy will bring eudaemonia and peace everlasting.
The most that can be said with confidence about democracy is that certain satisfactions are given to those who practice it. If three-quarters of your gang voted for this kind of government, then you live with this kind of government. If the citizens are mad at other governments, they have the option of going to war against them, which non-democratic governments often do. But if there is self-rule, they have only themselves to blame, and relief is in their own hands at the next election.
What happens between yesterday, when the Palestinians voted in Hamas, and the day after tomorrow, when Hamas is voted out, is the question before the house. We will, everyone hopes, struggle through, but it's worth remembering that democracy got us into this mess. Not because democracy is to be doctrinally rejected, but because democracy simply cannot be trusted always to do the right thing, in Palestine, in Bolivia, in Venezuela, in Weimar Germany, or in Iraq.
There are three alternative roads ahead. Up against reality, Hamas leaders can temporize. But David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post warns us: "Some may seek comfort in the belief that an ascent to government could prompt a greater sense of responsibility, a move to moderation. But Hamas' intolerance is based on a perceived religious imperative. No believing Muslim, in the Hamas conception, can be reconciled to Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. To deny that, for Hamas, is blasphemy. And that is the ideology to which the Palestinian people, for whatever reason and by their own free hand, have just tied their fate. That is the guiding ideology with which Israel and the West will now have to grapple."
So what is to be done if doctrinal orthodoxy continues to guide Hamas?
In words of one syllable, a fight to the death. We would need to stimulate latent forces of moderation, and there are some, notably in Egypt, who do not desire such orthodoxy as would appeal to the Muslim Brotherhood in their own country. Saudi Arabia and Jordan would not want a situation in Palestine such as the Hezbollah brought on in Lebanon. And it is always reassuring for the Israelis to know that, at least for the immediate future, they are invulnerable.
A second road would be an imaginative and resourceful Israeli response to the election events. General Sharon put his program for disengaging from the PLO deep in his pocket, and that program continues to reside in the pocket of a prime minister dispossessed of mind and authority. Sharon thought with mailed fist to encourage settlements, and then, with mailed fist, to disassemble some of them, leaving Gaza at liberty to claw its way back to independence -- under the leadership of a Hamas government.
And Sharon constructed that wall, which winds in and out of Palestine, blocking some Palestinians who are terrorists, and reminding many Palestinians who are not terrorist-minded of life on the impotent side of a wall. It is entirely justified to wonder whether Hamas would have carried the day so decisively on Thursday if the wall had not been there.
A third way would spring from Hamas' recognition that, having power, it may be necessary to reject the use of it. Hamas is left without the alternative of a Fatah government to blame for every national inconvenience or blow to the pride. It is one thing flatly to reject the Oslo Accords and the road map and progressive measures toward a Palestinian state. But Hamas in power, as distinguished from Hamas in the parliamentary wings, has to settle for realistic progress, or else turn back to war every day, with an enemy that is brighter, better trained, better armed, and with access to definitive U.S. support. These are alternatives that require more exertions than waving green flags out the windows and on the streets.
It's wrong to assume that the mere creation of democracy will bring reasonable conduct. But it is always correct that the burden of ruling imposes restraints.
By William F. Buckley
So ... Democracy rides again.
What disconcerts so is the obstinacy of the democratists in believing that good, heavy doses of democracy will bring eudaemonia and peace everlasting.
The most that can be said with confidence about democracy is that certain satisfactions are given to those who practice it. If three-quarters of your gang voted for this kind of government, then you live with this kind of government. If the citizens are mad at other governments, they have the option of going to war against them, which non-democratic governments often do. But if there is self-rule, they have only themselves to blame, and relief is in their own hands at the next election.
What happens between yesterday, when the Palestinians voted in Hamas, and the day after tomorrow, when Hamas is voted out, is the question before the house. We will, everyone hopes, struggle through, but it's worth remembering that democracy got us into this mess. Not because democracy is to be doctrinally rejected, but because democracy simply cannot be trusted always to do the right thing, in Palestine, in Bolivia, in Venezuela, in Weimar Germany, or in Iraq.
There are three alternative roads ahead. Up against reality, Hamas leaders can temporize. But David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post warns us: "Some may seek comfort in the belief that an ascent to government could prompt a greater sense of responsibility, a move to moderation. But Hamas' intolerance is based on a perceived religious imperative. No believing Muslim, in the Hamas conception, can be reconciled to Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. To deny that, for Hamas, is blasphemy. And that is the ideology to which the Palestinian people, for whatever reason and by their own free hand, have just tied their fate. That is the guiding ideology with which Israel and the West will now have to grapple."
So what is to be done if doctrinal orthodoxy continues to guide Hamas?
In words of one syllable, a fight to the death. We would need to stimulate latent forces of moderation, and there are some, notably in Egypt, who do not desire such orthodoxy as would appeal to the Muslim Brotherhood in their own country. Saudi Arabia and Jordan would not want a situation in Palestine such as the Hezbollah brought on in Lebanon. And it is always reassuring for the Israelis to know that, at least for the immediate future, they are invulnerable.
A second road would be an imaginative and resourceful Israeli response to the election events. General Sharon put his program for disengaging from the PLO deep in his pocket, and that program continues to reside in the pocket of a prime minister dispossessed of mind and authority. Sharon thought with mailed fist to encourage settlements, and then, with mailed fist, to disassemble some of them, leaving Gaza at liberty to claw its way back to independence -- under the leadership of a Hamas government.
And Sharon constructed that wall, which winds in and out of Palestine, blocking some Palestinians who are terrorists, and reminding many Palestinians who are not terrorist-minded of life on the impotent side of a wall. It is entirely justified to wonder whether Hamas would have carried the day so decisively on Thursday if the wall had not been there.
A third way would spring from Hamas' recognition that, having power, it may be necessary to reject the use of it. Hamas is left without the alternative of a Fatah government to blame for every national inconvenience or blow to the pride. It is one thing flatly to reject the Oslo Accords and the road map and progressive measures toward a Palestinian state. But Hamas in power, as distinguished from Hamas in the parliamentary wings, has to settle for realistic progress, or else turn back to war every day, with an enemy that is brighter, better trained, better armed, and with access to definitive U.S. support. These are alternatives that require more exertions than waving green flags out the windows and on the streets.
It's wrong to assume that the mere creation of democracy will bring reasonable conduct. But it is always correct that the burden of ruling imposes restraints.
Does Democracy Boulevard Lead to Islamism?
By Pat Buchanan
The neoconservatives who dreamed up the Bush Doctrine -- promoting "democracy" would be the U.S. mission in the Middle East -- may be about to hold yet another "Seconds Thoughts" conference.
Certainly, Israel must be having second thoughts on the folly of having yielded to U.S. pressure and allowed Hamas to participate in elections. For Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and employs suicide-bomb attacks on civilians, has just won a sweeping political and moral victory in Palestine.
Freedom and democracy are on the march, says President Bush. Perhaps. But there is no doubt Islamism is on the march.
Not only is Hamas now the voice of Palestinian nationalism, Hezbollah used elections to establish itself as the political power in south Lebanon. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood swept over half the parliamentary seats it was allowed to contest and appears the probable beneficiary to the political estate of President Mubarak.
In the Iraqi elections, Shia militants wiped up the floor with secularists like ex-Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi. In Iran, the dark horse who stormed to victory in the 2005 elections is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose commentaries on the Holocaust and wiping Israel "off the map" have even the Ayatollah nervous. In the two provinces of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, pro-Taliban fundamentalists swept the boards in recent elections.
That Zogby poll of 3,900 people in six Arab nations which revealed rampant distrust of U.S. motives and widespread detestation of Bush and Sharon appears to have been on the mark.
But what do we do now?
For Israel, it is an uncomplicated question. Both the "peace process" and the "roadmap," agreed to by the European Union, United Nations, Russia and the United States, have long been, as Sharon aide Dov Weinglass put it, in "formaldehyde."
Israel will not negotiate with a government that includes Hamas and will proceed on the course set by Sharon after Bush gave him a green light in April 2004. Having pulled out of Gaza, Israel will wall in all Jewish settlements surrounding Jerusalem and the city itself, deny Palestinians any right of return, annex the choicest cuts of the West Bank and leave the shank to the Palestinians.
No one -- not the Palestinians, not the Arab world, not the EU -- will accept this Bantustan solution, except the Americans. But that is all that counts with Israelis -- be it Labor, Likud or Kadima.
What will Bush do? Nothing. Any attempt to force Israel to negotiate on settlements or East Jerusalem would put the White House in a withering crossfire. The Christian right and neocons would accuse him of a "Munich," while Democrats and the Israeli lobby savage him for forcing Israel to "negotiate with terrorists."
Down deep, Bush probably agrees with them.
But if Israel's course seems clear -- proceed to a separation of the two peoples, wall herself in and rely on U.S. moral, military and materiel support indefinitely -- what should U.S. policy be?
Having touted elections as America's roadmap to peace, Bush cannot credibly say we will only accept elected leaders who share our views and values. But he should demand, as we did after the Oslo Accords, that every party to any negotiation renounce terror.
As for negotiating with terrorists like Hamas, is this not just what Bush did when he agreed to lift sanctions on Khadafi, who had been behind the air massacre of Pan Am 103? In return, Bush got a commitment from Khadafi to compensate the victims' families, surrender his weapons of mass destruction and forego any right to build such weapons.
During the presidential campaign, Bush's men touted the Libya agreement as a diplomatic triumph that proved the mailed fist in Iraq had induced moderation in the Arab world.
As the situation is evolving in the Middle East, Bush is going to have to modify or abandon his democracy crusade, or eat some crow and start talking to the Islamists who get elected. As for Israel, she may believe isolationism and reliance on America is a winning strategy. Demography says otherwise.
Here are the latest UN population projections for mid-century for Israel's neighbors, friend and foe.
Nation ---- Population in 2050
Lebanon ---- 5 million
West Bank, Gaza ---- 10 million
Jordan ---- 10 million
Syria ---- 36 million
Saudi Arabia ---- 49 million
Iraq ---- 64 million
Iran ---- 102 million
Egypt ---- 126 million
Of Jordan's 10 million, 6 million will be Palestinians. Of Israel's estimated population of 10 million, 2.5 million to 3 million will be Arabs.
What recent elections tell us is that Arab peoples believe they have been misruled by corrupt leaders, with U.S. support, and the Palestinians have been brutalized, with U.S. support, and their only hope lies in Islamic militants who understand this.
Whether Israel talks to these folks, or slams the door in their faces, is her call. But if we do not wish to be as isolated, we have to talk to them. For, in the Middle East, time does not appear to be on our side.
By Pat Buchanan
The neoconservatives who dreamed up the Bush Doctrine -- promoting "democracy" would be the U.S. mission in the Middle East -- may be about to hold yet another "Seconds Thoughts" conference.
Certainly, Israel must be having second thoughts on the folly of having yielded to U.S. pressure and allowed Hamas to participate in elections. For Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and employs suicide-bomb attacks on civilians, has just won a sweeping political and moral victory in Palestine.
Freedom and democracy are on the march, says President Bush. Perhaps. But there is no doubt Islamism is on the march.
Not only is Hamas now the voice of Palestinian nationalism, Hezbollah used elections to establish itself as the political power in south Lebanon. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood swept over half the parliamentary seats it was allowed to contest and appears the probable beneficiary to the political estate of President Mubarak.
In the Iraqi elections, Shia militants wiped up the floor with secularists like ex-Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi. In Iran, the dark horse who stormed to victory in the 2005 elections is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose commentaries on the Holocaust and wiping Israel "off the map" have even the Ayatollah nervous. In the two provinces of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, pro-Taliban fundamentalists swept the boards in recent elections.
That Zogby poll of 3,900 people in six Arab nations which revealed rampant distrust of U.S. motives and widespread detestation of Bush and Sharon appears to have been on the mark.
But what do we do now?
For Israel, it is an uncomplicated question. Both the "peace process" and the "roadmap," agreed to by the European Union, United Nations, Russia and the United States, have long been, as Sharon aide Dov Weinglass put it, in "formaldehyde."
Israel will not negotiate with a government that includes Hamas and will proceed on the course set by Sharon after Bush gave him a green light in April 2004. Having pulled out of Gaza, Israel will wall in all Jewish settlements surrounding Jerusalem and the city itself, deny Palestinians any right of return, annex the choicest cuts of the West Bank and leave the shank to the Palestinians.
No one -- not the Palestinians, not the Arab world, not the EU -- will accept this Bantustan solution, except the Americans. But that is all that counts with Israelis -- be it Labor, Likud or Kadima.
What will Bush do? Nothing. Any attempt to force Israel to negotiate on settlements or East Jerusalem would put the White House in a withering crossfire. The Christian right and neocons would accuse him of a "Munich," while Democrats and the Israeli lobby savage him for forcing Israel to "negotiate with terrorists."
Down deep, Bush probably agrees with them.
But if Israel's course seems clear -- proceed to a separation of the two peoples, wall herself in and rely on U.S. moral, military and materiel support indefinitely -- what should U.S. policy be?
Having touted elections as America's roadmap to peace, Bush cannot credibly say we will only accept elected leaders who share our views and values. But he should demand, as we did after the Oslo Accords, that every party to any negotiation renounce terror.
As for negotiating with terrorists like Hamas, is this not just what Bush did when he agreed to lift sanctions on Khadafi, who had been behind the air massacre of Pan Am 103? In return, Bush got a commitment from Khadafi to compensate the victims' families, surrender his weapons of mass destruction and forego any right to build such weapons.
During the presidential campaign, Bush's men touted the Libya agreement as a diplomatic triumph that proved the mailed fist in Iraq had induced moderation in the Arab world.
As the situation is evolving in the Middle East, Bush is going to have to modify or abandon his democracy crusade, or eat some crow and start talking to the Islamists who get elected. As for Israel, she may believe isolationism and reliance on America is a winning strategy. Demography says otherwise.
Here are the latest UN population projections for mid-century for Israel's neighbors, friend and foe.
Nation ---- Population in 2050
Lebanon ---- 5 million
West Bank, Gaza ---- 10 million
Jordan ---- 10 million
Syria ---- 36 million
Saudi Arabia ---- 49 million
Iraq ---- 64 million
Iran ---- 102 million
Egypt ---- 126 million
Of Jordan's 10 million, 6 million will be Palestinians. Of Israel's estimated population of 10 million, 2.5 million to 3 million will be Arabs.
What recent elections tell us is that Arab peoples believe they have been misruled by corrupt leaders, with U.S. support, and the Palestinians have been brutalized, with U.S. support, and their only hope lies in Islamic militants who understand this.
Whether Israel talks to these folks, or slams the door in their faces, is her call. But if we do not wish to be as isolated, we have to talk to them. For, in the Middle East, time does not appear to be on our side.
Immigrants need to embrace U.S. culture
J.D. Hayworth
U.S. CONGRESSMAN
Jan. 29, 2006
Assimilation is the key to any successful immigration policy, and no country has succeeded in assimilating immigrants as well as the United States. Turning immigrants into Americans didn't happen by accident but was the result of a comprehensive national effort called Americanization.
Sadly, Americanization has given way to an insidious multiculturalism. In the mid-1980s, the late Alistair Cooke, himself an immigrant, lamented the "general movement in the United States to unmelt the melting pot, to break down the goulash of the pot into its ethnic ingredients: to return, in short, to the immigrant compounds which Teddy Roosevelt was determined to fuse into one nation."
With each passing day America is becoming more divided by ethnicity, race, language and income, a situation only exacerbated by illegal immigration. We all had a good laugh when Al Gore mangled the translation of E pluribus unum. "Out of one, many," he goofed. But maybe he was just ahead of his time.
Hispanic immigrants have a harder time assimilating than other groups largely because the flood of illegal immigrants reinforces cultural and linguistic connections to "the old country." It doesn't help that they are force-fed a steady diet of multiculturalism and told by their own community leaders and our own anti-American elites that America is racist, sexist, intolerant and genocidal. And make no mistake, multiculturalism is the enemy of assimilation, and it can have devastating consequences, as we saw with riots outside Paris and the subway bombers in London.
Mark Steyn explains: "The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated. They ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest, the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what multiculturalism is."
The Islamists who rioted outside Paris last year weren't merely "disadvantaged youths" demanding more welfare. They were demanding that parts of France be recognized as Islamic territory and that French law be replaced by Islamic law, or sharia. They chanted "Allahou akhbar" while torching cars. They were not and are not interested in accommodation with French society; they want to bury it. France isn't alone; other Western Europe countries that welcomed large numbers of Muslim immigrants without demanding that they assimilate are in the same boat. Tragically, it is too late to do anything about it now.
As Dyab Abou Jahjah, leader of the Brussels-based Arab League says: "We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here, and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the Westerners."
In his book The West's Last Chance, Tony Blankley quotes an equally belligerent radical German Islamist who declares: "Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We (Muslims) will say what we want. We'll live how we want. It's outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture."
How different are these radical Islamists from the Mexican politicians who push for a Mexico without borders and undermine our efforts at assimilation? From the multi-culti elites who oppose English-language education? Or from the radical left-wingers preaching "reconquista?" Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, declared in 1997 that changing demographics in the United States means it's only a matter of time before "we shall overwhelm!" What makes his statement any less provocative than the radical Islamists quoted above?
Over three decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked, "To what does one assimilate in modern America?" In Henry Ford's day, we had a great big list of things. But if multiculturalism and diversity are valued above all else, the answer is you can assimilate however you want, or not at all. It's up to you. In France, they have a minister of social cohesion. How long before we need one here?
Assimilation - and by that I mean Americanization in the early 20th-century sense of immersing immigrants in English, American patriotism and traditional American values - was good for immigrants and good for America. It cannot be replaced by the multicultural whim of the day. Citizenship is serious business, and we need to start treating it as such. We can begin by making English the official language of the United States. As Teddy Roosevelt said, "We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans."
Ironically, among the biggest supporters of acculturation and learning English are earlier Hispanic immigrants who successfully assimilated. They embrace their Americanism while still holding onto their roots. They understand that English is the language of success. They are appalled at Spanish-language advocates who believe that speaking English somehow insults their Hispanic ethnic identity.
A fascinating story in The Arizona Republic illustrates the growing gulf between assimilated Hispanics and unassimilated newcomers in a central Phoenix neighborhood. A community action officer with the Phoenix police says: "(Longtime Hispanic residents) feel like the neighborhood is being overrun by immigrants. . . . A lot of them are not happy with the way their neighborhood has changed." Meanwhile, the immigrants complain that assimilated Hispanics "have betrayed their country by speaking English and not celebrating the Mexican holidays." Said one: "Our Mexican-Americans are even racist against our own people." Doesn't that just about say it all?
Let me end with a letter from a constituent, a World War II veteran and member of what Tom Brokaw termed the "Greatest Generation."
He wrote: "Unrestricted immigration is destroying our sovereignty, our American culture, our traditions and our unity as united states. We are a nation of immigrants and descendant's of immigrants. The flame under our 'melting pot' has gone out and our country's invasion by illegal immigrants is overwhelming assimilation. If our porous borders are not closed and all illegals deported, we shall fracture as a united nation geographically. We will always have immigration, but it must be legal and strictly regulated."
To the multi-culti elites, that American hero is a bigot. To me, he is a patriot. I'm working to ensure his views, which are the views of an overwhelming majority of Americans, break through the walls of silence in Congress, where the issue of America's dissolving borders needs urgent action before we lose the country that the Greatest Generation fought to defend.
J.D. Hayworth, a Republican, represents Arizona's 5th Congressional District This column is adapted from his new book, "Whatever It Takes.'
J.D. Hayworth
U.S. CONGRESSMAN
Jan. 29, 2006
Assimilation is the key to any successful immigration policy, and no country has succeeded in assimilating immigrants as well as the United States. Turning immigrants into Americans didn't happen by accident but was the result of a comprehensive national effort called Americanization.
Sadly, Americanization has given way to an insidious multiculturalism. In the mid-1980s, the late Alistair Cooke, himself an immigrant, lamented the "general movement in the United States to unmelt the melting pot, to break down the goulash of the pot into its ethnic ingredients: to return, in short, to the immigrant compounds which Teddy Roosevelt was determined to fuse into one nation."
With each passing day America is becoming more divided by ethnicity, race, language and income, a situation only exacerbated by illegal immigration. We all had a good laugh when Al Gore mangled the translation of E pluribus unum. "Out of one, many," he goofed. But maybe he was just ahead of his time.
Hispanic immigrants have a harder time assimilating than other groups largely because the flood of illegal immigrants reinforces cultural and linguistic connections to "the old country." It doesn't help that they are force-fed a steady diet of multiculturalism and told by their own community leaders and our own anti-American elites that America is racist, sexist, intolerant and genocidal. And make no mistake, multiculturalism is the enemy of assimilation, and it can have devastating consequences, as we saw with riots outside Paris and the subway bombers in London.
Mark Steyn explains: "The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated. They ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest, the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what multiculturalism is."
The Islamists who rioted outside Paris last year weren't merely "disadvantaged youths" demanding more welfare. They were demanding that parts of France be recognized as Islamic territory and that French law be replaced by Islamic law, or sharia. They chanted "Allahou akhbar" while torching cars. They were not and are not interested in accommodation with French society; they want to bury it. France isn't alone; other Western Europe countries that welcomed large numbers of Muslim immigrants without demanding that they assimilate are in the same boat. Tragically, it is too late to do anything about it now.
As Dyab Abou Jahjah, leader of the Brussels-based Arab League says: "We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here, and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the Westerners."
In his book The West's Last Chance, Tony Blankley quotes an equally belligerent radical German Islamist who declares: "Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We (Muslims) will say what we want. We'll live how we want. It's outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture."
How different are these radical Islamists from the Mexican politicians who push for a Mexico without borders and undermine our efforts at assimilation? From the multi-culti elites who oppose English-language education? Or from the radical left-wingers preaching "reconquista?" Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, declared in 1997 that changing demographics in the United States means it's only a matter of time before "we shall overwhelm!" What makes his statement any less provocative than the radical Islamists quoted above?
Over three decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked, "To what does one assimilate in modern America?" In Henry Ford's day, we had a great big list of things. But if multiculturalism and diversity are valued above all else, the answer is you can assimilate however you want, or not at all. It's up to you. In France, they have a minister of social cohesion. How long before we need one here?
Assimilation - and by that I mean Americanization in the early 20th-century sense of immersing immigrants in English, American patriotism and traditional American values - was good for immigrants and good for America. It cannot be replaced by the multicultural whim of the day. Citizenship is serious business, and we need to start treating it as such. We can begin by making English the official language of the United States. As Teddy Roosevelt said, "We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans."
Ironically, among the biggest supporters of acculturation and learning English are earlier Hispanic immigrants who successfully assimilated. They embrace their Americanism while still holding onto their roots. They understand that English is the language of success. They are appalled at Spanish-language advocates who believe that speaking English somehow insults their Hispanic ethnic identity.
A fascinating story in The Arizona Republic illustrates the growing gulf between assimilated Hispanics and unassimilated newcomers in a central Phoenix neighborhood. A community action officer with the Phoenix police says: "(Longtime Hispanic residents) feel like the neighborhood is being overrun by immigrants. . . . A lot of them are not happy with the way their neighborhood has changed." Meanwhile, the immigrants complain that assimilated Hispanics "have betrayed their country by speaking English and not celebrating the Mexican holidays." Said one: "Our Mexican-Americans are even racist against our own people." Doesn't that just about say it all?
Let me end with a letter from a constituent, a World War II veteran and member of what Tom Brokaw termed the "Greatest Generation."
He wrote: "Unrestricted immigration is destroying our sovereignty, our American culture, our traditions and our unity as united states. We are a nation of immigrants and descendant's of immigrants. The flame under our 'melting pot' has gone out and our country's invasion by illegal immigrants is overwhelming assimilation. If our porous borders are not closed and all illegals deported, we shall fracture as a united nation geographically. We will always have immigration, but it must be legal and strictly regulated."
To the multi-culti elites, that American hero is a bigot. To me, he is a patriot. I'm working to ensure his views, which are the views of an overwhelming majority of Americans, break through the walls of silence in Congress, where the issue of America's dissolving borders needs urgent action before we lose the country that the Greatest Generation fought to defend.
J.D. Hayworth, a Republican, represents Arizona's 5th Congressional District This column is adapted from his new book, "Whatever It Takes.'
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