Wizblog

"Joy Unrestrained" - A New Home on the Heights

100 years ago, my grandfather wasn't just the happiest man in Cleveland. To hear him tell it, he was the happiest man on earth. Winning a new house the same week he becomes a father for the first time can do that for a man.

That's him in the front yard, pointing to the new bungalow he had just won as first prize in a local newspaper contest. He was grateful for his good fortune, but then again, they say luck is where preparedness and opportunity meet.

In June of 1912, Albert D. ("Bert") Wismar was a married 29-year old, and the proud father of a newborn baby girl. He worked as an accountant at the Struthers Furnace company in their downtown Cleveland offices. By all accounts, Wismar was a hard worker, and he and his wife Sadie tried to save all they could, with an eye toward eventually buying a home of their own.

Wismar had moved to Cleveland from the family farm near Bowling Green, Ohio. The small town of Custar was the location his grandfather had chosen to buy land when he came to America from Germany in 1866. Bert's dad Fred was a teenager when the family arrived from the old country to farm in Ohio, and Bert was the fifth of Fred's ten children.

Uphill Both Ways

Bert was the only one of Fred Wismar's kids to pursue higher education, and to do it he had to regularly bicycle the 80 miles from Custar to Tri-State University in Angola, Indiana for his teacher training. After working as a teacher in Wood County for a couple years, Bert came to the big city around the turn of the century, and took up accounting, eventually working his way into a lead accounting position with the furnace company.

The family shared a double house on Preston Rd. in East Cleveland, but the baby meant they needed more room, and the couple talked often of their dream house, maybe even one "on the Heights". In what spare time he did have, Wismar was an avid participant in contests of all sorts. He and an uncle in Detroit engaged in a friendly competition, taking each other on in ventures like the "booklovers' contest" sponsored that year by The Cleveland News. 

The Tressel File

Since I started covering OSU sports for TheClevelandFan.com more than three years ago, writing about the Buckeyes (and pretty much all sports) on the blog has dried up almost completely. Once you crank out a couple thousand words about a game...or about a scandal...over there...and say anything else that's left to say at the TCF message boards...the urge to say what you think is pretty much sated.

Genuinely curious and sincere friends and acquaintances of mine who know I cover the Buckeyes will ask what I think about the ongoing turmoil in Columbus, and I always have to resist the urge to say "go read the 12,000 words I've written about it over the last three months and then if you still have any questions, come talk to me". And that's mostly because I can't do justice to the issue in a 2-minute conversation, (even though I suspect what they want is the 2-minute version)

What I've been missing to this point is one link I can send to people who really want to read what I've written on the subject without sifting through links at my TCF archive to find what they want...and now I'll have one. Here's a summary of my related TCF articles since December when the players' violations were disclosed...most recent first...

(Updated 6/18) - Buckeye Leaves - 6/18 - How heavy will The Hammer be when it finally falls on OSU?

Buckeye Leaves - 6/11/11 - Fickell in, Pryor gone, and questions about who'll be coaching the offense.

OSU: Reaching For the Bottom - 6/4/11 - Tressel resigns and OSU fans wait to bottom out.

Buckeye Leaves - 5/28/11 - on the undisguised glee of the national media, and my errant prediction, two days before the resignation, that Tressel will fight on.

Buckeye Leaves - 5/1/11 - after the NCAA "notice of allegations" went public and the media feeding frenzy got restarted.

Buckeye Leaves 4/9/11 - thoughts on the impact of Tressel's 5-game suspension.

The Tainting of Tressel - 3/10/11 - my first article following the OSU press conference...contains links at the end to other reaction from various writers and pundits.

Sugar Bowl Preview - 1/4/11 - first coverage of the Tat5 player suspensions.

Idling

I'm feeling the urge to fire up this blog after keeping it in cyber-mothballs for about nine months. That's far and away the longest stretch of inactivity in its eight-year existence, and it's explainable by some combination of the laws of motion (once at rest, it tends to stay at rest), procrastination, laziness, Twitter-addiction, and perhaps frustration with writing it for no one. In any event, I'm going to get back to it as an outlet for taking note of things I find important, funny, outrageous or interesting. Feel free to join in with the spambots in the comments if you like.

The Fall of Bobby Lowder

My article on Bobby Lowder and Auburn athletics has been up just over 24 hours, and it's already one of the most widely read pieces ever at TheClevelandFan.com...

...and counting. We assume what we're experiencing is a Twitter-lanche.

UPDATE 12/9: Allen Barra quotes yours truly, and plugs TCF in his Wall Street Journal article today. My fifteen minutes counting down....

A week after the original article, I address the feedback: Reaction on Lowder and Auburn

Another follow-up piece: Auburn Revisited - 2/20/11

4/20/11 - Rumors of Lowder's Demise Greatly Exaggerated

5/12/11 - Alabama Senate Blocks Lowder's Reappointment

5/16/11 - Lowder Withdraws at Auburn

Nobody Wants To Hear About It

(...and what better place for nobody to hear about it than right here at this blog....)

The New Slavery: Sex Trafficking - Hudson New York

The above link is to the transcript of a truly moving speech given by Emma Thompson in New York this June on the ongoing global catastrophe that is human sex-trafficking. Longish, but hard to excerpt....please do RTWT.

More here, here, and here on Thompson and the Journey exhibit.

Remembering the Good Times

Iowahawk - Barack, Can We Talk?

Barack, can we, uh, talk for a few minutes?

Oh, nothing. It's just that it just seems we haven't had a chance to talk for a while. I mean, I know we've both been busy for the past year or so. You with your fundraisers and golfing and stuff, and me with all those appointments at the unemployment office. But you know I think it's important in a relationship like ours to keep the lines of communication open.

So anyway, I've been think that... look, this is really hard. God. Do you remember when we met at that big party in Denver back in 08? I mean when I saw you across that crowded convention floor, it was like, Oh My God. I don't think I ever saw anything like you before. I was on the rebound from a bad relationship and you were so tall and articulate and, well hot. And then I couldn't believe that of all the democracies in the room you picked me out.!

Read it all...but remember...nostalgia is not what it used to be.

Beyond Parody

From the New York Times editorial on the investigation of Tom Delay:

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been "found innocent." But many of Mr. DeLay's actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

Had those lawmakers known in advance what actions Delay would take, they could have passed laws criminalizing them. Think ahead a little bit next time, Democrats.

UPDATE: Taranto:

By the same logic, the New York Times editorialists are not in the dock only because "criminal stupidity" is a figure of speech and not an actual law.

Covering Their Fannie

Jim Geraghty, from Friday's Morning Jolt newsletter...

The fundamental problem with the [financial reform] legislation is that it doesn't address...the underlying problems with the mortgage market. It was the mortgage bubble, instigated by liberal social justice demands placed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which caused the crisis, not a failure of securities rules and regulations. No mortgage market problems, no mortgage-backed securities problems; no mortgage-backed securities problems, no financial crisis. One of the greatest scams ever is the success of Democrats in distancing their mortgage policies from the financial crisis, and portraying the crisis as simply a matter of Wall Street greed and lack of regulation. . . . Reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac never is going to happen unless Democrats have no other choice. Not at least as long as Barack Obama is President or Democrats control all or part of Congress. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are off limits for Democrats, just as they were when the Bush administration warned of problems.

This was not a problem caused exclusively by one political party, but the ""mess we inherited" rhetoric by the White House necessitates reminding people that the Bush administration did warn of problems...and they did propose reforms...which were shot down and the need for them dismissed by Sens. Frank and Dodd...and as you can see here...

UPDATE 8/23: With an election looming, Barney Frank sees the light.

UPDATE 8/24: The Obama administration fesses up about who their HAMP program was designed to help.

Who's Unserious?

In the course of dismissing Mitt Romney as a viable GOP candidate for 2012, Dr. Zero articulates nicely my biggest concern about Republicans retaking political power...that they won't have the political courage to do what needs to be done...

Serious Human Beings

This election will not be fought over the fine details of a few specific pieces of legislation. It will not be a contest to find someone who can escort an unpopular Barack Obama from the White House, then trot back inside and continue shoveling trillions of dollars into the deficit furnace. We don’t need a national CPA to provide a lecture on deficit reduction during his inauguration, then return for a State of the Union speech in which he explains spending cuts are pretty much impossible, while forklifts roll in with massive new tax packages. We have no use for someone who thinks ObamaCare is an awesome machine that just needs a new transmission and some mag wheels to reach its potential.

We are about to conduct an election about the very philosophy of our government. It is our last chance to avoid the Great Crash which Obama has brought to our doorsteps… but which would have lurked twenty or thirty years in the future even without him. The Obama presidency has begun a fundamental transformation of the relationship between Americans and their government. The groundwork for this transformation was laid over many years, by politicians from both parties. Government bloat has accumulated for decades. The State isn’t really changing all that much under Barack Obama. It’s working to change us.

To reverse this process, we must reach farther back than the administrations of George Bush or Bill Clinton. We are being crushed by engines of regulation, taxation, and corruption that were designed in the first decades of the last century. We’re approaching the end of the story that began during the New Deal. It won’t be good enough to merely rewind the tape a few years. Even such a half-hearted measure, simply returning us to where George Bush left us, would be the most spectacular reduction of State power in our entire history… and it wouldn’t be good enough.

Horowitz on Hitchens - Hitch on Hewitt

David Horowitz reviews the new Christopher Hitchens memoir Hitch 22, in a two-part essay at NRO, and it's a must for admirers of either or both men. David says his friend Hitch hasn't really left the Left, and shows how Hitchens' loyalty to his Marxist revolutionary influences is hopelessly at odds with his proud Orwellian anti-totalitarianism. The result is "a moral incoherence" that is navigated by Hitchens in the book by omission of inconvenient facts.

Hitchens' apostasy from the Left wasn't nearly the abrupt and devastating "crucible of despair" endured and described by Horowitz, but David's message that "you can't have it both ways" is hammered home in countless examples for Hitchens. The larger point made by Horowitz is to show how powerful is the seductive appeal of the utopian fantasy...that such a lover of freedom as Christopher Hitchens cannot and has not rid himself of it. Pack a lunch.

"Second Thoughts" - Part One - Part Two

Also a very worthwhile read is this transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Hitchens last week. Another long one, but not to be missed by Hitch fans.

Here's the link to the Hitchens memoir. And here's to his successful treatment and speedy recovery.

He Calls It Community Organizing

Documentary Charges Obama Won 2008 Democratic Nod With Caucus State Dirty Tricks

It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats handle this issue in 2012. Pass the popcorn.

More Sportsguy

Post-decision thoughts by Simmons and his readers. Among them...

It's one thing to leave. I get it. You're 25. You don't know any better. You're tired of carrying mediocre teams. You want help. You want the luxury of not having to play a remarkable game every single night for eight straight months. You want to live in South Beach. You want to play with your buddies. I get it. I get it. But turning that decision into a one-hour special, pretending that it hadn't been decided weeks ago, using a charity as your cover-up and ramming a pitchfork in Cleveland's back like you were at the end of a Friday the 13th movie and Cleveland was Jason ... there just had to be a better way.

---

We are already fools for caring about athletes considerably more than they care about us. We know this, and we do it anyway. We just like sports. We keep watching for moments like Donovan's goal against Algeria, and we keep caring through thick and thin for moments like Roberts' Steal and Tracy Porter's interception. We put up with all the sobering stuff because that's the price you pay -- for every Gordon Hayward half-court shot, or USA-Canada gold-medal game, there are 20 Michael Vicks and Ben Roethlisbergers. Last night didn't make me like sports any less -- my guard has been up since 1996 -- it just reinforced all the things I already didn't like.

Well said. It didn't really help to have the Cavs owner respond immediately, sounding like a sixth-grader. ("The curse" moves to Florida? Really?) As much as some of his lines have generated applause in town, I'm thinking he really should have slept on it before penning his response.

The other thing that strikes me is that the NBA's reputation for being well-run by David Stern is in serious jeopardy. I suspect Stern will fine Gilbert for his outburst, and probably act to get his arms back around a system that used to require things like contracts being in place before players announced where they were going to play. There's a real sense now that the inmates are running the asylum, and Stern will have to act decisively to reassert control.

Meanwhile, I can go back to treating the NBA like I treated it before LeBron came to the Cavs....as my least favorite pro sport, and one where I'm too disinterested to ever watch a game start-to-finish until the Finals...maybe.

UPDATE: A pretty good column by Adrian Wojnarowski.

Simmons on LeBron

Reading Bill Simmons, five hours before LeBron announces, with his 23 thoughts on "The Decision". Let's face it. He's the best... Read it all, but here's a large slice of it...

Countdown to the LeBron James decision

19. I always thought the goal was winning rings. That's what Russell, Bird, Magic and Jordan taught us. That's what I grew up believing. But sports are different now. You're a brand as much as an athlete. In the past 72 hours, with the suspense building for his announcement, LeBron created a Twitter account, launched his own website and agreed with ESPN on a one-hour live selection show that, incredibly, was the exact same idea that a Columbus reader named Drew had in my Thanksgiving '09 mailbag … but I thought he was kidding. Now I think he's Nostradamus. Or even Nostradamu-SAS.

Drew from Columbus looked into the future, and here's what he saw: A world in which it was totally conceivable that an NBA superstar would sell an hour-long show in which he picked his next team and tainted his legacy in the process. I played along and pushed a "Bachelor"-type setup ("The LeBrachelor!") in which LeBron whittled 29 teams down to six, then four, then two, then one over the course of six episodes. Hell, have him hand out roses. Why not? It's not like this would actually happen, right?

20. Seven months later, it's happening. I can't wait to watch for the same reasons I couldn't turn away from O.J.'s Bronco chase or the Artest melee: it's Car Wreck Television. If LeBron picks anyone other than the Cavaliers, it will be the cruelest television moment since David Chase ended "The Sopranos" by making everyone think they lost power. Cleveland fans will never forgive LeBron, nor should they. He knows better than anyone what kind of sports anguish they have suffered over the years. Losing LeBron on a contrived one-hour show would be worse than Byner's fumble, Jose Mesa, the Game 5 meltdown against Boston, The Drive, The Shot and everything else. At least those stomach-punch moments weren't preordained, unless you believe God hates Cleveland (entirely possible, by the way). This stomach-punch moment? Calculated. By a local kid they loved, defended and revered.

It would be unforgivable. Repeat: unforgivable. I don't have a dog in this race -- as a Celtics fan, I wanted to see him go anywhere but Chicago -- but LeBron doing this show after what happened in the 2010 playoffs actually turned me against him. No small feat. I was one of his biggest defenders. Not anymore.

And here's where I really worry, because I don't think LeBron James has anyone in his life with enough juice to hurl his or her body in front of the concept of "I'm going to announce during a one-hour live show that I'm playing somewhere other than Cleveland." It's the best and worst thing about him -- he has remained fiercely loyal to his high school friends, but at the same time, he's surrounded by people his own age who don't stand up to him and don't know any better. Picking anyone other than Cleveland on this show would be the meanest thing any athlete has ever done to a city. But he might. Assuming he's not malicious, and that he's just a self-absorbed kid who apparently lost all perspective, that doesn't make him much different than most child stars who became famous before they could legally drink -- or, for that matter, Tiger Woods. That's just the way this stuff works. Too much, too fast, too soon. You don't lose your way all at once; just a little at a time. Then one day you look up and there's a TMZ photo spread with 15 of your mistresses, or you're agreeing to stab an entire city in the heart on a one-hour television show.

Scott Need Not Apply to CBC

John Steele Gordon:

Charleston, South Carolina, was the cradle of the Confederacy. And come next January, barring unforeseen developments, it and the rest of the 1st District will have a black Congressman for the first time since Reconstruction. Tim Scott defeated Paul Thurmond for the Republican nomination last night, and the district has been a safe Republican seat since 1981. It wasn’t even close, with Scott trouncing Strom Thurmond’s son by 61 to 39 percent.

That a black man could beat the son of the legendary segregationist so badly in a district where the Civil War began — the district where Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — is a measure of just how much the South has changed in the last 50 years, and the country’s politics and race relations along with it.

But assuming Scott is elected, he needn’t apply for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, of course. It’s a measure of how little the left in American politics has changed in the last 50 years that the Black Caucus — devoted to race-based politics and victimology — admits only liberal Democratic members.

To be fair, it has been a while since there was such a thing as a black Republican Congressman for the Black Caucus to consider (J.C. Watts), and if elected, Scott will face the customary leftist smears of inauthenticity and Uncle Tomism endured by all blacks who stray from identity politics orthodoxy. If the past predicts the future, he will be called a "race traitor" and there will be no end to leftist attempts to marginalize and defame him.

May he have the courage and character to persevere until he is joined in Congress by many more black conservatives, and the poisonous and condescending idea that all blacks should be of one correct political persuasion is consigned to the scrap heap once and for all.

It is notable that Scott was endorsed by Sarah Palin, and won big in a majority white (66%) congressional district...all of which confounds and refutes the "Tea Partiers are racists" crowd...an inconvenient reality that they will doubtless ignore.

Weary of Last Year's Boy Band

Classic Steyn. Hilarious, right down to the new Hillary campaign slogan. (Yes, I'm in the Mark Steyn Fan Club...we have a secret handshake and everything)

Making it Personal: Barack:

From MEMRI - The Middle East Media Research Institute

American Al-Qaeda Operative Adam Gadahn Threatens More Anti-American Terror Attacks in a Personal Address to President Obama, and Concludes: Next Time We Might Not Show the Same Restraint and Self-control

Barack:

I know that as you slither snakelike into the second year of your reign as a purported president of change, you are finding your hands full with running the affairs of a declining and besieged empire and – in the process – proving yourself to be nothing more than another treacherous, bloodthirsty and narrow-minded American war president, what with your overseeing of the hasty overhauling of America’s compromised homeland security cordon, your brazen escalation of American aggression and interference in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and your removal of our captive brothers from detention facilities scattered around the globe to Muslim-only concentration camps in Illinois, Bagram and elsewhere, all in the name of protecting the American people from the threat of Muslim retaliation for American crimes, or what you insist on calling the threat of al-Qaida and al-Qaida inspired terrorism.

Click above for the rest.

Quite a catch for Al Qaeda and their sponsors...this American-born America-hater Gadahn. A useful tool for the leadership, for sure... the best possible P.R. man to trot out the company line. Unfortunately, it also means he likely has access to the ways and means to complement his own zeal for terror attacks. It comforts me to know that we have many missiles with Adam Gadahn's name on them, and when he screws up, in Karachi or elsewhere, he'll be vaporized by the U.S. military as the enemy he is.

No one can deny that Barack Obama has been making war on al Qaeda and their Taliban counterparts, but as Michael Ledeen and Andy McCarthy repeatedly point out, the disconnect of those anti-terror policies from the direct sponsorship of the terrorist organizations by Iran's mullahs, continues to make our policy incoherent. Predator drones for al Qaeda, and engagement for Tehran...and of course the disconnect, if not the engagement policy, long predates Obama.

Because it is Iranian IED's killing our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Iran-funded Hamas bombing Israel from Gaza. The Hezbollah that blew up our African embassies and sits on Israel's borders is an Iranian creation. Iran harbors Osama bin Laden. Could they mock us any more openly? Yet their fraudulently-elected President is permitted to fly here and speak at the United Nations. Excerpting Ledeen:

...from time to time a military leader will stand up and tell the press or the Congress about the ongoing attacks against American military personnel from the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are very short-lived episodes. Neither our journalists nor our elected representatives demand to know more, because they really do not want to know more. If they knew more, if they added up all these episodes over many years they would have to recognize the pattern, that is to say, the war that is being waged against us.

McCarthy was asking in 2006, as Bush was kicking the can down the road..."How many Americans do they need to kill before we get the point?" This administration is still counting...and to make it worse, they're disinclined to do much to help the Iranian democracy movement, even rhetorically, lest we risk irritating our negotiating partners.

We talk because talking is an end in itself for the diplomatic class. Iran talks...or doesn't...depending on the day...because they don't quite have their nukes yet.

Obama Speech

Full text of Obama's speech on the Gulf oill spill.

I think quoting Olberman is unprecedented in this space, but his response immediately following the speech was apt..."it was a great speech if you've been on another planet the last 57 days".

Using the occasion to campaign for cap and trade energy taxation wasn't giving the people exactly what they wanted to hear either, I suspect, as McConnell says in the response (below)

The ever present strawmen were there...he's reforming an agency that operated on "a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility - a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves". Yep, that sounds like the Department of the Interior.

So the regulated shouldn't view their government regulators with hostility...but they shouldn't get too cozy with them either. Embrace your government overlords...just don't jump into bed with them. The relationship between government and the entities they regulate is too adversarial...and not adversarial enough. Got it.

I know of no one who thought the next step in cleaning up the Gulf mess should be an Obama speech....and I think turning it into a commercial for another huge tax increase was politically tone deaf and inappropriate. But hey...he's in the middle of the toughest year and a half of any year and a half since the 1930s, hadn't you heard?

Here's an excerpt from Sen. McConnell's response:

...day after day, as the oil continues to flow, what we hear about from the administration is how tough they plan to be with BP and now, apparently, how important it is that we institute a new tax that will raise energy costs for every single American but which will do nothing to plug the leak. Never has a mission statement fit an administration as perfectly as Rahm Emanuel’s “never allow a crisis to go to waste.” Climate change policy is important, but first things first.

Americans are saying two things at the moment: stop this spill and clean it up. So with all due respect to the White House, the wetlands of the Bayou, the beaches of the coast, and our waters in the Gulf are far more important than the status of the Democrats’ legislative agenda in Washington. Americans want us to stop the oil spill first. And until this leak is plugged, they’re not in any mood to hand over even more power in the form of a new national energy tax to a government that, so far, hasn’t lived up to their expectations in its response to this crisis.

Rejecting Apathy

Doctor Zero is still optimistic, because he rejects The Pillars of Apathy

I refuse to believe government programs launched in the Forties, Sixties, and Seventies are indestructible features of our lives, immune to repeal or reform. I don’t believe a nation with a 234-year history of courage and industry is destined to suffocate in a shallow pool of nanny-state cement, poured only a few generations ago. It will be difficult for the American giant to rise again… but history unfolds in the space between difficult and impossible.

There is no such thing as eternal legislation. Even the Constitution can be amended. It’s only a question of how much willpower it will take for us to cast aside the intolerable acts of our political class. We are descended from men who showed great vigor in resisting intolerable acts.

[...]

I reject the notion that politicians are universally corrupt and treacherous, leaving the voters with no meaningful power but to select the next batch of crooks to rob them blind. There are some men and women of true character and integrity in public offices throughout the land. There should be more of them. We should demand it. Throwing up our hands and accepting the notion that all of them are charlatans set the bar low enough for a useless “community organizer” with a shady past to stumble over it. It’s what got us trillion-dollar spending bills full of vague assumptions and lies, pushed by a government that has no serious plans beyond making itself larger. It’s how we ended up with a chief executive who only bothers to come into the office long enough to write himself a bigger budget, and looks honestly stunned when his country expects him to do something productive, or even take their side in an international debate.

Waiting in Line For Yourself

More Steyn...the guy is prolific.

Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

Congressional Sanity

Jen Rubin on what Congress is doing to pressure Obama on Israel, and to go around him to Netanyahu.

Related:

Scott at Power Line

Worst First - Alan Dershowitz

The Two-Tier Sisterhood

Mark Steyn talks about "The left’s strange hostility to Hirsi Ali"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s great cause is women’s liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on “speaking truth to power,” the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat.

The latest is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Reviewing Ayaan’s new book Nomad, he begins:

“She has managed to outrage more people—in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her—in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir.”
That’s his opening pitch: if there are those who wish to kill her, it’s her fault because she’s a provocateuse who’s found a lucrative shtick in “working on antagonizing” people. The Times headlines Kristof’s review “The Gadfly,” as if she’s a less raddled and corpulent Gore Vidal. In fact, she wrote a screenplay for a film; Muslim belligerents threatened to kill her and her director; they made good on one half of that threat. This isn’t shtick.

As per usual with Steyn, read it all....

Another example of shooting the messenger who brings awkward and revealing tidings...David Horowitz attempts to elicit comment from Joshua Micah Marshall, leading light of the liberal blogosphere, on the deafening silence emanating from the left on the oppression of women and gays in Islam, and their failure to proudly (liberally?) stand up to Islamic totalitarianism as the enemy of America and the West that it is. The exchange is ably narrated and commented upon by David Swindle.

As far as I can tell from their correspondence, Marshall's answer is basically "it's not my job". Marshall has instead expended his progressive pixels ridiculing Horowitz for his tireless work championing the cause of women's rights under Islam on American college campuses. All Horowitz wants to know is where the self-professed liberals are. He'd like to think they'd have his back as he speaks out against the gay-lynching, woman-oppressing, Jew-hating theocratic culture of radical Islam. And he can't hear them.

Horowitz infuriates the left just as Hirsi Ali does...by rubbing the noses of self-styled liberals in their own illiberalism and incoherence. A feminist movement that ignores the oppression of women under Islam is not a movement worthy of the name. They'd rather point to other outcomes in society that offend them...not enough female CEO's, for example. Unlike Hirsi Ali's brand of courage, that sort of protest doesn't get one's throat slit in the street.

By the way, female CEO's are just fine...in theory....as a prop for political grievance. That is, until they have actual experience and success in the cruel, capitalist private sector....and then perhaps run for elective office as Republicans. Then they get icky all of a sudden...and they are fiercely opposed as the enemy by the same folks who fancy themselves advocates for women. That these smart, capable female CEO's might have acquired skills in...say, efficient management of large amounts of money...which might prove useful in government work....is a bug, not a feature, apparently. Hear them roar. But I digress in a big way...

As Christopher Hitchens (and no doubt others) has repeatedly said, no one deserves the label of liberal who is so indifferent as to whether people live in freedom or under tyranny. This is the hole that leftists dig for themselves when they allow their multicultural pieties (and their allergy to agreeing with conservatives) to trump their liberal principles. And they respond with indignant fury...and in Marshall's case, evasions and subject-changing...when true fighters for individual freedom like Hirsi Ali and Horowitz ask them..."What happened to your liberalism?"

A Saint Elsewhere

Dorothy Rabinowitz - The Alien in the White House

...it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion.

[...]

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

[...]

The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good.

Not a Parody

National Deficit-Reduction Commissioner, Andy Stern:

"America needs a 21st century economic plan because we now know the market-worshipping, privatizing, de-regulating, dehumanizing American financial plan has failed and should never be revived, worshipping the market again....It has failed America and everyone that works here."

Yes, Andy, the American system of capitalism and free enterprise that has produced the highest standard of living in human history, and is at the same time the most generous, charitable, freedom-enhancing nation on the planet, is an abject failure. Clearly we need to emulate more closely the European social democracies that are currently in a death spiral.

It's beyond a simple lack of patriotism with poseurs like Stern. After all, they think patriotism is out-dated...retrograde. There's nothing about America or its values that is worth defending...that is, until it is transformed by them, via raw state power, into something more admirable...less exceptional. Hubris on stilts.

Laffer - Incentives Matter, Turns Out

When the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year (it is not in Obama's DNA to extend them) the already struggling private economy "will collapse", according to Arthur Laffer. As weak as the 2010 numbers look, they are artificially strong, according to Laffer, as earners continue to declare income sooner (2010), rather than wait until tax rates jump after the first of the year.

Arthur Laffer: Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse - WSJ.com

Kaus: Bribe Me

By acclaim, the conservative blogosphere's favorite Democrat...Mickey Kaus:

In an obviously effective attempt to attract free attention to his hopeless primary campaign against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, California's Mickey Kaus has just announced the three backroom bribes that he would accept from the Obama administration to drop his challenge.

The California primary is Tuesday.

[...]

The candidate who claims to be no politician said he would accept no ordinary federal bureaucrat's job. However, he could be purchased by employment as:

--Head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to push for an actual physical fence on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants and to end the "anointed incumbent...Boxer's obsessive talk of amnesty, sorry, 'a path to citizenship'" that actually acts as a powerful lure for even more illegal immigrants.

--Second, Kaus kindly offers, Obama could put him on the National Labor Relations Board so he could thwart "Big Labor's attempt to add to their dwindling memberships by avoiding secret ballots in union organizing drives."

--Finally, Kaus offered to accept an administration job offer to the Department of Education to write "a scathing report" on California teachers' unions and their deleterious impact on the state.

The Battle

Two great pieces this week by Arthur C. Brooks, President of AEI

WSJ - Slouching Towards Athens;The Obama agenda and the Europeanization of America.

Our friends across the Atlantic are fond of saying that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work. According to the data, they are basically right. Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that while the average Italian, for example, enjoys 42 days of vacation per year, the average American has 16.

A predictable corollary: Many Europeans also expect others to work so they can live. The International Social Survey Programme asked Americans and Europeans whether they believe "It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes." In virtually all of Western Europe more than 50% agree, and in many countries it is much higher—77% in Spain, whose redistributive economy is in shambles. Meanwhile, only 33% of Americans agree with income redistribution.

Simply put, Europeans have a much stronger taste for other people's money than we do. This is vividly illustrated by the recent protests in the U.S. and Greece.

Why are citizens rioting and striking in Greece? Despite the worst economic crisis in decades, labor unions and state functionaries demand that others pay for the early retirements, lifetime benefits and state pensions to which they feel entitled. In America, however, the tea partiers demonstrate not to get more from others, but rather against government growth, public debt, bailouts and a budget-busting government overhaul of the health-care industry.

In other words, the tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding. It is an example of American exceptionalism if there ever was one.

And at NRO, an eloquent case for free enterprise, and what's at stake in its battle against big government...

Happy Now?

Reads like it might be essentially Chapter One of The Battle, Brooks' new book.

We Con the World

Beautiful.

UPDATE: I have replaced the original YouTube version of this video with a link from Eyeblast (via Ed Morrissey), because YouTube caved to a baseless copyright claim by Warner Bros and took down the video. "We Con the World" was obviously a parody of the original "We Are the World" song, and as such protected under the "Fair Use" rules, but then YouTube is gutless and avoids litigation at the expense of free speech principles, especially when the politics of the issue suit them. Weasels. More from Ed Driscoll.

See also:

Krauthammer:

The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence. The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Photos: The Horrifying Toll of the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

Behind the Headlines: The Israeli humanitarian lifeline to Gaza

UPDATE: Four Hamas rockets hit Israel from Gaza..

This is powerful...Free Gaza, indeed.

Worst First

Excerpting Alan Dershowitz' column.....RTWT

Singling Out Israel For "International Investigation"

In a world in which North Korea sinks a South Korean naval vessel killing dozens, Iran arms Islamic terrorists, who kill hundreds, Russia bombs Chechnya, killing thousands, and the United States and Great Britain, while targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban, kill an indeterminate number of civilians, only Israel is subjected to international "investigations" such as that conducted by Richard Goldstone and that being called for by the Security Council in the wake of the recent flotilla fiasco.

Why only Israel? Why is the United Nations silent about other situations that cry out for international investigations? Surely it's not because what Israel did was worse than what other member nations have done. Certainly it's not because Israel lacks self-criticism or mechanisms for internal investigation. Plainly it's not because the other "offenders" were provoked, while Israel was unprovoked.

There is only one answer--because Israel has long been singled out for public scrutiny and opprobrium by the United Nations in particular and the international community in general.

[...]

If the United Nations is to get into the business of ordering and conducting international investigations, it must establish neutral and objective criteria for when such an investigation is warranted. These criteria must be equally applicable to all nations, and not merely to the Jewish nation.

Primary among the criteria must be "the worst first." Under that rule, investigations must be conducted in the order of the seriousness of the offense, not the unpopularity of the offender. Israel's actions in enforcing its blockade ranks fairly low on the pecking order of offenses, compared to those that have never been subjected to a mandated international investigation. Until and unless North Korea, Iran, Russia and other nations are required to undergo international scrutiny, the demand that Israel do so is illegitimate.

McCarthy at Power Line

The new McCarthy book arrived yesterday, and I ripped through the first 100 pages last night. I wish the first chapter were available online, but for now, settle for McCarthy talking about the book at Power Line

The provocative sub-title will no doubt earn McCarthy instant outrage and dismissals from the left, but he doesn't suggest that the Alinskyite crowd in the White House is colluding or cooperating with the jihadists to sabotage America...just that they share a goal....the end of our capitalist social order and our culture of individual freedom. Argue the point if you can.

McCarthy stresses that while the numbers of violent Islamist terrorists is relatively low, a high percentage of Muslims do favor the implementation of sharia law, so just because they don't personally take part in blowing up skyscrapers, their more subtle efforts at undermining secular law are no less radical and no less a malign force in our society. Yet we define these people as "moderates"...and that's nuts. From the Power Line piece...

The point is that Islamist ideology - the modern version conceived by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, refined by thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, and expounded by the likes of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, probably the most influential Sunni cleric living today - is very mainstream. Sure, it is an aberrant position to endorse the killing of Muslims who fail to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam; but if the proposition at issue becomes, say, "I support the killing of Americans operating in Muslim countries," or "I would like to see the U.S. Constitution replaced by sharia law," we find the percentage of approving Muslims shoots skyward. Indeed, while much was made of Qaradawi's condemnation of the 9/11 attacks (a condemnation that was more tactical position than a moral one), the same Qaradawi issued a fatwa in 2004 calling for attacks on American troops in Iraq - and in so doing drew strong support from scholars at al-Azhar University.

The thrust of my book is that we need to come to terms with this in order to defend ourselves. There is a vibrant debate in the Muslim world about terrorism. We need to understand, though, that it is a debate about methodology. Islamist terrorists and other Islamists are in harmony about the endgame: they would like to see sharia installed and the West Islamicized. That a person is not willing to mass-murder non-Muslims in order to accelerate that process does not make him a moderate.

In the chapter about what to call the threat, I ultimately conclude that it is best to describe it as "Islamism" or the "Islamist" challenge. I do this as a hopeful nod to the millions of Muslims who both reject violence and do not want to live in sharia societies. But I do it with my eyes open. It may well be that these Muslims will not succeed in reforming their creed, in stripping from it the elements that cannot coexist with such core tenets of Western liberalism as freedom of conscience, the proposition that people have a right to make law for themselves, the proposition that freedom really is freedom rather than perfect submission, the equality of men and women and of Muslims and non-Muslims. Still, I think we have to support the reformist cause. I do not believe we can entice natural allies to our side by telling them their religion is irredeemable. They are trying to redeem it, and it is in our interest to help them - while recognizing that they may very well fail.

Seems to me far closer to "realism" than the folks who refuse even to utter the "I"- word when discussing terrorism.

More McCarthy in this concise statement of his case at the NY Post

Israelis Stop Hamas Blockade Run

J.E. Dyer at Contentions

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a very good summary of points about the Hamas-backed attempt to break the maritime blockade of Gaza on May 31. The summary includes links on the Turkish “aid” group, Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), and its associations with the Muslim Brotherhood and all the usual suspects of Islamist terror (including the Millennium bombing plot in 1999). There is convincing video footage of the fight mounted by the peace activists – using knives, metal pipe, handguns, stun grenades, and incendiary devices – against the Israeli commandos boarding M/V Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ferry used as the flotilla’s flagship. Probably the best compliment I can give Ed’s post is that it doesn’t adopt the credulous, pro-activist editorial perspective of virtually all the mainstream media outlets.

There is good reason not to. For one thing, the fingerprints of Hamas are all over this blockade-running attempt. IHH, a key organizer of the flotilla, has longstanding ties to Hamas that include establishing an IHH office in Gaza and setting up celebrated meetings between its leader, Bulent Yildirim, and Hamas leaders Khaled Meshal and Ismail Haniyeh. Moreover, British participation in the flotilla was organized by British Hamas leader Mohammed Sawalha, among other Hamas links to the European flotilla participants (laid out here).

Flotilla spokesmen told Islamic media repeatedly in the weeks before the attempt that their purpose was to break the blockade. Israel, of course, regularly allows aid convoys into Gaza; the Israelis offered to accept the humanitarian cargo in Ashdod and have it convoyed into Gaza over land. But IHH leaders stated that they hoped to widen the rift between Israel and Turkey by inciting Israel to take military action against the flotilla.

---

YnetNews.com report

A roundup at the Standard blog

Power Line has video and links

Miscellany 5/30

Dariusz Tolczyk - The New Criterion - Katyn: The Long Cover-up

Larry Elder - The Anti-Incumbency Myth

Mark Steyn - We're Too Broke to be This Stupid

Tom Joscelyn - Inside the Gitmo Task Force's Final Report. More here.

Doctor Zero on the reason lefties object to the term "Obamacare"

Jeffrey H. Anderson - Obamacare taking on water

Horowitz at UC San Diego

When Hitler comparisons are apt....

Text of David Horowitz' May 10 speech - The War Against the Jews

It is appropriate — and not coincidental of course — that I arrive here during “Israel Apartheid Week” or, as I prefer to call it, “Hitler Youth Week.” I use that reference because — as should be evident — what is going on here is part of a globally organized movement centered in the Arab Muslim Middle East to finish the job that Hitler started. Unlike the Nazis, who hid their “final solution” from ordinary Germans and the world at large, the Muslim radicals shout it from the rooftops, put it in their organizational charters and get applauded for doing so by millions of Muslims who want to see it happen. And the left does its job, as during the Cold War years, of conducting auxiliary campaigns to help the genocide along.

I dread the day David passes from the scene as an active force in political and social commentary. His intellect, courage, passion and wit, let alone his willingness to engage the modern day campus orthodoxies face to face, will be irreplaceable. Read it all, but here Horowitz takes apart the big lie...

...allow me to deal with some of the lies perpetrated by the Muslim Students Association and their “Israel Apartheid Week” on this campus. On the “apartheid” wall of hate funded by this university there is a map that pictures Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. It is labeled “occupied Palestine.” It is a lie.

There is no occupation of a country called “Palestine.” There were no Palestinian lands originally to be stolen. Israel was created in the same way that Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq were created – out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire. The Turks are not Arabs. They had ruled the entire region for 400 years since the 16th Century, until they joined the powers that were defeated in World War I.

At the end of the war, the victors – Britain and France — divided up the spoils, in this case the defeated Turkish empire. The “Palestine Mandate,” which was part of these Turkish spoils did not refer to a people but to a geographical region. The people in the region for the previous thousand years called themselves “Arabs” not “Palestinians.” The word “Palestine” is not even an Arab word. It is Roman in origin. When the Romans drove the Jews out of their homeland, Judea, in the first century CE, they renamed it after the Jews’ enemies, the Philistines, who were Europeans, not Arabs. Hence the name “Palestine.”

The claim that Israel is “occupied Palestine” is a lie of Hitlerian proportions and has the same genocidal intention.

Related:

Horowitz - "Why Israel is the Victim..." - 2002

Big Lies: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel - David Meir-Levi - with an introduction by David Horowitz - 2005

McCarthy - The Grand Jihad

Andy McCarthy's new book is out this week, which is reason enough for me to read it by next week.

Here's an interview of Andy on Bill Bennett's radio show...plus another interview with Big Journalism.

In a recent column at NRO, McCarthy reacts to the shameful specter of two-thirds of our Congress standing to applaud Mexican President Calderon as he condemned Arizona's legal attempts to control its border with his country. One theme of the new book is that the shared enemy of both the Islamists and the American left...the West's freedom culture...is under organized assault. Here's McCarthy sensing that his President doesn't value that priceless freedom culture as he and millions of others do.

The House Divided

A number of years ago, at some risk to myself and my family, I prosecuted savage jihadists who had made themselves enemies of the United States. I was lauded for doing so by the Clinton administration. Though I disagreed with that administration philosophically, and particularly with its conception of international terrorism as a crime problem, I praised the much-needed overhaul by which it put teeth in our counterterrorism laws. Our disagreement was over the best way to protect the country, not over the imperative that the country be protected. Our debate was the traditional Right-Left debate.

Moreover, as a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem.

UN Audits Released

Claudia Rosett, who did the heaviest of the heavy lifting exposing the billion dollar Oil-for-Food scandal in the United Nations, says it's probably a coincidence....but I doubt it.

Just days after I queried the U.S. Mission to the UN about its commitment to UN transparency (Paging Ambassador Susan Rice), the Mission finally posted on its web site more than 130 previously secret UN internal audit reports. The UN, for all its endless promises about transparency and its ample enjoyment of other people’s money, does not release these reports to the public. It is only thanks to the U.S. that they are now seeing daylight at all — though it takes some trolling through the Mission’s web site to find them.

For anyone who cares about even minimal integrity in UN management and handling of taxpayer money, there’s a trove of bombshell material here. Together, the reports total hundreds of pages, but the typical report runs about 10-20 pages. They date from October, 2008 through August, 2009.

Again, Rosett is doing the legwork so we don't have to, though she encourages readers to browse the records for themselves. Based on her early assessment, it's hard to be encouraged that the relentless corruption at the U.N. will slow anytime soon. As Rosett says, audits are one thing, and action to bring about reform is something else again...and there is little appetite for the latter. The Obama people do deserve credit for this small step. Go for links and details.

Delusional Pap

For allowing themselves to be used by the White House to promote a piece of legislation, Mark Steyn says the least the family of Daniel Pearl deserved was a bit of honesty from President Obama. What they got instead was the same "delusional pap" we've come to expect from an administration trying to remove any reference to Islamic-inspired terrorism from the government lexicon.

Tom Blumer writing at Newsbusters, has the quotes and links, but here's the offending Obama line:

"And obviously the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.

The Pearl family had been notified by the White House just four days before the bill's signing that they could be props at the ceremony for the legislation bearing Daniel's name. The bill is a "free press" matter, and while Pearl was clearly an advocate of that ideal, it seems to me cynical for the administration to make use of public sympathy for Pearl in the service of their latest legislative photo op, and then gloss over the real reasons why this particular journalist was "silenced".

The twisted version of events that served Obama's momentary purpose is that Pearl was beheaded on video for the entire world to see because he was a journalist....presumably silenced for seeking truth by forces opposed to its disclosure. The words of KSM, Pearl's confessed beheader, provide enough clarity for me to get the picture..."I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi." Truth-telling doesn't seem to have been a stumbling block for KSM here.

Interesting how the journalist thing doesn't come up. The murderers are at best just selective enemies of a free press...using the Internet to virally spread their murder video to a global audience, while denying free expression wherever they can.

As usual, Steyn is reacting more eloquently (and entertainingly) than the rest of us...

Now Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it's the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

[...]

But what did the "loss" of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."

Read it all, naturally.

Via Jen Rubin, an interview with Judea Pearl at Haaretz.com

The Obama people cannot dodge forever the public spectacle of re-living 9/11 and its radical religious inspiration. Pearl's murderer, the 9/11 terrorist leader, awaits trial, and sooner or later they have to decide how and where to hold it. The vibe you get is that they don't want to dredge up all that nasty 9/11 carnage by trying its strategic mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. How is that going to impact the Obami outreach to the Muslim world? Or their radio silence on the connection of Islam to what they are now calling "violent extremism".

And if trying the terrorist mastermind for the crimes of 9/11 presents a troubling and badly-timed image problem for the administration, think how little they want to deal with Mullah Omar, the now-captured clerical ideologue who, along with Osama bin Laden, sent KSM on his murderous mission. So far, they refuse to acknowledge that he is even in custody, let alone say how they plan to bring him to justice.

I stumbled on an older piece by Judea Peal at danielpearl.org, and had to share. It doesn't seem dated half a decade out. From the top...

After Terror

In his speech of April 15, 2004, President George Bush linked the murder of my son, Daniel Pearl, to a global "ideology of murder." "The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad" said Bush "is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew.

A week later, while engaging in a Jewish-Muslim dialogue in Williamsburg, Virginia, the first question reporters asked me was: "What is your reaction to the President's mention of your son?" My answer was:
"I agree with the President's observation that Daniel's tragedy is pivotal for understanding the current tide of madness." However, I consider Danny's legacy as a communicator and bridge builder to be equally pivotal in inspiring and revitalizing East/West dialogues, an effort to which I am devoting my energies.

The wave of violence now rocking the planet is of a fundamentally different character than anything this planet has known in the past few centuries. For the first time in recent history a friendly messenger is killed by calculated design, in front of millions of spectators, for the sheer purpose of transmitting a message to those it deems its enemies.

True, planet earth has known cruelty before, and on a much greater scale. Yet even the Nazis labored to hide their gruesome deeds, thus unveiling some inkling of shame, doubt or fear. Daniel's murderers, in shocking contrast, boasted openly in their cruelty, totally secured in faith and righteousness, triumphantly expecting spectators to rally in sympathy. More shocking yet, many of their spectators did rally in sympathy (according to reports from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and, as the recent murders of Nicholas Berg and Fabrizio Quattrocchi indicate, message-transmission killing has become an increasingly acceptable practice in certain parts of the world.

Such brazen assault on the sanctity of human life marks a profound transgression in the evolution of human civilization, and we must ask ourselves what the origin of this transgression is, and whether it can be isolated, understood and controlled.

Pearl's moral clarity is refreshing, and his message of hope for eventual peaceful reconciliation makes this worth reading in full.

Healthcare Consequences

No, You Can't Keep Your Health Plan - Scott Gottlieb: WSJ.com

That was big lie number one. Number two was the projected cost savings benefits of Obamacare...remember? (older link). More from Ed at Hot Air

UPDATE: WSJ: Goodbye, Employer-Sponsored Insurance

Like Obama promises tend to do, those two have reached their expiration dates.

Related articles from the last three weeks or so, as the early effects of the legislation start to show....

Medicare and Medicaid’s Hidden Costs - The Agenda

Obamacare's Danger Signs - Critical Condition blog

Side Effects: Doctor Participation May Vary - Heritage

Side Effects: Physician-Owned Hospitals Face New Regulations, Limits on Growth - Heritage

Obamacare Mulligan - WSJ

In case you missed it last time:

REPEAL - Why and how Obamacare must be undone - Yuval Levin

UPDATE 5/24: Two good articles in last week's Weekly Standard: The first, Cash For Doctors, deals with the ways medical service providers are already devising ways to deal with, and in some ways circumvent, the new Obamacare realities. The second, Put the Patient in Charge, by Peter J. Hansen, is a more comprehensive plan for real reform, focused on leveling the playing field, by giving people who purchase their own healthcare plans the same tax treatment people under employer-sponsored plans receive.

Serial Contradictions

Victor Davis Hanson

This is the strangest presidency I have seen in my lifetime. President Obama gives soaring lectures on civility, but still continues his old campaign invective (“get in their face,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” etc.) with new attacks on particular senators, Rush Limbaugh, and entire classes of people—surgeons, insurers, Wall Street, those at Fox News, tea-partiers, etc.

And like the campaign, he still talks of bipartisanship (remember, he was the most partisan politician in the Senate), but has rammed through health care without a single Republican vote. His entire agenda—federal take-overs of businesses, near two-trillion-dollar deficits, health care, amnesty, and cap and trade—does not earn a majority in the polls. Indeed, the same surveys reveal him to be the most polarizing president in memory.

His base was hyper-critical of deficit spending under Bush, the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and government involvement with Wall Street. But suddenly even the most vocal of the left have gone silent as Obama’s felonies have trumped Bush’s misdemeanors on every count.

All this reminds me of the LaLa land of academia. Let me explain.

Answering Questions No One's Asking

Of the treasure trove of documents from the Cold War era Soviet Union, smuggled out by dissidents at great personal risk, most still await translation into English. Shunned by publishers, they're still waiting for most anyone to care about them, let alone mine them for history.

There was no Nuremberg equivalent after the fall of the Soviet Union to assess and hold to account the regime that killed tens of millions of innocents, and to discredit communism as a social model once and for all. For many of the same reasons, I suspect, there's little appetite today in the media, the academy or among political elites in the U.S. or Europe, to dredge up the messy details about how collectivism works in practice. It hits too close to home.

Just a couple of excerpts from a fascinating City Journal piece by Claire Berlinski: A Hidden History of Evil, to get you to go read the whole thing.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

On Our Terms

I just revisited three longish essays that I had saved as a single post back in February because they shared the theme of "changing the narrative" in our political and public policy debates, and looked ahead toward governance by any coming center-right majority. Not sure why they never got posted back then, and I thought they held up pretty well 90 days out...so...better late than never. I'll spare you excerpts, since they can't do justice to the material...just a suggestion on the order in which to take it in.

Jeff Bergner hangs a definition on "The Narrative" and looks at the problems facing conservatives if they can't reshape the debate. What do you do when you're running things as the unapologetic "Party of No"? - Can Republicans Govern?.

Jennifer (J.E.) Dyer cites Bergner, and develops his challenge into her own ideas on a narrative for conservatives, along with a withering critique of the progressive mindset. America at the Crossroads; The Inner Life. (Read more J.E. Dyer at Contentions)

Chase all that with Doctor Zero - An Answer to Socialism. Plain talk on collectivism vs. individual liberty.

Collectivism, with it's blood-stained 20th century resumé in tow, has an address in American politics....and it is the Democratic Party, now with Obama as its proud vanguard. That this relentless statism is the polar opposite of individualism, that empowering American ideal, is one point the nascent center-right coalition should be stressing as a way to re-frame the debate.

Garden Variety?

At Commentary, a serious treatment of the question by Jonah Goldberg

What Kind of Socialist is Barack Obama?

Will Cain interviews Goldberg on this topic.

Why I'm Right

A few weeks ago, Matt Continetti had an item at TWS listing some of the books that had most shaped his thinking over the years, and he asked for input from readers on their influences. Aware that my conservatism owes itself to more than just repeated muggings by reality, I tried to walk it back in books. It's easy enough to trace it to a beginning point somewhere between Nixon's resignation, which I celebrated as a 21-year old, and Carter's weakness, which served as a wake-up call.

Limiting the influences to books per se is problematic in itself, since so much of what I've consumed in political thought over the last 20 years has been online, and in column or blog formats. Still, at the risk of appearing pretentious (I read them, so you should) or presumptuous (like someone cares), here are ten books that came to mind when I gave some thought to my own political influences...in no particular order...(all links to Amazon)

1984 - George Orwell

Witness - Whittaker Chambers

Radical Son - David Horowitz

The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Conservative Mind - Russell Kirk

The Vision of the Anointed - Thomas Sowell

Reagan: In His Own Hand - Skinner, et al (Editors)

The Black Book of Communism - Stephane Courtois, et al

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich von Hayek

Liberal Fascism - Jonah Goldberg

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A couple others by Horowitz might well make a hypothetical second ten...Destructive Generation, or the more recent compilation Left Illusions for example....as might another Sowell title or two...Basic Economics for sure. A few other "just missed" books like Tocqueville's Democracy in America or Common Sense by Thomas Paine got consideration, but if I start going there, it never ends.

Of the ten above, only two are of 21st century vintage, and since I can fairly be accused at times of bearing the imprint of the last person to sit on me, some more contemporary reading is worth citing too. So here are another 15 (published since about 1995) that informed or entertained or otherwise spoke to me, and that I can recommend as worthwhile reads...again, in no particular order..

The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright

Imagining the Future; Science and American Democracy - Yuval Levin

Willful Blindness - Andrew C. McCarthy

Bury the Chains - Adam Hochschild

Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Red Hot Lies - Christopher Horner

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe; Immigration, Islam and the West - Christopher Caldwell

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton - Ambrose Evans Pritchard

The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang

Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East :1776 to the Present - Michael Oren

The Age of Reagan - (Part II) - Steven F. Hayward

In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage - John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

America Alone - Mark Steyn

Ex-Friends - Norman Podhoretz

The Skeptical Environmentalist - Bjorn Lomborg

Fighting Words for the Facebook Generation

NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Mary Eberstadt, author of The Loser Letters ( see sample letter)

Here's another piece at First Things adapted from a talk Eberstadt gave about her book and its protagonist, and the New Atheism.

I somehow missed this when it was serialized at NRO in 2008. Haven't read the book yet, but it's in the mail.

Freedom To Be Stupid

Penn Gillette on the demise of the Hummer and the freedom to do stupid stuff...

Hummers are stupid and wasteful and if they go away because no one wants to buy one, that'll be just a little sad. It's always a little sad to lose some stupid. I love people doing stupid things that I'd never do—different stupid things than all the stupid things I do. It reminds me that although all over the world we humans have so much in common, so much love, and need, and desire, and compassion and loneliness, some of us still want to do things that the rest of us think are bug-nutty. Some of us want to drive a Hummer, some of us want to eat sheep's heart, liver and lungs simmered in an animal's stomach for three hours, some us want to play poker with professionals and some of us want a Broadway musical based on the music of ABBA. I love people doing things I can't understand. It's heartbreaking to me when people stop doing things that I can't see any reason for them to be doing in the first place. I like people watching curling while eating pork rinds.

But if any part of the Hummer going belly-up are those government rules we're putting in on miles per gallon, or us taking over of GM, then I'm not just sad, I'm also angry. Lack of freedom can be measured directly by lack of stupid. Freedom means freedom to be stupid. We never need freedom to do the smart thing. You don't need any freedom to go with majority opinion. There was no freedom required to drive a Prius before the recall. We don't need freedom to recycle, reuse and reduce. We don't need freedom to listen to classic rock, classic classical, classic anything or Terry Gross. We exercise our freedom to its fullest when we are at our stupidest.

A Cautionary Tale

Steven Malanga at City Journal

How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government.

(The cartoon alone is worth the click over)

One of the challenges facing Republicans this fall and in 2012, is getting elected without minimizing the trouble we are in with our debt-spending-deficit crisis, and without sugar-coating the fact that the medicine we require will not taste good. I suspect most Americans realize that recovery from the mess both parties have gotten us into will not be pain-free, and most of them are willing to "tighten their belts". But only to the extent that they can credibly perceive government and the rest of the public sector to be doing the same thing. That's where the disconnect has been, and that's the basis for tea party activism, as far as I can see.

China's Girls

Peter Hitchens reports from China for the Daily Mail.

In the cruel old China, baby girls were often left to die in the gutters. In the cruel modern China, they are aborted by the tens of millions, using all the latest technology.

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide.

Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.

By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in this giant empire, so large and so different (its current population is 1,336,410,000) that it often feels more like a separate planet than just another country. Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilisation before.

[...]

All kinds of speculation is now seething about what might happen; a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.

Three things are for sure. It cannot now be prevented, and it is already beginning to be obvious in the schools. It is also stimulating a miserable trade in stolen children.

You'd hope that the scarcer women became, the more valued and revered they would be by a society. The picture Hitchens paints shows them instead disdained by their own families as "spilt water", stolen and trafficked in by criminal gangs, and exploited in the thriving prostitution trade or sold to elite families as mates for privileged males.

Meet your new superpower. A country with 30 million young men without prospective mates. This can't end well. Read it all of course.

UPDATE 4/12: Turns out The Economist had a cover story on the global "gendercide" last month, plus another related story.

Deep Thinker

Deepak Chopra: Sorry about that earthquake.

Buffoon, I believe, was the word Jonah Goldberg used earlier.

Maxine And Matthews

Do Maxine Waters and Chris Matthews simply lack intellectual honesty or self-awareness, or both?...or are they both just witless? I know, there has to be an "all of the above" option here.

Do the video...then read Taranto.

Here's Byron York exposing Matthews once again as cable's leading stooge.

The Definition of Chutzpah

James Taranto on the President's call for patience. Rich.

Our Debt Crisis

If you can, carve out some time to read Donald Marron's lead article from the current issue of National Affairs, entitled "America in the Red". It's informative without being overly wonkish, and communicates the seriousness of the fix we're in while holding out hope that we can recover...if, that is, we act decisively and soon on multiple fronts.

Another in the "we are so screwed" series, this one by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post