Latin's Comeback

From The Guardian:

The grassroots interest in all things Latin is in no doubt. Hollywood follows the money, and has no fewer than eight classically themed movies in production. Minimus – the textbooks that introduce primary-school kids to Latin, has clocked up its 110,000th British sale. Yet whereas the majority of the Lib-Con cabinet benefited from a classical education, we're in danger of denying this opportunity to modern Britain.

In a recent survey of 1,000 schools, 75% of parents and teachers said they would welcome the reintroduction of Latin. The benefits are tangible. When, in 1989, I was roughed up by the Romanian secret police, I negotiated my way out in pidgin Latin. Thanks to the Latin base of all Romance languages, I'd have a similar chance in 36 other countries. In the United States, surveys have revealed that children from disadvantaged backgrounds do better not just in languages but also maths and English once they have studied a year of Latin.

Now, if we can just convince the American bishops and parish priests of the beauty of Latin, once more.

The Bush Women

Barbara Bush (the daughter, not the mother) "surprised" the news world today by commenting that she was "glad" that the health bill passed. Sheesh!

Barbara's revelation comes on the heels of Laura Bush, who recently blabbed that she supports abortion "rights" and gay "marriage." Is Barbara planning to sell a book also? Call me cynical, but it seems a bit curious that Mrs. Bush made these controversial statements just as her book was being put out. Can you say "Creating headlines for $$?" That said, it is another reminder of why we need to look elsewhere for truly conservative leadership and definitively close the chapter on the Bush era. After all, how whole-heartedly committed to conservative causes could President Bush himself have been, given his (influential) wife and her radically different views on such important things? Does Harriet Miers ring a bell?

Pro-Life Women Set to Storm DC (finally)

A hopeful piece from Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in The New York Times:

The number of pro-life women running for office has increased, perhaps paradoxically, because of the social changes of the last few decades. The first generation of women to become active in politics strongly identified as feminist and considered abortion rights central to their feminism. Pro-life women were more likely to be full-time homemakers. Their invisibility on the public stage contributed to an impression that the vast majority of women were pro-choice.

These days socially conservative women are likely to have careers, too. The growing number of Americans who consider themselves pro-life suggests that fewer people, of either sex, consider access to abortion to be crucial to women’s economic success. The pro-life stance generally wins Republicans votes in general elections, because pro-lifers are more likely to vote on the issue than pro-choicers are.

That advantage is likely to be more pronounced for pro-life women running for office. Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster, says that her surveys have found that voters respond more positively to the pro-life message when it comes from women. Pro-life women won’t be suspected, or credibly accused, of opposing abortion because they want to keep women in their place; they can therefore talk about the issue less defensively than male pro-lifers sometimes do.

Pro-life women can also soften the message: Ms. Fiorina has said, “I myself was not able to have children of my own, and so I know what a precious gift life is.” It’s hard to imagine a male politician making that comment. These women will make it easier for pro-lifers to discuss the issue in the terms we want to discuss it: as a plea for justice for a vulnerable group.

Who Is Barack Obama?

Mark Steyn provides some answers in his latest for National Review Online:

In recent months, a lot of Americans have said to me that they had no idea the new president would feel so “weird.” But, in fact, he’s not weird. True, he’s not, even in Democratic terms, a political figure — as, say, Clinton or Biden are. Instead, he’s the product of the broader culture: There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. As someone once said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” When you’ve spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it’s bound to be a disappointment.

The West and Confidence

A West that sees in its past nothing but pathology, racism, colonialism, religious wars and persecutions, sexism, and all the rest, is a West that cannot and almost certainly will not, defend its present. -An excerpt from George Weigel's Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism.

JPII Showtime!

From the BBC:

Elvis Presley, Eva Peron, Buddy Holly have all had one. Now, so too, does Pope John Paul II: a musical dedicated to his life.

Actually entitled Non Abbiate Paura, or Don't Be Scared, this show, like the others, is bustling with show-stopping songs, dance routines and drama.

It is an attempt to cram the 84 years of his life into two hours.

The musical was written by two priests, one who wrote the script, the other who crafted the songs.

Should be interesting.

No Shame

Is there a politician out there who can match Florida Governor Charlie Crist for total abandonment of principle, save that which serves his own calculated maneuvering for political advancement? The very same governor who once boasted of his pro-life credentials has just vetoed a bill that would have required women considering an abortion to get an ultrasound first. (The first link here was taken from Crist's own website prior to leaving the Republican Party. To appease the liberals no doubt, the page was subsequently purged from his campaign site, but not before Marco Rubio's people made a copy of it.)

Crist said repeatedly that he would run as a Republican, and then, perceiving that he was set to be trounced by Marco Rubio, he jilted the Party and decided to run as an Independent. Ever since then, he has been shifting ever further to the left. His shameless posturing knows no bounds. It's a sad thing to behold. Machiavellian politicians like Crist are the paragon of everything that is askew with our political culture.

Hopefully, Floridians will take note and elect Rubio, thereby ejecting Crist from relevance once and for all.

The New Anti-Semitism

Victor Davis Hanson on the Jewish people, Helen Thomas and Turkey:

...in the last two decades especially, the Left has made anti-Semitism respectable in intellectual circles. The fascistic nature of various Palestinian liberation groups was forgotten, as the “occupied” Palestinians grafted their cause onto that of American blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Slurring post-Holocaust Jews was still infra dig, but damning the nation-state of Israel as imperialistic and oppressive was considered principled. No one ever cared to ask: Why Israel and not other, far more egregious examples? In other words, one could now focus inordinately on the Jews by emphasizing that one’s criticism was predicated on cosmic issues of human rights and justice. And by defaming Israel the nation, one could vent one’s dislike of Jews without being stuck with the traditional boorish label of anti-Semite.

On the future of the Department of Education

Writing for National Review Online, Mona Charen offers a shrewd look at the history of the DOE.

Newly minted Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle is a kook: That’s what Sen. Harry Reid’s people are telling reporters. ABC, CNN, and other outlets seem to agree, noting that Mrs. Angle wants to shutter the federal Department of Education, get the U.S. out of the U.N., phase out Social Security, and eliminate the IRS.

We haven’t yet heard her explanations of these positions — many of which can be justified in the proper context. It’s certainly possible that she is a little eccentric (that prison massage program doesn’t pass the smell test). But this much is certain: It is not kooky to favor the elimination of the Department of Education. That this proposal is routinely labeled “extremist” is a reminder of the one-way ratchet that operates in government. Enshrine something in a federal agency, and it becomes sacrosanct. Democrats cheerlead for federal programs because they are the party of government, and Republicans quietly go along because they’re afraid.

For far too long, Republicans have accepted liberal premises, and the policies that spring from them, out of fear of being labeled by the left as callous. The party needs to shake this habit asap. With the current crop of new faces emerging in our ranks, this could become more of a possibility.

The Great Unveiling

Here's an excerpt from a nicely written piece by Dorothy Rabinowitz that appears in The Wall Street Journal:

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.

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

More Buffoonery

Hillary Clinton hobnobbed with a cadre of leftist agitators in Latin America. She didn't disappoint them either. From the Guardian:

It is a call you would expect from Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez: soak Latin America's rich to help the poor and build a fairer society. "In many places it is a simple fact that the wealthy do not pay their fair share. We can't mince words about this."

The latest newspaper column from Cuba's retired communist leader? Another anti-capitalist broadside from Venezuela's president?

Step forward Hillary Clinton, secretary of state for the gringo empire, aka the United States.

Clinton has made tax equity a theme of a four-nation tour through the region this week, saying wealthy elites are starving governments of funds for infrastructure and poverty relief.

When will it end?

"Bertrand de Jouvenel indicates that contemporary liberals fail to see that government based on free discussion and free opinion presupposes the human capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood and to define general principles of justice that transcend the human desire for power."

"European chivalry had tied manliness to gentleness and had 'subdued the fierceness of pride and power.' In Christian Europe, authority had been tamed by elegance and 'subdued by manners.' But modern rationalist philosophy, vulgarized by the revolutionaries, had no place for taste, elegance, or even moral self-restraint. Its cold, calculating rationality undermined the 'love, veneration, admiration, or attachment' that connect people to their commonwealth. In Burke’s view, public affections, combined with manners, are required as 'supplements,' 'correctives” and 'aids' to the law. The French Revolution left 'another inheritance, it…hallowed violence.'"

-Taken from Daniel J. Mahoney's excellent book on Jouvenel, Bertrand De Jouvenel: Conserative Liberal & Illusions Of Modernity

Strength in Numbers...

Well, if that adage is true then we needn't worry too much about the impact of the dyspeptic gals that took to the Vatican today to call for, you'll never guess, women's ordination.


At least they had enough of a presence to carry their sign.


Count 'em, one, two, three...is that number four back there?


Perhaps they should worry about our numbers...

Follow-up to last post

From US News and World Report:

Not everybody was pleased with President Obama's uncharacteristic line on the Today Show, spoken in the pre-school hours Tuesday morning, that he wants some "ass to kick" in the Gulf oil crisis.

Becky Quick, who co-hosts Squawk Box with lead anchor Joe Kernen and co-host Carl Quintanilla, slapped Obama for using unpresidential language in an interview he knew would be aired as children prepared for school.

"If you're the president of the United States and you go on the Today Show which is a morning show, where you're going to have a lot of kids sitting around watching this, I think you choose your words more carefully," said Quick. "Using the A word when you are on the Today Show talking with Matt Lauer, yeah, that disturbs me. But I also think that this is a way of trying to prove that I'm mad, to do exactly what everybody's been pushing me to do, and it doesn't ring true."

Unpresidential, again

From CNN:

"I don't sit around talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

Did the President of the United States actually just say that? It's hard to imagine any other self-possessed president, secure in his role as leader, making such an uncouth, sophomoric statement on the record. It smacks of insecurity. Beyond that though, Obama just isn't an intimidating man by any stretch, as opposed to say, Theodore Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson, so to hear him say "so I know whose ass to kick" borders on the comical and pathetic. This ranks right up there with the cringe-worthy "Did you plug the hole yet, daddy?" moment from the press conference a couple weeks ago. After that schmaltzy line, to now hear him wax macho, talking about ass kickin', well it just doesn't work.

Polish Martyr Beatified

From the AP:

WARSAW, Poland – Thousands of Poles filled a vast sunbathed square in Warsaw on Sunday for the beatification of Jerzy Popieluszko, a charismatic priest tortured and killed in 1984 by communist Poland's secret police for supporting Lech Walesa's Solidarity freedom movement.

The head of the Vatican's saint-making office, Archbishop Angelo Amato, presided over the Mass at Pilsudski Square that was also celebrated by 120 bishops and 1,600 priests. Popieluszko's 90-year-old mother Marianna, his sister and brothers, were among some 140,000 attending that included Walesa.

Amato read out Pope Benedict XVI's declaration that made Popieluszko blessed for his martyrdom in giving his life to defend good. The crowd applauded when Popieluszko's portrait was unveiled.

The pope, on a visit to Cyprus, said Popieluszko's "zealous service and his martyrdom are a special sign of the victory of good over evil."

Shifting Paradigm

While starry-eyed Europeans are still smitten with Obama, more Americans are starting to come around. From the Telegraph:

Polls show that around 10 per cent of those who voted for Obama in 2008 now disapprove of his performance and the heavy turnout of young people and black voters among the 69 million who back him will not be repeated again...

It is an irony of Obama's presidency - which came into being because he was the unBush - that it shares some of the worst traits of his predecessor's administration. Among these are insularity and a blinkered arrogance.

The young Texans who seemed genetically incapable of viewing any criticism of George W Bush as less than treason may have gone but a similar cult has replaced them. The Obamatrons who now populate Washington have iPads under their arms and greet each other with fist bumps. Earnest, geeky types, they look upon anyone who does not worship Obama with pity – such a being must be too stupid or bigoted to know better.

Obama has never been wracked by self-doubt and he is unusually self-contained for a politician. He seems not to need people or reassurance. In office, this is dangerous – he sometimes seems to be living in a cocoon.

The White House's attempts to deal criticisms of Obama's detachment have been comical. First there was Obama's own cringeworthy (and doubtless bogus) anecdote about his 11-year-old daughter Malia asking: "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

Running Low on Water

The narrator of this BBC report extolls the everyday Cuban's penchant for survival, despite "fifty years of an economic blockade." (In other words, the US is the bad guy in the narrative.) But what about having to survive some fifty years under the iron fist of a malevolent dictator, and being denied the most basic freedoms? Might the policies of Communism in and of themselves have a thing or two to do with the harsh conditions faced daily by Cubans? "Balderdash!" says the BBC.

False Sense of Stability

Mark Steyn gets it right on the money (again) with his sobering assessment of Turkey's intentions. From National Review Online:

Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla. Much of what went on — the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies — was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks. In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war — more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the State of Israel.

Ten years ago, Turkey’s behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel’s best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state’s destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry. I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister, who told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren’t quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay. Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. “They’re tough hombres,” he said admiringly. “You have to be in this part of the world.” If you had suggested to him that in six years’ time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that “I know well how you kill children on beaches,” he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe.

Yet it happened. Erdogan said those words to Shimon Peres at Davos last year and then flounced off stage. Day by day what was formerly the Zionist entity’s staunchest pal talks more and more like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan-of-the-month.

So What's Next?

So much for "Yes we can!" From the AP:

WASHINGTON - America's vaunted can-do spirit is badly frayed.

From the Gulf oil spill to the war in Afghanistan, from lost jobs to soaring budget deficits, cascading crises are defying easy resolution and undermining faith in the future...

That gusher, which can be seen around the clock on live video feeds from the ocean floor, stands as a vivid image of the limits of modern technology and governance. We can fly through space and walk on the moon — but can't stop a crude oil leak that has grown into the nation's worst environmental catastrophe.

Then there's the economy. Many months after the recession was said to be over, Friday's jobless figures showed the nation still in the grip of frighteningly high unemployment. Despite Obama administration insistence that no problem is getting more attention.

Abroad, the U.S. still hasn't defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan after nearly 10 years of trying. We seem unable to slow the nuclear march of Iran and North Korea. And efforts to broker peace in the Middle East keep slipping from our grasp.

When you set yourself up as a political messiah, as "the one", and nurture narcissism in your followers with "we're the ones we've been waiting for" blather, disappointment will inevitably set in. Never having believed in Obama at all, it's nice to experience immunity from the disappointment.

Wasted TIME

Standing in line at the supermarket the other day, my eyes fell upon the cover of the latest issue of TIME Magazine. The image on the cover was a striking one, featuring a shot from behind of the mitre-capped Holy Father. The obnoxious title of the cover story was rather elongated and clumsy: Why Popes Never Have to Ask for Forgiveness: the limits of atonement. Or something like that. It was one of those profound "ugh" moments. I thought to myself, "Is any other religion so singularly examined for public humiliation and scrutiny?" Of course not, and there's a reason. For but a second, I thought about snatching up the remaining copies in order to spare others like myself from the sheer annoyance and to shield the ignorant from the deceptive poison. The consolation of TIME's ever-dwindling circulation was mitigated somewhat by the realization that many shoppers passing through store check-out lines across America, while perhaps not purchasing the piece of journalistic flotsam and saving the three bucks, will nonetheless be drawn to it and smugly concur with the absurd assertion stated in bold on the cover.

The editors of TIME are not interested in eliciting apologies but rather in advancing an agenda; a sordid agenda that the Pope's moral authority and intellectual arsenal severely threaten and undermine. So the solution lies in destroying the man and the institution he helms. "The gates of hell..." We cannot forget that.

For the record, the Pope has absolutely nothing for which to apologize personally. Fr. Raymond J. de Souza's excellent defense of Pope Benedict clearly passed by the selective eyes of the editors of TIME, wholly unnoticed. Jay Scott Newman and George Weigel also took a wrecking ball to the spurious charges against the Pope.

Gov. Jobs Way Up

In terms of sustainable, long-term employment in the private sector, the job market continues to look grim, the fruit of Obamanomics. From Politico:

The nation's economy added 431,000 jobs in the month of May, and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.7 percent, the government reported Friday.

That’s less job growth than many expected, and will not provide a boost to the Obama administration, which has been struggling to demonstrate that its economic policies are helping to ease the nation's epic unemployment probelem.

The government said that 411,000 of the jobs created in May were temporary positions with the once-a-decade US Census, and not the kind of employment that can drive a sustained economic recovery. That meant that the overall private sector employment growth for the month was anemic – up by just 41,000.

And the president's reaction:

HYATTSVILLE, Md. (AP) - President Barack Obama says the addition of 431,000 new jobs in May shows "the economy is getting stronger by the day."

Speaking at a trucking company outside Washington, Obama embraced the Labor Department's new employment snapshot, released Friday morning. A burst of census hiring lifted payrolls last month, and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.7 percent.

This is embarrassing.

Underachieving...at best

From Politico:

Obama’s detached performance with respect to this massive and growing crisis — the ripple effects of which could still be with us on Election Day 2012 — is generally portrayed as a PR meltdown and a simple failure to step up by an understandably beleaguered Obama...

Obama’s failure to convey any hint of genuine emotion, to rouse the American people to turn their hearts toward the Gulf and to assure them that their world — still built on the plentiful supply of fossil fuels — is not falling apart, is a profound failure of leadership.

Instead of offering reassurance, the president is using the crisis to promote his political agenda, hankering for alternative energy and climate change legislation in Congress — though there won’t be any significant replacement of carbon-based power sources for years to come.

Madison vs. Wilson

For the moment, the Wilsonians have the upper hand. Here's an excerpt from an excellent article by George Will, writing for The Washington Post:

Lack of "a limiting principle" is the essence of progressivism, according to William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in his new book "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." The Founders, he writes, believed that free government's purpose, and the threats to it, are found in nature. The threats are desires for untrammeled power, desires which, Madison said, are "sown in the nature of man." Government's limited purpose is to protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.

Wilsonian progressives believe that History is a proper noun, an autonomous thing. It, rather than nature, defines government's ever-evolving and unlimited purposes. Government exists to dispense an ever-expanding menu of rights -- entitlements that serve an open-ended understanding of material and even spiritual well-being.

A Pattern Emerges

This is how Chicago-style politics operates. We shouldn't be surprised. From Politico:

Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff confirmed Wednesday that Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff, suggested three administration jobs that would be available to him last September if he dropped his plans to run against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who had the support of the White House.

Romanoff said he informed the White House that he would stay in the race. The revelation comes days after the White House confirmed that Rep. Joe Sestak was approached about an unpaid position in the administration if he dropped his campaign against Sen. Arlen Specter. But in this case, Romanoff was offered paid positions in the administration, a clear difference from the Sestak case.

Nota Bene

A new Gallup poll augurs well for the GOP.

With five months to go before the general election, a new poll finds that Republicans have opened their widest lead yet when it comes to which party voters prefer this fall. Gallup's generic congressional ballot finds that the number of voters who say they will vote GOP has jumped to 49 percent, compared with 43 percent for Democrats. That's not only the biggest lead Gallup has recorded for the GOP this election cycle, it's the largest lead Republicans have ever had in the poll, which Gallup has run since 1950.

Why are Republicans surging?
According to Gallup, the GOP gained 3 percentage points in the poll over the last week, while Dems fell 4 points. All of this happened as President Obama's approval rating took a hit, especially with his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Gallup puts Obama's approval rating at 46 percent — not exactly in George W. Bush territory, but low for this White House.

Spills and Perspective

Here's a helpful chart prepared by climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer that puts the current Gulf oil spill disaster in perspective:

More British Saints to Come?

From The Independent:

Tucked away on a side street on the east bank of the Tiber, the Casa di Santa Brigidia guesthouse has specialised in welcoming weary travellers for much of the past century.

Run by the Bridgettine nuns, it is a place of tranquillity in the heart of Rome. During the Second World War the guesthouse's reputation as a sanctuary was cemented when the nuns risked their lives to harbour more than 60 Jewish refugees following the arrival of German troops in 1943.

Now, more than 65 years after the nuns opened their doors to those refugees, the Vatican has signalled its plans to put three of the order's most prominent figures, two of whom were British, on the road to sainthood. On 5 July the Vatican will declare Mother Riccarda Beauchamp Hambrough and Sister Katherine Flanagan as "servants of God", the first official step towards sainthood.

Clueless at the Helm

Dick Morris marvels at Obama's fecklessness and detachment in this blistering piece from The Hill:

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill...

Some presidents have failed because of their stubbornness (Johnson and Bush-43). Others because of their character flaws (Clinton and Nixon). Still others because of their insensitivity to domestic problems (Bush-41). But now we have a president who is failing because he is incompetent. It is Jimmy Carter all over again.

The "Moderate" Threat

Andrew McCarthy's latest book, entitled "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America", is a must read. Here's a piece by McCarthy appearing in The New York Post that touches on the major points in "The Grand Jihad":

Yes, 31 years after the Iranian revolution, 17 years after Islamists declared war on the United States by bombing the World Trade Center and nine years after the 9/11 atrocities, the American people are still in the dark about the daunting challenge we face. Under jihadist siege for decades, we still don't even get what jihad is and why it isn't just about "violent extremists" -- the politically correct term now used by government officials in their desperation to bleach the Islam out of Islamist terror...

And effectively allied with the jihadists is the hard left across the West. For all their differences (e.g., on abortion and the rights of women and homosexuals) Islam and the Left are in essential harmony when it comes to their vision of authoritarian government and their perception of the immediate obstacle to their designs: American constitutional democracy.

Nobody's business but the Turks

Ralph Peters gets it right in his observations on the Israeli raid yesterday. Writing for the New York Post:

Yesterday's "aid convoy" incident off the coast of Gaza wasn't about bringing humanitarian supplies to the terrorist-ruled territory. It wasn't even about Israel.

It was about Turkey's determination to position itself as the leading Muslim state in the Middle East.

Three ships of that six-ship pro-terror convoy flew Turkish flags and were crowded with Turkish citizens. The Ankara government -- led by Islamists these days -- sponsored the "aid" operation in a move to position itself as the new champion of the Palestinians.

And Turkish decision-makers knew Israel would have to react -- and were waiting to exploit the inevitable clash. The provocation was as cynical as it was carefully orchestrated.

Islam, Jihad and the Administration

A piece that is well-worth reading, by Andrew McCarthy, writing for National Review Online:

While our top officials imagine an Islam that isn’t, jihad is something the rest of us needn’t imagine, because it is all too real. And it is simple. Jihad is, always and everywhere, the mission to implement, spread, or defend sharia, the Islamic legal code. It is not exclusively violent; an army doesn’t need to be violent if its enemies are willing to give ground. But jihad only “means to purify oneself or one’s community” in a very narrow sense. It is not the syrupy quest to become a better person but the command to become a better Muslim; it is not the smiley-face mission to “purify” one’s community of crime but the command to cleanse one’s community of non-Islamic influences.

The inextricable bond between jihad and sharia is also easily explained. In Muslim doctrine, sharia is deemed the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society. Islam’s designs are hegemonic: Even in its less threatening iterations, it is taken as a given that believers must call all of humanity to the faith. What separates the true moderates from the faux moderates and the terrorists are the lengths to which one is willing to go in carrying out that injunction. That it is an injunction, however, is not open to debate.

Our political leaders can continue to trivialize jihad as if it were some benign struggle to brush after every meal. They can continue to ignore the core tenets that make sharia antithetical to a free, self-determining society. But they can’t do that and do the only job we need them to do: protect our lives and our liberties.

Vatican Library Opens Up

Here's an article from Telegraph on the Vatican Archives. It's very interesting, so long as you ignore the requisite broadsides about the Church during WWII, Dan Brown and the current priest scandal. Disappointing, but it is a British paper, after all.

This is the Vatican secret archive, possibly the most mysterious collection of documents in the world.

Here you can find accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at Chinon in August 1308; a threatening note from 1246 in which Ghengis Khan’s grandson demands that Pope Innocent IV travel to Asia to ‘pay service and homage; a letter from Lucretia Borgia to Pope Alexander VI; Papal Bulls excommunicating Martin Luther; correspondence between the Court of Henry VIII and Clement VII; and an exchange of letters between Michelangelo and Paul III.

There are also letters from Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, St Bernadette, Voltaire and Abraham Lincoln.

Pelosi Singles Out Bush (Again)

The blame Bush modus operandi is still going strong with the cognoscenti of the left. The latest salvo comes from none other than Nancy Pelosi. From the Washington Examiner:

“Many of the people appointed in the Bush administration are still burrowed in the agencies that are supposed to oversee the [oil] industry,” Pelosi said when asked if Democrats could have prevented or mitigated the crisis by keeping a closer watch on the industry.

Added the Speaker, “the cozy relationships between the Bush administration’s agency leadership and the industry is clear…I’ve heard no complaints from my members about the way the president has handled it,” Pelosi stated.

Bush must be laughing at all of this. Note to Pelosi: It's no longer 2007. Seriously, there has to be some kind of catalogued, diagnosable complex that explains the democrats' unyielding obsession with Bush.

Spill Seepage

From the Telegraph:

George W Bush's unpopularity and perceived incompetence was encapsulated by the way he dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Candidate Obama branded it "unconscionable incompetence".

Central to Obama's appeal was his promise to be truly different. His failure to achieve that is now at the core of the deep disappointment Americans feel about him. At the press conference - the first full-scale affair he had deigned to give for 309 days - he appeared uncomfortable and petulant.

His approach to the issue was that of the law student suddenly fascinated by a science project. He displayed none of the visceral indignation Americans feel about pretty much everything these days - two-thirds now say they are "angry" about the way things are going - resorting instead to Spock-like technocratic language and legalese. "I'm not contradicting my prior point," he stated at one juncture. During those 63 minutes of soporific verbosity, about 800 barrels of oil poured into the Gulf.

Liberalism and Spills

Some conservatives are rightly cautioning the right about placing too much blame on the president for the BP spill. After all, accidents do happen, whether on a republican's watch or a democrat's. That said, I think the reason most people on the right are annoyed is that we remember all too clearly how eager, bordering on the obsessive, the left (and Obama) was to link the Katrina aftermath to President Bush. Some even went so far as to suggest that latent racism on the part of Bush was the real explanation for the administration's supposedly lackadaisical response to the hurricane. Anyway, Peggy Noonan makes a good point here. The analogy she offers between the images of the gushing oil from underwater and the out of control spending flowing out of Washington under Obama is particularly salient.

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: "We pay so much for the government and it can't cap an undersea oil well!"

Places to Drill

Charles Krauthammer asks some reasonable questions about drilling in his piece that appears on National Review Online:

Here’s my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That’s a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from barren areas to populated ones, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism, and recreation?

White House Quid Pro Quo

From ABCNews:

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder today, all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee "urge the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Congressman Joe Sestak's claim that a White House official offered him a job to induce him to exit the Pennsylvania Senate primary race against Senator Arlen Specter."

The seven – Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Jon Kyl or Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma – allege that the offer would appear to violate federal criminal laws, including 18 U.S.C. 600, which prohibits promising a government position “as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity” or “in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office.”

Rep. Sestak, D-Penn., who defeated Specter in the primary last week, told Comcast’s Larry Kane in February that the White House had offered him a position in exchange for not challenging Specter.

Realizations

From Politico:

President Barack Obama is on the defensive over his presidential multitasking, for refusing to scrub his schedule of events that seem peripheral — even trivial — compared with the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

As oozing oil fouls Louisiana’s marshes, Obama has committed to maintaining the semblance of a regular schedule, adhering to his walk-and-chew-gum style of crisis management even as criticism of his administration mounts.

That includes a sit-down to talk hoops with Marv Albert, events touting the stimulus and Duke’s basketball team, a Memorial Day appearance in Illinois and a pair of fundraisers in California that roughly overlapped with a memorial service for 11 workers killed in the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon platform...

“There are times and places where his cool, technocratic mastery is a great blessing. ... But, ideology aside, what do you think [President Ronald] Reagan would have done in this situation? He’d be down there. Look at [Louisiana Gov. Bobby] Jindal. ... It is puzzling, the detachment,” said one veteran Democratic strategist, a frequent defender of Obama.

“I just cringe at the specter of the president doing a political fundraiser in San Francisco during the memorial service instead of going to the memorial service,” the person added. “He was sure there for the coal miners in West Virginia; he spoke at their funerals. That juxtaposition can’t be good.”

Some disappointed followers are slowly perceiving that their hallowed image of "the one" does not, in reality, square up to the man himself. Just as with his candidacy, Obama's entire presidency is nothing but an interminable exhibition of elaborate, glossy packaging gimmicks set in motion years ago in order to avoid being exposed as the radical he truly is.

Death of a (Bad) Dream

From Victor Davis Hanson, writing for National Review Online:

The new world order as envisioned by Obama in January 2009 was, I think, supposed to look something like the following: A social-democratic America would come to emulate the successful welfare states in the European Union. These twin Western communitarian powers would together usher in a new world order in which no one nation was to be seen as preeminent. All the old nasty ideas of the 20th century — military alliances, sovereign borders, independent international finance, nuclear arms, religious and cultural chauvinism — would fall by the wayside, as the West was reinvented as part of the solution rather the problem it had been in its days of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. A new green transnationalism would assume the place of that bad old order, a transnationalism run by elite, highly educated, and socially conscious technocrats — albeit themselves Western — supported by a progressive press more interested in effecting social change than in merely reporting the tawdry news.

Obama can still push that story, but more and more Americans disagree with his 21st-century vision. Stuck in the past, they instead believe that capitalism, not socialism, brings prosperity; that to reach a green future we need to survive for now in a carbon and nuclear present; that all, not some, laws must be enforced; that our country is different from others and needs to maintain the integrity of its borders; and that there are always going to be a few bad actors abroad who must be deterred rather than appeased.

Biden: Brussels has Claim to Leadership of Free World

What?

Westpoint Blues

Thoughts from Arthur Herman on President Obama's bland address to graduates at Westpoint, who were notably tepid in their reception of the man.

On Saturday, Pres. Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, which in effect told the thousand or so soon-to-be second lieutenants that, if he has his way, they’ll soon be out of a job.

Obama outlined for the cadets his vision of a new international order organized around bodies such as the United Nations. In Obama’s future, American military force will give way to American diplomacy joined together with new multilateral partnerships, while “stronger international standards and institutions” will replace unilateral assertion of national interests — including our own. Obama told West Point’s Class of 2010 that he sees them not battling our enemies but “combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth, [and] helping countries feed themselves” even as their citizens achieve their “universal rights.”

Arizona and the Importance of Reading

The Poll's Toll

From Rasmussen:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

Government Bubble

Newt Gingrich offers his take on the not-so-sunny economic outlook for the United States:

The economic collapse of Greece is a wake-up call. The unsustainable combination of a bloated public bureaucracy, high deficit spending and unfunded pension obligations busted Greece's government bubble. Now the birthplace of modern democracy is on the brink of becoming a failed state.

The Bank of England recently warned that the U.S. is on the road to the same fiscal failure as Greece, and the Obama administration's insistence on massive public spending and increasing deficits is the reason.

At this rate, the U.S. government will be the next economic bubble to burst. We've seen similar downturns: the information technology bubble in 2000, housing in 2007 and Wall Street in 2008. If unchecked, America's government bubble will depress our economy with higher interest rates and defaulting state and local governments.

Remembering Daniel Pearl

A brilliant piece by Mark Steyn:

Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn't always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the "Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act." Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That's how I'd put it. This is what the president of the United States said:

"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."

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.

Running the Show

From Reuters:

Clinton avoids China disputes, hands out teddy bears

(Reuters) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton passed out teddy bears to Chinese children as she toured the Shanghai World Expo on Saturday and carefully skirted the United States' many policy disputes with China.

At the start of a four-day visit whose centerpiece will be talks in Beijing about strategic and economic matters, Clinton spent a misty morning at the Expo, an emblem of China's rise on the world stage.

Dressed in a powder blue jacket to match the Expo's plump, cartoonish mascot, Clinton walked through the U.S. and Chinese national "pavilions" shaking hands, posing for pictures and talking up the importance of people-to-people ties.

She avoided any public discussion of the issues that will occupy her in Beijing, including North Korea's suspected sinking of a South Korean warship, Iran's nuclear program, and U.S. calls for China to allow its currency to appreciate.

Sigh

Things to Come

From the Associated Press:

HONOLULU – A Honolulu city councilman has defeated two Democrats to give Republicans a midterm election victory in the U.S. congressional district where President Barack Obama grew up.

Charles Djou's win Saturday is the latest triumph for the GOP as it looks to take back control of Congress. And it came as a blow to Democrats who could not rally around a candidate and find away to win a congressional race that should have been a cakewalk. The seat had been held by a Democrat for nearly 20 years and is located where Obama was born and spent most of his childhood.

"This is a momentous day. We have sent a message to the United States Congress. We have sent a message to the national Democrats. We have sent a message to the machine," Djou said. "The congressional seat is not owned by one political party. This congressional seat is owned by the people."

Fixing the Books

More from the goings on in Texas regarding the pending revision of school text books. From ABCNews:

The 15-member board dominated by conservative Republicans is expected to reject calls for a delay and move forward on establishing new standards for textbooks and teaching history, economics and other civics classes that will take effect in August, 2011.

The new standards call for a greater focus on the Biblical and Christian traditions of the founding fathers. It also calls for the teaching of free market principles, how government taxation and regulation can serve as restrictions to private enterprise [isn't that obvious?], and emphasizes the achievements of Republican leaders, including former President Ronald Reagan [the defeat of Communism was a fairly big deal, after all] and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The new curriculum also states that the system of the U.S. government be called a "Constitutional Republic" rather than a "Democratic society." Additionally, it inserts a "Celebrate Freedom Week" during which Texas students will study the importance of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

And this is controversial? Because liberals have succeeded so remarkably in their revisionist history crusade of the past forty years, any motion to undo the knot is lambasted as controversial.

Euro's End?

Jeff Randall, writing for The Telegraph offers an interesting look at the economic crisis facing the European Union.

The euro has many flaws, but its weakest link is Greece, whose fundamental problem is that for years it spent too much, earned too little and plugged the gap by borrowing in order to enjoy a rich man's lifestyle. It flouted EU rules on the limits to budget deficits; its national accounts were a moussaka of minced statistics, topped with a cheesy sauce of jiggery-pokery.

By any legitimate measure, Greece was unworthy of eurozone membership. That it achieved card-carrying status was down to the sleight-of-hand skills of its Brussels fixers and the acquiescence of central bank bean-counters. Now we know the truth, jet-hosing it with yet more debt makes no sense. Another dose of funny money will delay but not extinguish the need for austerity.

Iran Rises, Obama Falters

Charles Krauthammer, writing for National Review Online, discusses the consequences of Obama's impotent foreign policy in the context of the uranium deal struck between Iran, Brazil and Turkey:

...the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran’s program.

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture — a defiant, triumphant “take that” to Uncle Sam — is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there’s no cost to lining up with America’s enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

They’ve watched President Obama’s humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant, and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.

Depressing

Anyone else totally disgusted that the president of Mexico, while a guest in this nation, has been routinely lighting into Arizona? Worthy of singular contempt is the sanctimonious lecture that he gave congress today regarding the Arizona law (supported overwhelmingly by Arizonans), with Democrats all too eager to give him a hearty, fist-pumping ovation.

Question: What kind of people are running this country?

Hitting the Books

From MSNBC:

AUSTIN, Texas - Is Texas on the verge of rewriting history, or just correcting it?

The answer depends on whom you listen to on the state’s Board of Education, which is poised to vote this week on new social-studies curriculum standards that could significantly shape what Texas children — and perhaps those outside the nation's second-largest state — are taught in the classroom.

Social conservatives on the 15-member Republican-dominated board are optimistic they will be able to push through curriculum changes that, according to board member and conservative Texas lawyer Cynthia Noland Dunbar, “promote patriotism.”

Among the recommendations facing a final vote: adding language saying the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and including positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Associationand the GOP’s Contract with America.

Other amendments to the state's curriculum standards for kindergarten through 12th grade would minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state; require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action; assert that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society; and rename the slave trade to the "Atlantic triangular trade.”

Well, Jefferson didn't "advocate the separation of church and state" in the manner that is commonly (mis)understood today, so I'm not sure that it's wise to pluck him from the important events of the day. Why not just teach the truth about what the founders thought regarding the role of religion in the public realm? Jefferson himself made Washington's Farewell Address, which singles out religion and morality as indispensable pillars in society, required reading at the University of Virginia.

Toxic Influence

Arlen Specter: he tried and failed.

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Voters rejected one of President Barack Obama's hand-picked candidates and forced another into a runoff, the latest sign that his political capital is slipping beneath a wave of anti-establishment anger.

Sen. Arlen Specter became the fourth Democrat in seven months to lose a high-profile race despite the president's active involvement, raising doubts about Obama's ability to help fellow Democrats in this November's elections.

The first three candidates fell to Republicans. But Specter's loss Tuesday to Rep. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania's Democratic senatorial primary cast doubts on Obama's influence and popularity even within his own party — and in a battleground state, no less.

Specter's exit is cause for universal jubilation. Probably the most unprincipled and shamelessly Machiavellian of all senators (and, considering the competition, that's saying something), his departure is long overdue. Conservatives, celebrate this evening with a round of drinks.

Greek and EU Ways

George Will, writing for The Washington Post:

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, ratified Europe's emerging system of nation-states. Since the end of the Thirty-One Years' War (1914-1945), European elites have worked at neutering Europe's nationalities. Greece's debt crisis reveals this project's intractable contradictions, and the fragility of Western Europe's postwar social model -- omniprovident welfare states lacking limiting principles.

Greece represents a perverse aspiration -- a society with (in the words of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan) "more takers than makers," more people taking benefits from government than there are people making goods and services that produce the social surplus that funds government. By socializing the consequences of Greece's misgovernment, Europe has become the world's leading producer of a toxic product -- moral hazard. The dishonesty and indiscipline of a nation with 2.6 percent of the eurozone's economic product have moved nations with the other 97.4 percent -- and the United States and the International Monetary Fund -- to say, essentially: The consequences of such vices cannot be quarantined, so we are all hostages to one another and hence no nation will be allowed to sink beneath the weight of its recklessness.

Recklessness will proliferate.

"The coining of money," said William Blackstone more than two centuries ago, "is in all states the act of the sovereign power."...

If money represents, as Emerson said, the prose of life, the euro reflects a determination to make European life prosaic. It is an attempt to erase nationalities and subsume politics in economics in order to escape from European history. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

Letting Go of Holder

An excellent piece from Investor's Business Daily that explains why the feckless and endlessly embarrassing Attorney General Eric Holder (the same man who claimed that America is a "nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing race) should be given the boot:

Competence: Stumbling from one gaffe to another and showing little appreciation for our Constitution, Attorney General Eric Holder has become a major embarrassment. Time to admit he's in over his head and let him go.

We were never big fans of the AG, but like many others, we had hoped our misgivings were wrong and that he'd be successful as the nation's top law enforcement officer. Sorry to say, he hasn't been.

Events in recent days and weeks show that Holder has little if any understanding of our nation's most precious asset, the Constitution, and seems oblivious to the actual requirements of his job.

An appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last week illustrates the problem. Holder told the panel that Justice Department decisions "are done in a political way." Thanks for the honesty, but that's not what the job requires.

N. Korea

John Bolton offers his characteristically prescient take on the happenings in North Korea. From the New York Daily News:

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has now left Beijing and returned home after a typically secretive visit, his first trip abroad in four years. Kim's last trip was also to China, the North's dominant benefactor; his core mission was undoubtedly to ensure continued Chinese support for his ironfisted rule.

Also undoubtedly central was North Korea's nuclear weapons program. President Obama has been silent for many long months on Pyongyang's continuing nuclear threat, but silence does not equal good news. Although "all quiet" on the North Korean nuclear front might seem to indicate that the menace is receding, precisely the opposite is true.

November Begins Now

From National Review Online:

On Tuesday, West Virginia Democratic primary voters ousted an incumbent who has been in the House since 1983 — partly because of his vote for Obamacare. That legislation is also at issue in a special election this month for a Pennsylvania House seat the Democrats have held since 1974. In that race, both candidates say they opposed the passage of Obamacare, but the Republican is running to the Democrat’s right by saying that he will vote to repeal it.

The message from these campaigns: Opposition to Obamacare is a winning cause. But House Republicans are not yet doing enough to capitalize on the discontent in order to elect Republicans to office and, more important, raise the likelihood of an eventual repeal. The House Republican leadership ought to get behind a simple, one-sentence bill to repeal Obamacare — now.

The Governor

Gov. Jan Brewer is quickly becoming my favorite governor in the United States. Few leaders would have the temerity to sign a bill into law banning courses in "ethnic studies," which is nothing more than cloaked language for anti-American, anti-Western indoctrination in our schools. Watch the left go into conniptions over this one. From CNN:

(CNN) -- Fresh on the heels of a new immigration law that has led to calls to boycott her state, Arizona's governor has signed a bill banning ethnic studies classes that "promote resentment" of other racial groups.

Gov. Jan Brewer approved the measure without public statement Tuesday, according to state legislative records. The new law forbids elementary or secondary schools to teach classes that are "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and advocate "the overthrow of the United States government" or "resentment toward a race or class of people."

The bill was pushed by state school Superintendent Tom Horne, who has spent two years trying to get Tucson schools to drop a Mexican-American studies program he said teaches Latino students they are an oppressed minority. There was no immediate response from the Tucson Unified School District, the law's main target.

Spasms of a "Catholic" University

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online:

Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki and the judicial vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee separately raised red flags over Marquette's hiring of a Seattle University professor as Arts and Sciences dean.

Listecki called Marquette President Father Robert A. Wild about the university's offer to Jodi O'Brien after receiving calls from clergy and lay leaders, the archbishop's spokeswoman said.

Also expressing concerns about O'Brien's appointment was Father Paul Hartmann, the archdiocese's judicial vicar. Hartmann sent a March 3 letter to the chair of the search committee that said the gender studies professor "pursues subject matter that seems destined to actually create dichotomies and cause tensions (if not contradictions) with Marquette's Catholic mission and identity."...

Marquette said last week that it rescinded its offer to O'Brien, a lesbian who has written extensively on issues of gender and sexual orientation, saying she was not a good fit with the university's Catholic mission and identity.

Let there be no doubt that, had there not been an eruption of outrage over this scandal, Marquette, as always far more concerned with money and prestige than with preserving any shred of Catholic identity, would have gone along with the hiring of O'Brien.

Kagan Follow-up

Kagan: a mirror image of Obama

Republicans should do whatever they can (however ineffectual that may be in the end, given their numbers and RINOs like Collins and Snowe) to derail the Kagan nomination. Maggie Gallagher offers some potent reasons for this.

A vote for Elena Kagan is a vote for “marriage equality,” which features in two key cases that will shortly be before the Supreme Court: Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which arises out of California’s Prop 8 but will apply to all 50 states, since it seeks to establish a federal constitutional right to gay marriage; and Gill et al. v. Office of Personnel Management, which seeks “only” to overturn the federal laws defining marriage as one man and one woman.

There has been an effort to obfuscate Kagan’s position on gay marriage using statements she made when nominated to be solicitor general, but these efforts are all either sad or laughable. Take, for instance, this Cornell law professor: He pretends to believe that, when Kagan stated that she has never taken a public position on whether the Constitution ought to be read as protecting gay marriage, she somehow meant that she believes the question should be left up to the political process. This is shameful to the author; he must know better.

Earlier today, I scanned a few mainstream media stories on Kagan's background and most, predictably, focused on her knack for "bringing people together". Have any conservative nominees ever been described in this manner?

In any event, one silver lining for the right is that the late-summer hearings are sure to galvanize the conservative movement in the run-up to the November midterms.

Not Again

Few things are more off-putting than watching this cocksure president fill vacancies to the Supreme Court for lifetime positions, especially when his party holds 59 seats in the Senate. A bitter pill indeed.

November '10 can't arrive fast enough.

The PC War on America

S.E. Cupp looks at the perils of caving to the demands of political correctness when dealing with Islamic extremism and also the double standard employed when Christians are involved. From CNN:

The reluctance by the media and the government to acknowledge Islamic extremism -- is responsible for the deaths at Fort Hood, and the nearly successful attempts by Abdul Mutallab and Shahzad.

Even after we knew Shahzad was an Islamic terrorist, MSNBC host Contessa Brewer expressed her disappointment, suggesting some of us actually wanted him to be Muslim so we could revel in our bigotry: "There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way."

Bending over backward to redefine Islamic terrorism, and equate violence with Christian conservatism, has become a favorite pastime of some in the press. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson was one of many to forego the kind of kid-glove caution used to handle Hasan and Shahzad in favor of sweeping mischaracterizations about the Hutaree, arguing that "there has been explosive growth among far-right, militia-type groups that identify themselves as white supremacists, 'constitutionalists,' tax protesters and religious soldiers determined to kill people to uphold 'Christian' values."

He also incorrectly claims that "for the most part, far-left violence in this country has gone the way of the leisure suit and the AMC Gremlin."

Wishful thinking. There was the vandalism against Mormon temples after gay marriage was rejected in California, an episode that got almost no media coverage. And reports of death threats to Maine pro-family leader Mike Heath after a gay marriage vote in Maine. And legislator Jim Bunning reported getting death threats for his conservative position. Environmentalists and animal rights groups have taken to arson over the past decade to promote their left-wing agendas.

Our safety and security are being jeopardized every day because of cowardly political correctness, anti-Christian messages in the media, distracting semantic arguments over definitions and titles, the Obama administration's naïve, Montessori-school foreign policy, and a national security policy that hamstrings the American intelligence community from effectively pursuing threats. It's a double standard that is costing us lives.

The Four Ways

Writing for Reuters, James Pethokoukis presents a concise look at the root causes of the financial crisis.

1) Credit Ratings Agencies. While the crisis does not have a single cause, the behavior of the credit rating agencies is a defining characteristic. It is impossible to imagine the current crisis without the activities of the NRSROs. And, it is difficult to imagine the behavior of the NRSROs without the regulations that permitted, protected, and encouraged their activities. … Rather the evidence is most consistent with the view that regulatory policies and Congressional laws protected and encouraged the behavior of NRSROs.

2) Credit Default Swaps. I am suggesting that the evolution of the CDS market, the fragility of the banks, and the Fed’s capital rules illustrate a key feature of the financial crisis that is frequently ignored. The problems with CDSs and bank capital were not a surprise in 2008; there was ample warning that things were going awry. Senior government policymakers created policies that encouraged excessive risk taking by bankers and adhered to those policies over many years even as they learned about the ramifications of their policies.

3) The SEC and Investment Banks. Consider three interrelated SEC decisions regarding the regulation of investment banks. First, the SEC in 2004 exempted the five largest investment banks from the net capital rule, which was a 1975 rule for computing minimum capital standards at broker- dealers. Second, in a related, coordinated 2004 policy change, the SEC enacted a rule that induced the five investment banks to become “consolidated supervised entities” (CSEs): The SEC would oversee the entire financial firm. Specifically, the SEC now had responsibility for supervising the holding company, broker-dealer affiliates, and all other affiliates on a consolidated basis. Third, the SEC neutered its ability to conduct consolidated supervision of major investment banks. … The combination of these three policies contributed to the onset, magnitude, and breadth of the financial crisis. The SEC’s decisions created enormous latitude and incentives for investment banks to increase risk, and they did.

4) Fannie and Freddie. Deterioration in the financial condition of the GSEs was not a surprise. … But, Congress did not respond and allowed increasingly fragile GSEs to endanger the entire financial system. It is difficult to discern why. Some did not want to jeopardize the increased provision of affordable housing. Many received generous financial support from the GSEs in return for their protection. For the purposes of this paper, the critical issue is that policymakers did not respond as the GSEs became systemically fragile. Again, I am not arguing that the timing, extent, and full nature of the housing bubble were perfectly known. I am arguing that policymakers created incentives for massive risk-taking by the GSEs and then did not respond to information that this risk-taking threatened the financial system.

Catholic but...

I just came across a news story showing off this catchy title: "Many Catholics Loyal to Church, Not the Vatican". At the moment, time is rather sparse to comment on this nonsense at any length, but it demonstrates the popular move by so many out there to drive a permanent wedge between the Catholic faith and the pope. Predictable fare coming from those who don't want to be reminded that they're supposed to live a certain way.

It reminds me of a humorous line Christopher Buckley once made. I'm going from of memory here but it went something like this:

"I love these Catholics who say, 'I'm Catholic, but I don't need the pope to tell me what to do, I don't need the bishops, and I don't need the priests, and so on', and by the time they're finished, you want to hand them an entry card to the Unitarian church."

Eyes on Pakistan

From Sadanand Dhume, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

Monday night's arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday, will undoubtedly stoke the usual debate about how best to keep America safe in the age of Islamic terrorism. But this should not deflect us from another, equally pressing, question. Why do Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora churn out such a high proportion of the world's terrorists?

Indonesia has more Muslims than Pakistan. Turkey is geographically closer to the troubles of the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Syria are immeasurably more hostile to America and the West. Yet it is Pakistan, or its diaspora, that produced the CIA shooter Mir Aimal Kasi; the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef (born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents); 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's kidnapper, Omar Saeed Sheikh; and three of the four men behind the July 2005 train and bus bombings in London...

Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam. The country's name means "Land of the Pure." The capital city is Islamabad. The national flag carries the Islamic crescent and star. The cricket team wears green.

From the start, the new country was touched by the messianic zeal of pan-Islamism. The Quranic scholar Muhammad Asad—an Austrian Jew born Leopold Weiss—became an early Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. The Egyptian Said Ramadan, son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, made Pakistan a second home of sorts and collaborated with Pakistan's leading Islamist ideologue, the Jamaat-e-Islami's Abul Ala Maududi. In 1949, Pakistan established the world's first transnational Islamic organization, the World Muslim Congress. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the virulently anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed president.

Through alternating periods of civilian and military rule, one thing about Pakistan has remained constant—the central place of Islam in national life. In the 1960s, Pakistan launched a war against India in an attempt to seize control of Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority province, one that most Pakistanis believe ought to be theirs by right.