Right U.S.

Dem compares Repubs to Nazis,TEA Party to KKK

2011-01-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

In a January 11th Roll Call op-ed Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen wrote

"I have been troubled by the hateful and often patently untrue words that enter the American mind via the Internet, talk radio and even mainstream media."

On Tuesday January 18th on the floor of the House, Rep. Cohen compared Republican dissent of Obamacare to Nazi propaganda.

Ahh the new civility.

On Wednesday nights “Keeping them Honest” segment, with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Rep. Cohen defended his earlier statements and even blamed Jesse Venturas Tru TV show "Conspiracy Theories" for creating anti Government sentiment. Cooper calls the show "ridiculous" and "such a joke" Rep. Cohen goes on to claim that shows like Conspiracy Theory are responsible for the murder of Federal employees.

Later in the interview Cooper asks Rep. Cohen to explain the following comments made by Cohen in an April 2010 interview;

"The Tea Party people are kind of, without robes and hoods, they have really shown a very hardcore angry side of America that is against any type of diversity."

Rep. Cohen claimed that the TEA Party did arise much like the KKK did after the civil war but in the same sentence admits that the Tea Party is not doing the kind of things the klan did. Cooper responds by stating that the TEA Party could be compared to any populist movement and the KKK comparison seems incendiary and deeply offensive to those in the party.

Realizing he could no longer defend his position or deny the glaring double standard Rep. Cohen had this to say;

“I won’t say it again, but I was right,”

The aftermath of the Tucson tragedy

2011-01-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

By Charles Krauthammer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others Saturday in Tucson brought out an outpouring of emotion for the victims. Six people were killed, including a 9-year-old girl who went to the casual meet-and-greet because of her interest in politics. In addition to Giffords, 13 others were wounded. The suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, was taken into custody at the scene.

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.
This Story

the verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class "I sit by the door with my purse handy" so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.
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Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

Fiscal crises threaten Europe's generous benefits

2010-05-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

Associated Press

LONDON (AP) -- Six weeks of vacation a year. Retirement at 60. Thousands of euros for having a baby. A good university education for less than the cost of a laptop.

The system known as the European welfare state was built after World War II as the keystone of a shared prosperity meant to prevent future conflict. Generous lifelong benefits have since become a defining feature of modern Europe.

Now the welfare state -- cherished by many Europeans as an alternative to what they see as dog-eat-dog American capitalism -- is coming under its most serious threat in decades: Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

Deep budget cuts are under way across Europe. Although the first round is focused mostly on government payrolls -- the least politically explosive target -- welfare benefits are looking increasingly vulnerable.

"The current welfare state is unaffordable," said Uri Dadush, director of the Carnegie Endowment's International Economics Program. "The crisis has made the day of reckoning closer by several years in virtually all the industrial countries."

Germany will decide next month just how to cut at least 3 billion euros ($3.75 billion) from the budget. The government is suggesting for the first time that it could make fresh cuts to unemployment benefits that include giving Germans under 50 about 60 percent of their last salary before taxes for up to a year. That benefit itself emerged after cuts to an even more generous package about five years ago.

"We have to adjust our social security systems in a way that they motivate people to accept regular work and do not give counterproductive incentives," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told news weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on Saturday.

The uncertainty over the future of the welfare state is undermining the continent's self-image at a time when other key elements of post-war European identity are fraying.

Large-scale immigration from outside Europe is challenging the continent's assumptions about its dedication to tolerance and liberty as countries move to control individual clothing -- the Islamic veil -- in the name of freedom and equality.

Deeply wary of military conflict, many nations now find themselves nonetheless mired in Afghanistan on behalf of what was supposed to be a North Atlantic alliance, shying away from wholesale pullout while doing their utmost to keep troops from actual combat.

Demographers and economists began warning decades ago that social welfare was doomed by the aging of Europe's baby boomers. Some governments had been trimming and reforming, but now almost all are scrambling to close deficits in order to prevent a wider collapse of confidence in the euro.

"We need to change, to adapt ... for the sake of the protection of our social model," European Union Commissioner Joaquin Almunia of Spain told reporters in Stockholm Thursday.

The move is risky: experts warn the cuts could undermine the growth needed to pull budgets back on a sustainable path.

On Monday, Britain unveils 6 billion pounds ($8.6 billion) in cuts -- mostly to government payrolls and expenses. The government has promised to raise the age at which citizens receive a state pension -- up from 60 to 65 for women, and from 65 to 66 for men. It also plans to toughen the welfare regime, requiring the unemployed to try to find jobs in order to collect benefits.

Britain says it will limit child tax credits and scrap a 250-pound ($360) payment to the families of every newborn. Ministers are reviewing the long-term affordability of the country's generous public sector pensions.

Funding for Britain's nationalized health care service will be protected under the new government, however, and should rise each year to 2015.

France's conservative government is focusing on raising the retirement age. Many workers can now retire at 60 with 50 percent of their average salary. Extra funds are available for retired civil servants, those with three or more children, military veterans and others.

A parliamentary debate is planned for September. Unions in France are organizing a national day of protest marches and strikes on Thursday to demand protection of wages and the retirement age.

In Spain, billions in cuts to state salaries go into effect next month, and the Socialist government has frozen increases in pensions meant to compensate for inflation for at least two years.

"They've hit us really hard," said Federico Carbonero, 92, a retired soldier. He said he was unlikely to live long enough to see the worst of the pension freeze, but had no doubts he would have to start relying on savings to maintain his lifestyle.

Spain is cutting assistance payments for disabled people by 300 million euros ($375 million) and did away with a three-year-old bonus of 2,500 euros ($3,124.25) per new baby. It also has proposed hiking the retirement age for men from 65 to 67.

Countries in northern Europe have done a far better of reforming social welfare and have unemployment systems that focus on re-employing people instead of making their unemployment comfortable, said Gayle Allard, a professor of economic environment and country analysis at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid.

Denmark and other Nordic countries are known for the world's highest taxes and most generous cradle-to-grave benefits. Denmark has implemented a system known broadly as "flexicurity," which combines flexibility for employers to hire and fire workers with financial security and training to prepare for new jobs.

Denmark had a 7.5 percent unemployment rate in the first quarter of this year, well below the EU average of 9.6 percent. Swedish and Finnish unemployment stood at 8.9 percent. Norway, with some of the world's most generous unemployment benefits fully funded by oil for the forseeable future, has Europe's lowest jobless rate, just 3 percent in April.

Southern European countries that have not moved toward reforming welfare in the same ways are paying a steep price.

After sharp cutbacks imposed as the condition of an international bailout this month, Greeks must now contribute to pension funds for 40 instead of 37 years before retiring, and the age of early retirement is set to 60 at the earliest.

Civil servants with monthly salaries of above 3,000 euros ($3,750) will lose two extra months of salary -- one paid at Christmas, the other split between Easter and summer vacation.

In Portugal, seen as another potential candidate for bailout, the government is focusing on hikes in income, corporate and sales taxes and has avoided drastic changes to welfare entitlements. Unemployment benefits will be cut somewhat and the out-of-work will have to accept any job paying more than 10 percent more than what they would receive in unemployment benefits.

The government is also stepping up checks on welfare claims, freezing public sector pay and slicing public investment.

"There's been a lack of willingness to shift away from welfare as purely social protection towards an approach which has been in much of northern Europe in recent years, which is welfare as social investment," said Iain Begg, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science's European Institute.

Otto Fricke, a budget expert for the Free Democrats, the coalition partner of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, told The Associated Press that no decisions on cuts have been made, but everything is on the table except education, pension funds and financial aid to developing countries. At least one high-ranking CDU member has called for the idea of protecting education to be re-examined, however.

German public education, which was virtually free until 2005, when some of Germany's 16 states started charging tuition fees of 1000 euros ($1,250) a year.

Virtually all Germany's students pay that much or less to attend state-funded universities, including elite institutions. Education isn't as cheap elsewhere in Europe but the 3,290 pounds ($4,720) per year paid by British students at Cambridge is still far less than Americans pay at comparable schools like Harvard, where annual tuition comes in just shy of $35,000.

The idea of cutting education is proving hard to swallow in the face of Germany's promise to contribute up to 147.6 billion euros ($184.5 billion) in loan guarantees to protect Greece and other countries that use the euro from bankruptcy.

"I am worried that this crisis will also affect me on a personal level, for example, that universities in Germany will raise the tuition in order to pay the loan they give to Greece," said Karoline Daederich, a 22-year-old university student from Berlin.

Associated Press

Tattered Liberty

2010-03-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

Author Mark Steyn
From the January 25, 2010, issue of NR.

While attempting to write a post describing what I see as a rather dismal future for America and much of the rest of the western world, I came across this article in which Mark Steyn describes the present state of affairs much better than I could have. Read on...

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry, and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is an illusion — and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more important, national decline is psychological — and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ’em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. And even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late-20th-century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

But that’s to cast decline in its least favorable light, after it’s had a couple of generations to work its dark magic. As it’s happening, incremental decline is extremely seductive. Great powers aren’t Chad or Rwanda, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Take a city like Vienna. Once upon a time it was an imperial capital. The empire busted up, but the capital still had magnificent architecture, handsome palaces, treasure houses of great art, a world-class orchestra, fabulous restaurants . . . who wouldn’t enjoy such “decline”? You benefit from all the accumulated capital of the past without being troubled by any of the tedious responsibilities. Have another coffee and a piece of strudel and watch the world go by. To be sure, everything new — or, at any rate, everything new that works — is invented and made elsewhere. But genteel decline from the heights can be eminently civilized, especially to those of a leftish bent. Francophile Americans passing through bucolic villages with their charmingly state-regulated charcuteries and farmland wholly subsidized by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy can be forgiven for wondering whether global hegemony is all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether decline will seem quite so bucolic viewed from a Jersey strip mall rather than the Dordogne remains to be seen. Yet in the geopolitical sense it can be marvelously liberating. You still go to all the best parties and have a seat at the top table — Britain and France are members of the U.N. Security Council and the G7 and every other group that counts — and even better, when the check comes, you’re not the one stuck with the tab. You can preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it: It’s no surprise to find that the post-great powers of Europe are the noisiest promoters of every fashionable nostrum, from the iniquities of the Zionist Entity to the perils of “climate change.” The European Union has attitudes rather than policies. A couple of years back, Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post, opened his mail to find a copy of something called “Conclusions of the European Council,” a summary of the work done during the six months of Ireland’s “Euro-presidency.” A braver man than I, he read it, at least as far as Item 80: “The European Council expresses its deep concern at the recent events in the Eastern Congo, which could jeopardise the transition process.”

And that and a couple euros will get you a café au lait. The EU is free to flaunt its “concern” — whoops, “deep concern” — over events in the Eastern Congo precisely because nobody in the Eastern Congo or anywhere else expects Europe to do a thing about it. The Continent increasingly resembles those insulated celebrities being shuttled around town from one humanitarian gala to another — like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo DiCaprio jetting in to join Barack Obama and Al Gore in bemoaning Joe Sixpack’s carbon footprint.

And when you put it like that, what’s the downside?

Okay, since you ask, here’s my prediction: American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s. For one thing, we don’t appreciate how unusual the last transfer of power was. If you’re not quite sure when that took place, the British historian Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised — although it was hardly “devised” at all. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base — just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the ANZUS alliance Down Under to NORAD close to home, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States. Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic progeny is one of the smoothest transfers of power in history — and unlikely to be repeated.

Now look beyond the Anglosphere. Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies,” from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the Free World” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few NATO members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise — see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have postmodern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario — because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is that America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Furthermore, is “a large Sweden” even possible? Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have common interests. There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above 1 million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4 million), and Singapore (3 million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions,” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.

And overseas? If America becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America? Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those that salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of a mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the trash heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Russia? The demographic deformation of Czar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

The new Caliphate? Even if every dime-store jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium would be in decline from Day One.

So there’s no plausible new kid on the block? Isn’t that good news? Not exactly. Much of the timing of American decline depends on Beijing, which will make the final determination on such matters as when the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency. Given that they hold at least the schedule of our fate in their hands, it would be rather reassuring if they had the capability to assume America’s role as the global order-maker. But they don’t and they never will. The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order — in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still be the most inviting target — first because it’s big, and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire Left and an increasing chunk of the Right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefited from an unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster, and more devastating than Britain’s — and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the West” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year-old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad, from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty — you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod — but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to old political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations’. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

— This article first appeared in the January 25, 2010, issue of National Review as “Welcome to Rome.”

As Gas Prices Rise

2010-03-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

Interior Department Blocks 61 More Oil and Gas Leases
By Steve Everleyleases
In yet another example of the U.S. government blocking the development of affordable and reliable American energy, the Bureau of Land Management agreed last Friday to suspend sixty-one oil and gas leases in Montana.

The BLM's decision came after a lengthy litigation process: The Western Environmental Law Center filed a federal lawsuit in 2008 claiming that the BLM did not consider the potential climate change impacts of oil and gas development in the area when it sold the leases.

After two years of fighting the lawsuit in court, the BLM agreed last week to settle with WELC by just suspending all of the leases.

The suspension comes just over a year after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar voided 77 oil and gas leases in Utah.

This latest anti-energy decision, however, is apparently part of a broader trend in Montana: Yesterday Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer personally asked Salazar to cancel several other oil and gas leases covering some 200,000 acres in the state.

According to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Montana oil and gas production generated more than $25 million in royalties in 2008 alone, a hefty sum for a state expected to face a more than $60 million budgetary shortfall by June 2011.

Shocker: Authoritarian Chinese government complains that IPCC censors are too authoritarian

2010-01-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

Call this one another nail in the coffin of global warming. The Chinese government, never known for endorsing open communication, has called on the UN’s IPCC to show more tolerance for dissent.

Business Standard reports the duplicitious details:

“Amid controversy surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on melting glaciers, Xie Zhenhua, Vice-Chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, today urged the UN panel to make the fifth assessment report comprehensive by also citing contrarian views.”

Alright, class, what does it tell us when an authoritarian dictatorship known for denying its citizens the right to open communications is appalled by the censorship of the IPCC?

Is it hypocrisy? Or honesty? Or both?

Source: BusinessStandard.com via Tim Blair

Why Obama's State of the Union has America's enemies smiling.

2010-01-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

In Beijing General Secretary Hu Jintao is sporting a big grin. Kim Jong Il is breaking out another case of his favorite Hennessy in North Korea. And in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is celebrating in, well, the way that dour theocrats kick up their heels, however they manage to do that.
The cause for all this cheer? On Wednesday Barack Obama delivered his first State of the Union message, and although he surely did not intend to do so, he essentially let these villains--and others--know they can do whatever they want. The president unfortunately will not be doing much to stop them from destabilizing the international system--or even from threatening the United States.

America, whether it should be or not, is a nation at war. There are two obvious ones, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a general struggle against Islamic fanaticism taking place across the globe. Then there are especially consequential confrontations. Two nuclear rogues--North Korea and Iran--threaten to upend everything, while others--Syria comes to mind--wait in the wings.
Finally, to take another example from current headlines, there is a silent conflict waged every day against the United States, an unprecedented program of state-sponsored cyberattacks against defense, civilian and corporate networks. This hostile and never-ending campaign gives rise--or at least should give rise--to a state of emergency. Yes, I'm referring to the People's Republic of China.
Yet in a long oration the president devoted just nine minutes--out of 69--to discussing foreign policy and external threats. In that short time, he didn't provide much assurance when it came to Afghanistan and Iraq. He wasn't even particularly candid about how long American soldiers would be in the latter country. "As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president," Obama said. "We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August." Yet as Larry Johnson of the No Quarter blog pointed out on WABC's John Batchelor Show just after the address ended, American soldiers are slated to remain in the country for at least another year.
With regard to nuclear rogues, President Obama is trying to both keep fissile materials out of the hands of terrorists and rid the world of its most destructive arms. "These diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons," he declared. "That's why North Korea now faces increased isolation and stronger sanctions--sanctions that are being vigorously enforced." Unfortunately that's not true: Beijing has, especially since last October, become a sanctions buster by ramping up material assistance to Pyongyang and facilitating its arms sales, now prohibited by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874.

Gordon G. Chang,

Democrats cry injustice

2010-01-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

Senate Democrats are furious with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito — and Alito’s Democrats say Alito crossed the line when he mouthed the words “not true” during President Barack Obama’s speech Wednesday night. But worse, they say, both Roberts and Alito misled them during their confirmation hearings when they represented themselves as jurists who would respect precedent. ..

“You bet they misled,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the assistant majority leaderSenate Judiciary Committee. and a member of the

At issue is the ruling in Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) that dealt with regulations on labor union and corporate financing.

Supporters say that Alito, Roberts and the three other justices in the majority simply returned to the original meaning of the First Amendment — that the ruling was intended to uphold the right of free speech.

“I really believe that an injustice was done to the First Amendment and political speech in the earlier decision,” said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a Judiciary Committee member who has argued before the high court. “I don’t think that’s activism.”

But Democrats see it otherwise — insisting that the decision represents exactly the sort of precedent-bucking judicial activism that Roberts and Alito rejected in sworn testimony during their confirmation hearings.

Referring to the memorable analogy in which Roberts compared himself to a baseball umpire, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told POLITICO this week, “He’s not somebody who just measures balls and strikes. It’s been the most activist court that I’ve seen in my 17 years in the committee.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said Roberts in particular “totally misrepresented himself” in testifying about upholding precedent.

In a speech on the Senate floor Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairmanhttp://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/politico/pl_politico/storytext/32200/34918466/SIG=11memh0s7.r{}

The Significance of Chris Matthews's Admission

2010-01-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

By [Jonah Goldberg]

Personally, I think Chris Matthews' momentary colorblindness offers a telling insight. As many of us have argued around here for a while, conservatives aren't obsessed with Obama's race, liberals are. That's why we've had so many asinine, nasty and ignorant charges of racism hurled at Obama's critics. There's a certain species of liberal that can't get over Obama's race. They assume that conservatives can't get over it either and so criticism of Obama from the right must — according to Olbermannesque thinking — stem from some evil desire to see a "black man fail" or some other idiocy. I think it's nice that we have a black president as do most conservatives I know. I just don't think it's the most important thing in the world. Nor do I think that his blackness makes bad liberal ideas suddenly good. Black men are wrong when they say 2+2 is 5 too.

Unlike Chris Matthews, I go weeks, even months, without "remembering" that Obama is black. It's just not a big part of how I see the world or his day-to-day presidency. It is a big part of how Matthews sees things. I leave it to others to decide whose outlook is healthier.

FDR: Tax Increases Don't Apply to Me

2010-01-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

Katherine Mangu-Ward

FDR's presidency was marked by more than a little chutzpah—22nd Amendment, anyone?—but there was perhaps no move more purely, willfully brass-balled than his personal tax scheme, described by Sarah Lawsky at TaxProfBlog:

Throughout his first term, President Franklin Roosevelt paid taxes at the rates in effect when he took office, even as statutory tax rates increased. His position was that paying tax at a rate higher than that in effect at his inauguration reduced his salary, which violated the Constitutional provision that states that the president's compensation "shall be neither increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected."

From Roosevelt's 1937 return [PDF], this note:

"I am wholly unable to figure out the amount of tax for the following reason," he writes. "The first twenty days of January, 1937, were part of my first term of office and to these twenty days the income tax rates as of March 4, 1933 apply. To the other 345 days of the year 1937, the income tax rates as they existed on January 30, 1937. As this is a problem in higher mathematics, may I ask that the Bureau let me know the amount of the balance due?"

Among execs, Roosevelt seems to have been alone in trying out this line of reasoning. Judges, who enjoy the protection of similar constitutional language about their compensation, have tried the Roosevelt gambit too. In the 1920s, the Supreme Court ruled that judges' salaries, including their own, should be tax exempt. But by 1939 and again in 2001, the Court decided their paychecks were taxable after all, suggesting that they wouldn't go for this reasoning if Obama tried it on them these days.
See a page of FDR's return here.

Al Queda’s New Strategy in Yemen Threatens U.S.-Saudi Arabia Axis

2010-01-25T08:17:00.000-08:00

ANALYSIS
by Webster Brooks
Al Queda’s shift in global strategy to transform Yemen into a platform to destabilize Saudi Arabia represents the most serious national security crisis the Obama administration has confronted. Saudi Arabia is the strategic lynchpin of energy security powering the U.S. dominated global order. Any chaos, instability or leadership change in Riyadh that disrupts Saudi oil production could trigger price shocks, a global economic downturn and enhance Iran’s status as the dominant regional hegemon in the Middle East. Osama bin Ladin’s escalation of attacks against the House of Saud comes at a time when U.S. military forces are overstretched in Afghanistan and Iraq and American public opinion is staunchly opposed to another military intervention. Given the constraints on his administration’s capacity to commit ground forces to the region, Obama must now rely on President Ali Saleh’s faltering regime to eliminate Al Queda’s growing presence in Yemen’s vast ungoverned spaces. AQAP’s sudden emergence as a serious threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia is not accidental; it is product of Osama bin Ladin’s long-term strategic planning.
Over the past year Osama Bin Ladin has merged his Saudi Arabia and Yemen operations into Al Queda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Led by Nasser Wahayshi and his Saudi deputy, Saeed al-Shihri, AQAP includes veterans from its defeated insurgency in Saudi Arabia two years ago, along with recruits from Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The new franchise has established command structures, communications lines, base areas and bomb making factories that fabricated new stealth PETN explosives recently tested in Saudi Arabia and the United States. By claiming responsibility for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day attempt to blow up the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and the August 2009 suicide bomber attack on Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohemmend bin Nayef, AQAP has signaled that its presence in Yemen will be permanent, lethal and have global reach.
Al Queda’s strategy in Yemen seeks to leverage the current crisis of President Saleh’s weak regime into a “state of controlled chaos” that will facilitate AQAP’s a long-term presence to conduct operations that undermine the Saudi government. To that end Bin Ladin’s forces are not necessarily seeking the overthrow of President Saleh’s regime. Quite the opposite, as long as President Saleh’s government remains weak and isolated AQAP’s capacity to expand its base in Yemen will grow. This explains why Al Queda is content with operating “in the seam” of the two insurgencies buffeting President Saleh’s regime; one led by the broad-based Southern Movement to secede from the central government, and the other a tenacious Shiaa-based Al Houthi insurgency backed by Iran along Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia. Both movements serve AQAP’s tactical and strategic goals in Yemen, but in different ways.
That the Sunni dominated AQAP is the beneficiary of the Shia-based Al Houthi’s two-front war against Yemen’s central government and Saudi Arabia is a peculiar irony of the crisis. The Al Houthi’s border war with Saudi Arabia is destabilizing the Saudi royal family, the Saudi army and inflaming the passions of the Kingdom’s oppressed Shia minority concentrated around its eastern oilfields. For months Riyadh denied that its troops were engaging Al Houthi’s forces on the ground and that Saudi jets were carpet bombing Al Houthi camps. On December 24, the Saudi government reluctantly announced that 70 Saudi soldiers were killed in fierce border clashes. Desperate to liquidate the Al Houthi Shia rebellion on its border, Saudi Arabia has stepped up its bombing campaign and artillery shelling of Al Houthi positions. Riyadh has also tried to deflect the growing political backlash across the Middle East to the atrocities it is committing against the Al Houthi by claiming Iran is supplying funds and weapons to the insurgents–claims that have yet to be substantiated. Thus, the Al Houthi insurgency serves AQAP’s interests on two fronts; destabilizing the Saudi government with its border war on the one hand and draining President Saleh’s government, army and national resources on the other.
AQAP’s relationship to the secessionist Southern Movement (SM) pivots on maintaining friendly neutrality in order to operate and sustain its base camps in eastern and southern Yemen. As a democratic alliance of Nasserites, socialists, labor and business leaders the Southern Movement and Al Queda do not share a common political program or ideology. Nevertheless, the Southern Movement’s anti-American sentiments and its struggle to secede from President Saleh’s U.S.-backed government has positioned the coalition and AQAP on the same side of the political divide. The complication facing the Obama administration in attacking AQAP’s southern bases were evident when U.S. cruise missiles raked the villages of Arhab and Abyan and Shabwah in December. The attacks were not only condemned by local tribal elders but Southern Movement leader Abbass al Asal characterized the strikes as a “genocidal attack on the people of the south, not Al Queda.” The gruesome scenes of 30 dead Yemeni villagers and five AQAP operatives were broadcast across the Middle East on Al Jazeera. The following day, 10,000 people attended a rally held by the SM’s Joint Meeting Parties which condemned “American targeting of civilians.” President Saleh also came under fire as a “U.S. puppet regime” for his army’s role in supporting the cruise missile attacks on Al Queda. The net political effect of the air strikes sparked anti-American rage and further undermined President Saleh’s government while fostering more support for Al Queda. Thus Al Queda is able to use the Southern Movement as a buffer that provides it with political cover and limits America’s freedom to conduct air strikes and Predator drone attacks that invariably kill civilians. In the future, Al Queda will undoubtedly attempt to co-opt elements of the Southern Movement’s diverse coalition in order to broaden its influence and enhance the security of its base operations. Should the Southern Movement formally break away from the Saleh government to re-establish an independent Republic of South Yemen (1967-1990) AQAP’s relationship to the new government will emerge as a crucial issue. A new government in South Yemen could conceivably sanction Al Queda’s presence and further complicate U.S. counter-terrorist operations.
In response to the AQAP’s offensive, President Obama pledged $70 million to Yemen’s government, increased Special Forces deployments to “train” Yemeni counter-terrorist units and launched cruise missile strikes against Al Queda bases in mid-December. Notwithstanding President Obama’s countermeasures, it’s clear his administration does not have a thoughtful strategy to neutralize Al Queda in Yemen. Indeed, the U.S. intelligence community’s failure to recognize the seriousness of AQAP’s buildup and new capabilities until Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas bombing attempt has left the Obama administration desperately playing catch-up.
The Obama administration needs a practical strategy to neutralize Al Queda in Yemen. Such a strategy must begin with preventing the collapse of President Saleh’s regime which cannot survive fighting three insurgencies simultaneously. The Southern Movement and the Al Houthi insurgents are not calling for the overthrow of President Saleh’s government; both seek to break away from the Yemen’s corrupt and criminal regime. Therefore, the Obama administration must convince President Saleh that significant concessions must be made to the Al Houthi and the Southern Movement to stabilize his regime, preserve Yemen’s sovereignty and isolate AQAP. In short, both groups will have to be offered some form of regional autonomy and Yemen must be transformed into a federated state with the central government possessing limited powers.
The most critical first step for the Obama administration to undertake is convincing President Saleh and Saudi Arabia’s leaders to agree to an immediate and unconditional cease fire with the Al Houthi insurgents. Further, the cease fire should include a pledge to enter into negotiations on regional autonomy for the Al Houthi’s, a settlement of Saudi border security issues and Al Houthi representation in a restructured national government. President Saleh’s current Six Point plan to implement a cease fire is nothing more than a call for the Al Houthi’s total surrender. It is a non-starter that should be scrapped immediately. A negotiated cease fire will dramatically reduce pressure on Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s government and limit Iran’s maneuvering room to become more deeply entangled in an insurgency on Saudi Arabia’s border.
Similarly, the Obama administration should enlist the services of a skilled mediator (preferably Qatar’s government) to convene talks between Sana’a and the Southern Movement. Qatar negotiated a cease fire between President Saleh and the Southern Movement in 2007 and is considered by both sides as an impartial mediator. Unless the Southern Movement is offered regional autonomy that grants sweeping autonomous powers similar to those enjoyed by Kurdistan today, it is doubtful that reconciliation can be achieved. In addition to a regional autonomy agreement, Southern Movement representatives must be brought into significant leadership roles in Yemen’s central government to ensure that equity, transparency and reforms are implemented. Anything short of giving Southern Movement representatives a significant role in governing a reformed Yemen, including demands that President Saleh step down as President will justifiably be rejected. President Saleh will not be disposed to concede autonomy to the Southern Movement or the Al Houthi, but a partitioned Yemen and the creation of a new breakaway republic in South Yemen will open the door to more instability in the region, particularly from Iran which has the economic largesse and proximate skills to stand-up a proxy state.
The concessions and compromises that President Saleh must make to the Al Houthi’s and the Southern Movement will dramatically alter the nature of Yemen’s embattled government. However, the alternative is more chaos, civil war, the likely breakup of the state and an enlarged presence of Iran and Al Queda on the peninsula. Arguably, it may already be too late for the United States and their allies to prevent the breakup of Yemen and the collapse of the Saleh regime. AQAP has the momentum. Osama Bin Ladin is dictating the time and place of battle, and the choice of weapons. Yemen is now the “new frontline” in the global war between Al Queda and the United States with Saudi Arabia’s security hanging in the balance.

Reviving Federalism

2010-01-13T14:07:00.000-08:00

Reihan Salam
National and state government should be kept apart.
America's federal system is badly broken. The economic downturn has exacerbated its many failings. State governments, meanwhile, have struggled over the past year. Tax receipts have collapsed and new spending commitments have proven unsustainable. Federal stimulus dollars have only delayed the reckoning to come. A number of observers, including James Surowiecki of The New Yorker, have suggested that the essential problem is that our federal system is ill-suited to a fast-moving global economy, and that we'd be better served by a more unified national government. The argument has some merit. The recession-fighting efforts of the federal government are indeed undermined by balanced budget requirements in the states. As Washington borrows and spends, the states are forced to retrench, leaving us at an economic standstill.
Yet it is also true that there are downsides to excessive centralization. Indeed, one could just as easily argue that the real problem with American federalism is that our states are stuck in their ways. Rather than acting as "laboratories of democracy," our states march in lockstep, reluctant to pursue the kind of political and institutional reform that might yield solid returns. The pathologies of the status quo have led a growing number of Californians to demand a constitutional convention, an effort that could easily spread to other dysfunctional states. Unfortunately, new state constitutions can only do so much. The deeper problem is that the United States has forgotten the virtues of what the legal scholars Richard Epstein and Michael Greve call "one problem, one sovereign."
In Greve's telling, which you can find in his brilliant Bradley Lecture on "Commerce, Competition, and the Court," the Supreme Court has abandoned what had once been its central mission, namely the integration of the American national marketplace, the source of the country's prosperity and power. Rather than strictly separating the functions of the federal government and the states, the Supreme Court increasingly allows states to interfere with the free flow of commerce and to create interstate compacts that would have once been deemed unconstitutional. This shift has led to all manner of pernicious economic and political distortions.
The Supreme Court isn't the only guilty party, however. Congress has devised social programs that "share" responsibility between the federal government and the states in a manner that has sent us on the road to fiscal ruin. A number of policy analysts on the left have proposed federalizing Medicaid, including Greg Anrig of the Century Foundation. In "Federalism and Its Discontents," Anrig offers a compelling indictment of the program, and he calls for federalizing it.
But as Anrig acknowledges, the idea of federalizing Medicaid actually has a solid conservative pedigree. The appeal for conservatives is straightforward. Simply put, it will lead to greater accountability: Now the federal government spends the bulk of the money, but the states determine eligibility rules and other factors. Washington depends on the states to control costs, yet the states don't bear the full burden of their spending decisions. The consequence is a ballooning program. By the same logic, all programs that are jointly funded and jointly operated deserve close scrutiny. Timothy Conlan's From New Federalism to Devolution contains an extensive discussion of Reagan's views on federalism, including his belief that Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)--now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families--should be the responsibility of the states. In 1982, the Reagan White House launched its federalism initiative.

In his State of the Union address, Reagan proposed to nationalize health care financing for the poor, terminate the federal role in welfare and return to the states 43 major federal grant programs along with 28 billion federal dollars in excise taxes to pay for them. Most proposals for rebalancing federal responsibilities actually handed the federal government responsibility for income maintenance programs, yet Reagan believed, rightly in my view, that an AFDC block grant would be preferable, to give states the flexibility to pursue more effective anti-poverty approaches tailored to local economies. This, of course, is what later enabled welfare reform.

Pregnant Woman Raped at Gun Point in Great Britain, Where Guns Are Banned

2010-01-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

by Duane Lester

A man and woman were sitting in their living room when they heard something outside. The man got up to investigate while the woman, who was seven months pregnant, stayed where she was.
That’s when their personal Hell began.

He saw the three men, all wearing balaclavas and scarves, at the end of the path and tried to shut the front door but the men forced their way inside and shoved him to the ground.

Once inside, the men demanded the keys to the couple’s car. The man was threatened and hit in the head with a sawed off shotgun. Then, it made a horrible turn for the worse:

The woman was then grabbed and forced upstairs by one of the attackers and forced to perform a sex act on him which police have described as ‘oral rape’.
He threatened to shoot the couple unless she did what he said.
Speaking for the first time about the rape, the victim said: ‘I just wanted to protect my baby. I was absolutely terrified and being so late in the pregnancy I didn’t want to get into a fight where they might hurt me or my baby.
‘He (the rapist) said it was my lucky day.’

If you are living in or around North London, please read the article and see if you can help identify these subhumans.
But I have to put some of this blame where it belongs. See, the gun control lobby has a stranglehold on the once Great Britain. The gun control laws are so strict their Olympic shooting team currently has to practice in Switzerland. They’ll have to amend the laws just to let them practice in the country they’ll be playing for.
So who doesn’t have guns? Any law abiding citizen.
Who has guns? The criminals.

In response, allow me to quote at length from “Gun Control in England: The Tarnished Gold Standard,” written by historian Joyce Lee Malcolm and published in the fall 2004 issue of Journal on Firearms & Public Policy:

[Between 1997 and 2003] crimes with [banned firearms] have more than doubled…. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose — by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offenses were committed….

Clearly since the ban criminals have not found it difficult to get guns and the balance has not shifted in the interest of public safety….

In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century….

A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime….

And here’s the icing on the cake: “[A] United Nations study of eighteen industrialized countries, including the United States, published in 2002 … found England and Wales at the top of the Western world’s crime league, with the worst record for ‘very serious’ offenses.” [Emphasis added]

And all this while crime in the United States, including violent crime, has been steadily falling.

In America, you have the right to defend yourself. In Great Britain, will probably be prosecuted for it.

Hyperbole?

Not at all:

In 1973 a young man running on a road at night was stopped by the police and found to be carrying a length of steel, a cycle chain, and a metal clock weight. He explained that a gang of youths had been after him. At his hearing it was found he had been threatened and had previously notified the police. The justices agreed he had a valid reason to carry the weapons. Indeed, 16 days later he was attacked and beaten so badly he was hospitalized. But the prosecutor appealed the ruling, and the appellate judges insisted that carrying a weapon must be related to an imminent and immediate threat. They sent the case back to the lower court with directions to convict.
In 1987 two men assaulted Eric Butler, a 56-year-old British Petroleum executive, in a London subway car, trying to strangle him and smashing his head against the door. No one came to his aid. He later testified, "My air supply was being cut off, my eyes became blurred, and I feared for my life." In desperation he unsheathed an ornamental sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of his attackers, stabbing the man in the stomach. The assailants were charged with wounding. Butler was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.
In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal.
In 1999 Tony Martin, a 55-year-old Norfolk farmer living alone in a shabby farmhouse, awakened to the sound of breaking glass as two burglars, both with long criminal records, burst into his home. He had been robbed six times before, and his village, like 70 percent of rural English communities, had no police presence. He sneaked downstairs with a shotgun and shot at the intruders. Martin received life in prison for killing one burglar, 10 years for wounding the second, and a year for having an unregistered shotgun. The wounded burglar, having served 18 months of a three-year sentence, is now free and has been granted �5,000 of legal assistance to sue Martin.

In America, the pregnant woman maybe gets a gun while her boyfriend fights with the robbers at their front door. Then maybe she shoots them as they enter the house. Maybe she doesn’t get raped.
It happens every 13 seconds. Clayton Cramer’s Gun Defense Blog is proof this happens more often than people think.
In America, this could end differently.

The Late Great Britain: Model Warned By Police for Defending Herself…In Her Own Home

2010-01-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

by Duane Lester
The lunacy continues in the island nation that once controlled so much of the world. Now, it’s content to try to control it’s subjects. I’d like to call them citizens, but really, I’m not going to try to fool you.

I recently told you about the man who went to prison for defending his home against intruders who had his family tied up. Now comes the story of a model who scared peeping Toms off by waving a knife at them.
Guess who the police talked to:

Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal.
Klass’s spokesman, Jonathan Shalit, said the former Hear’Say singer was “utterly terrified” by the intruders and “aghast” at the police warning. “All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. “She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused.”

Try to wrap your head around that for a minute. Even if those creeps were to come into the house, she would be in violation of the law if she tried to defend herself or her daughter.
Meanwhile, in crazy Bizarro world:

HOUSTON (KTRK) – A suspected burglar is dead after being shot by a homeowner in northeast Houston.
…
It’s unclear right now if the homeowner will face any charges.

It seems better that way, doesn’t it?

California Looks to Suspend State Cap and Trade Scheme

2010-01-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

By Nan Swift
If it's true that states are the "laboratories of democracy" California's cap and trade experiment should be considered a failed one and the federal government ought to think twice about implementing the same economy-killing measures across the nation. The Wall Street Journal has the story of a possible ballot measure to at least temporarily repeal California's cap and trade carbon tax.

So Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue has begun collecting signatures for "The Global Warming Solutions Act," a ballot initiative that would suspend California's cap-and-trade scheme until the unemployment rate falls below 5.5%. He's aiming to get it on the November ballot.
No matter what one thinks of climate science, it makes little sense for an individual state to unilaterally impose major new tax and regulatory costs on its own industries. The impact of California's gesture on global temperatures will be infinitesimal, but the economic impact will make the state even less attractive to start or expand a business.
...
The law all but encourages outsourcing to Nevada, Texas, China and India. Even the liberal Sacramento Bee, which supports the law, says that policy makers should be "candid about the real costs of the transition it is contemplating. . . . Industries that are energy-intensive will move elsewhere."
Meanwhile, a new study commissioned by the Governor's Office of Small Business Advocacy estimates that the direct cost of current California regulation is $175 billion, or nearly twice the size of the state general fund budget and about $134,000 per small business each year. The Golden State already has the second most business-unfriendly regulatory climate in the nation, after New Jersey and before the cap-and-trade law.
The stakes here are huge, and not merely for California. This is the first serious effort to roll back the environmental extremism that has dominated state capitals in recent years and is now ascendant on Capitol Hill. The green lobbies and businesses that have a monetary stake in cap and trade—including big utilities that want subsidies and Silicon Valley political capitalists investing in solar and ethanol—are sure to spend heavily to stop it. They know that an electoral defeat in the greenest of states could end their national and global hopes for cap and trade.
For Californians the issue is simpler: Whether they want to continue to impose burdens that encourage employers to locate anywhere except their once prosperous state.

Be sure to note the big utilities that want subsidies. Ay, there's the rub. It's not just your typical greenies who would like industry to have stopped progressing sometime in the last century, the real danger is the corporations that are looking for taxpayer funded subsidies and who will game the system to their advantage and the taxpayer's disadvantage. Sign the petition to oppose this next big government bailout here.

Nurse takes on IRS and wins

2010-01-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

by Laura Saunders
Monday, January 11, 2010
provided by

How One Woman Went to Tax Court and Won Deduction
A Maryland nurse accomplished two rare feats in her battle with the Internal Revenue Service: She defended herself against the agency's lawyers and won, and she got a ruling that could help tens of thousands of students deduct the cost of an M.B.A. degree on their taxes.
The U.S. Tax Court handed Lori Singleton-Clarke her victory last month, saying the 47-year-old Bryantown, Md., woman had properly deducted nearly $15,000 in business school tuition. The Tax Court ruling should make it easier for many other professionals to deduct the expense of a Master in Business Administration degree.

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After getting word of the court decision, "I nearly yelled the roof off the house," Ms. Singleton-Clarke says. "I still can hardly believe it."
The IRS's rules on deducting work-related tuition are complicated and onerous, ultimately preventing most students from deducting their tuition. But this case clarifies the rules and will likely lead to more taxpayers taking the deduction, tax experts say.
Few taxpayers decide to go toe to toe with the IRS as Ms. Singleton-Clarke did, arguing her case without a lawyer. For good reason: In 2009, individuals won only about 10% of about 300 such cases, according to data from Tax Analysts. Ms. Singleton-Clarke fought her case in Tax Court, a venue where taxpayers don't have to pay the contested tax before going to trial. The court has a special procedure for small cases.
Some of the losers, such as several dozen tax protesters who defended the filing of frivolous returns, were tilting at tax windmills. Others were simply on the wrong side of the law, including a horse enthusiast who wanted to deduct his hobby losses, an unsuccessful comedian who tried to classify his expenses as business losses, and an attorney who claimed over $100,000 in medical deductions for his visits to prostitutes.
Of the few who did prevail against the IRS, nearly half came to court on a single issue: requests for "innocent spouse" treatment that decouples a spouse from a partner who is a tax cheat. This provision has been used mostly to protect unknowing wives against their husbands' tax misdeeds. One of the spouses granted relief last year was formerly married to an investment banker who didn't pay his taxes after his bonus didn't come though.
Ms. Singleton-Clarke's encounter with the tax system shows what it can take for one individual to prevail over the IRS against the long odds: favorable facts, obsessive organization, and fearlessness. She says she didn't have a lawyer because she couldn't afford one.
Her odyssey began in 2006, when she filed her 2005 return. It showed just over $50,000 of income, several smaller deductions, and one large one—for $14,787 of expenses for an M.B.A. from the University of Phoenix, an online school. Ms. Singleton-Clarke deducted the tuition because her tax preparer told her she met the law's narrow definitions.
When the IRS audited the return in late 2006, she conceded all the IRS's challenges to her deductions but one. She dug in her heels on the tuition deduction because, after looking at a complex diagram in IRS Publication 970, she believed she qualified for it.
The audit process first involved several rounds of confusing IRS correspondence. "At one point I had three requests for the same records, each with a different contact name. I had to spend hours calling to figure out who needed what," says Ms. Singleton-Clarke, a steely but soft-spoken woman.
After that she was summoned to an IRS office in downtown Washington where she had to provide more copies of her résumé, a job description, and other records. She felt overwhelmed and intimidated.
Both the IRS's actions and her reactions are typical, says Christopher Bergin, president of Tax Analysts, a group that fights for tax-system transparency and since l972 has won a series of freedom-of-information cases against the IRS. "Without doing anything illegal, they muscled her. That's what they do. The pressure can be terrifying," he says.
A spokesman for the IRS says that it never comments on issues with specific taxpayers.
As Ms. Singleton-Clarke held fast to her conviction that she deserved the deduction, she drew on skills she developed as a nurse responsible for dealing with doctors who may have infringed hospital rules. That was why she studied for her M.B.A., she says: "I didn't want to feel outmatched by surgeons who didn't want to talk to me."
When the IRS again denied her deduction by mail after her meeting with the agent, Ms. Singleton-Clarke wound up going to Tax Court to set a trial date. But when she came to court in November 2008, it seemed that everyone else had settled their cases: "There was just me by myself at one table and the [IRS] tax team of at another in a big courtroom."
The tax team consisted of a two attorneys and several assistants or paralegals. Ms. Singleton-Clarke had been told to bring copies of her documents in triplicate, including a time line of her career. Judge Stanley Goldberg questioned her closely and complimented her on her record-keeping during the hour-long trial. "The whole time," she says: "I was thinking, here is this god-like man who is going to make an important decision for me. But he wasn't a bully. I had met with the bullies before."
Reached Friday by phone, Judge Goldberg said: "I remember the case well because Ms. Singleton-Clarke was so articulate and well-prepared. Too many taxpayers are not."
Ms. Singleton-Clarke's victory came when the ruling was issued a year later. It is unusual in that it helps not only her but others as well. Decisions in small cases aren't allowed to be cited as precedent. "But everyone uses them," says Melissa Labant, a tax expert with the American Institute of CPAs. "This case definitely provides a road map others can use, especially M.B.A. students."

27 States Say No Thanks To ObamaCare

2010-01-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

By Matthew Clemente on Jan 08, 2010

With 27 states taking legislative steps to combat the Democrats’ healthcare takeover bills and 13 state Attorney Generals joining together to question the constitutionality of some of the sweetheart deals included to secure votes, ObamaCare's next big challenge may be overcoming legal action at the state level. Even state politicians who once supported President Obama's reform plan are now turning against the legislation. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at one point praised Mr. Obama's efforts toward reforming the healthcare system, used his State of the State address to criticize the current bills:

Health care reform, which started as noble and needed legislation, has become a trough of bribes, deals and loopholes. You've heard of the bridge to nowhere. This is health care to nowhere.

A recent Time.com piece explains why Governor Schwarzenegger and other state legislators are so upset with the legislation being pushed by Congressional Democrats:

As the battle enters its final stage in Washington, a rebellion is taking shape in the states, which are alarmed about the new financial burdens they will face in a revamped system. Governors of both parties are complaining that reform will drive their budgets into even deeper holes, with some feeling the effects far more than others.

Such fears are not unwarranted. The article goes on to give four examples of how ObamaCare will cripple state budgets:

1. A Bigger Medicaid Tab:
Of the 31 million uninsured people who would gain coverage under a revamped health system, about half would do so through a vast expansion of Medicaid — the state-and-federal health care program for the poor. The Senate bill would make eligible anyone earning up to 133% of the federal poverty level (for a family of four, an income of about $29,300 a year); the House bill would lift that threshold to 150% of poverty (or about $33,000 for a family of four).
Congress is looking to expand Medicaid because in terms of raw costs, it is the cheapest and most efficient way to cover people of modest means. That's in part because Medicaid pays doctors and hospitals far lower reimbursements than private insurance does and in part because the states pick up some of the cost.
Both House and Senate bills would pay the states' share of the cost of the new patients over the first two years and up to 95% after that. But states would still face an enormous new financial obligation. There is also the question of finding enough providers to care for 15 million new patients. "It is a huge load on the states at a time when we are still climbing out of the recession," Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen said this week in Nashville. His state — already facing $1.5 billion in budget cuts this year and next — has estimated that the Senate version would cost it an additional $735 million from 2014 to 2019 and that the price tag of the House bill would be nearly double that. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the few prominent Republicans to favor the Obama health care reform effort. Now he is calling on Congress to "rethink it." In a Dec. 22 letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he wrote, "When asked for my support, I was assured that federal legislation would not increase costs to California." Instead, a state with a $21 billion budget deficit is looking at what Schwarzenegger calls a "crushing new burden" of at least $3 billion a year.

2. New Regulatory Burdens:
Can states enforce the dramatic new health insurance regulations called for in reform legislation? States already oversee commercial health insurers, but few have rules as restrictive as those expected under federal reform, which would bar insurers from setting premiums based on health status and require them to sell coverage to anyone who applies for it.
State legislatures may have to act to give state commissioners power to enforce the new rules, a process that could be complicated by political squabbling — not to mention the many Republican state legislators who have already said they plan to challenge the constitutionality of federal health reform. But even if states adopted the new federal rules, most state insurance departments would need to bulk up staff at a time when many are experiencing layoffs because of already strapped state budgets. "We would certainly argue that we're cut to the bone right now," says Kevin McCarty, head of Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation, which cut 14 positions in the 2009 fiscal year. New staff members could be charged with rooting out insurers who continue to cherry-pick healthy customers and making sure plans stay solvent despite the crush of new, previously uninsured customers.
What's the alternative? The Federal Government could enforce the new national rules, but this would require creating a sizable new regulatory bureaucracy, even though one already exists at the state level. The states don't want that to happen. If the federal bureaucrats assumed regulatory control, says Sandy Praeger, Kansas' insurance commissioner and chair of the health insurance and managed care committee of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, "we'd just be left to mop up the mess. We wouldn't have any authority, but we'd just deal with all the consumer complaints. That, to me, is the worst-case scenario."
3. Insurance Exchanges:
Perhaps the least understood aspect of federal health reform is how private insurance would be sold on the open market if and when the legislation becomes law. Under the Senate bill, states would be responsible for creating and running new insurance marketplaces, also known as exchanges. There, individuals and small businesses would purchase private health insurance, receiving federal subsidies if they qualified. The House bill would establish a national exchange, which states could opt out of if they had the capacity to run their own.
Exactly what states will have to do remains unsettled. But it's likely to be a lot. States may be required to vet some insurance plans to make sure they meet new federal standards. They may have to determine who is eligible for federal subsidies; they may have to build websites to market and rate plans. All that would require expertise and manpower. Massachusetts, which set up an exchange after enacting health reform in 2006, did so quickly and effectively, but Jon Kingsdale, who runs the program, says, "We had a 10% or less uninsurance rate. It's a well-to-do state. It's a progressive employer community. And ... the fact that a Republican governor championed this was a huge advantage." In states where some 25% of the population is currently uninsured, like Texas, setting up exchanges could take longer and cost more. And, Kingsdale warns, in states where there is "sustained and organized hostility" to reform (as in red states in the South and Midwest), "that in and of itself could turn a good program bad."
4. A Fight for Federal Aid:
Around the capital, the special deal that Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson got to secure his vital, filibuster-breaking 60th vote for the health care bill is now known as the Cornhusker Kickback. Even as political favors go, it's a whopper: if reform passes, the Federal Government will pay all of Nebraska's new Medicaid costs forever. And it's fueling envy and outrage in the other 49 states. Led by South Carolina's Henry McMaster, the attorneys general of 13 states — 12 Republicans and one Democrat — have signed on to a letter contending the Nelson deal is unconstitutional.
But that's not the only issue causing friction among states. Another is the fact that some good deeds will be punished under the health reform measures: states that expanded Medicaid coverage on their own — say, to include low-income childless adults under 65 — will get less federal aid than those that have been stingier with their Medicaid programs.
Because liberal and heavily Democratic states have traditionally been more generous in their Medicaid programs, they are likely to be the ones shortchanged. The biggest beneficiaries, arguably, could be states like Texas, whose lawmakers have waged the strongest rearguard campaign against reform. That may be reform's biggest political irony of all.

Feeling ignored by their "representatives" in the federal government, many citizens are now turning to state and local officials to continue their fight against the Democrats' hostile takeover of the American healthcare system. Even if the President's reform does pass through Congress, the battle is far from over.

Obama's Next Three Years

2010-01-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

By John R. Bolton

Where is Barack Obama's foreign policy headed? In answering, one must accept a measure of humility. Predicting American policy makes more fools than sages. That goes double for foreign policy, as analysts must anticipate not only the actions of the United States but of foreign provocateurs as well.
In the case of Barack Obama, there is an additional caveat: the high-profile concerns that have monopolized his efforts abroad are seen by the president himself as little more than Bush-era loose ends, not the defining transactions of his own foreign policy. All new presidents encounter irritating constraints on their aspirations, but Obama is more irritated than most at having to endure any sense of continuity with his predecessor. His criticism of Bush continues unabated even as he fares no better in the same stubborn terrain.
Obama is not looking to build his foreign-policy legacy on top of disputes that predate his arrival. He is working to move past these, toward the day when he can implement his own foreign policy and national-security agendas. Accordingly, the best way to predict Obama's foreign policy in the next three years lies not in examining how he deals with the accumulated baggage of Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East peace, and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Important as those are, they constitute what Obama has had to confront. We should ask instead what he will attempt to establish once he has become less encumbered by the inherited issues. Here, the record shows three critical characteristics.

Obama's America need only be restrained, patient, and deferential.

First, Obama has no particular interest in foreign and national-security policy. That is not what he has spent his professional and political career, such as it is, doing, and it is not where his passions lie. There can be no question that the challenges of remaking America's health-care, financial, and energy-production systems claim the bulk of Obama's attention.
Second, Obama does not see the rest of the world as dangerous or threatening to America. He has made it clear by his actions as president that he does not want to engage in a "global war against terrorism." The rising power of other nations, creeds, and ideologies, however unsavory, pose no grievous challenge to which the United States must rise. We are not at a Dean Acheson–style, post–World War II "present at the creation" moment. Therefore, Obama reasons, why behave in reactive, outmoded ways when there are many more interesting and pressing domestic projects to nurture?
Obama's America need only be restrained, patient, and deferential. Take, for example, Obama's November 2009 trip to China, during which the media highlighted how unyielding Beijing was, thus confirming their "rising China/declining America" conventional wisdom. In fact, it was more Obama's submissiveness and less China's assertiveness that made the difference on issue after issue: trade policy and Chinese currency manipulation; Taiwan; Beijing's unwillingness to limit growth for the sake of global-warming theory; and Iranian and North Korean nuclear-weapons programs. Obama repeatedly came away empty-handed, even on blatantly cosmetic aspects of the visit: where he would speak, to whom, and how it would be broadcast.
Third, Obama's vision is embedded in a carapace of naive internationalism, a very comfortable fit when national security is neither that interesting nor that important. Obama is the first president since December 7, 1941, to espouse a determinedly unassertive global role for the United States, one ironically verging on an essentially neo-isolationist view of America. Obama's December 1 announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan is not to the contrary, since he proclaimed the beginning of withdrawal in virtually the same breath. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is the very paradigm of legacy issues Obama does not want to confront. Failures such as his Middle East peace process and dealing with Iran and North Korea have simply led to resignation and inattention.
However, Obama's is not your grandfather's isolationism. He focuses not on America's virtues but on why it is ordinary (thus explaining why, as I have written elsewhere, he is firmly "post-American"). It is America's ordinariness that should enjoin it from imposing its will upon other nations. Obama is our first sitting president to express this sentiment. In April, he articulated this point with absolute clarity. Asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, the president responded, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, "No."
In this vein, the boundless naïveté in the president's UN speeches abundantly demonstrate Woodrow Wilson's patrimony. In September, he said to the UN General Assembly:
It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009--more than at any point in human history--the interests of nations and peoples are shared. . . . In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.
In 1916, Wilson said that "the interests of all nations are also our own," and later advocated "peace without victory." He said, "There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace" founded on "the moral force of the public opinion of the world." If you removed the dates from these two sets of comments, most people would have to guess which was Obama's and which was Wilson's.

Both enabling and following from the first two foreign-policy imperatives--"global governance" and "international law" will become growth industries under Obama.

Through these prisms--Obama's focus on domestic issues, his belief in the absence of major international threats, and his fascination with multilateralism for its own sake--we can project forward the president's foreign policy. Conveniently for Obama, pushing his priorities will involve international negotiations where presidential authority is virtually exclusive. That does not mean, of course, that he can determine the final outcome where congressional action such as Senate treaty ratification is required, but Obama and his negotiators will be able to dominate in crafting the agreements themselves. Three policy areas loom large and will allow Obama to showcase, in various combinations, the three core characteristics of his worldview.
The first policy on the table will almost certainly be American arms reduction, achieved through budget decisions and arms-control agreements, both bilateral agreements with Russia and multilateral pacts with other nations. At a time of profligate federal spending, only the Department of Defense's budget is constrained. With economic stimulus all the rage, Obama has rejected enlarging the standing military; decided against increasing defense procurement to replenish the weapons and other equipment consumed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and stalled progress on critical high-tech military systems. These expenditures (and others) are central to future power-projection capabilities, and all would result in tangible assets and greater policy options, in contrast with the pathetic "shovel-ready" programs of the actual stimulus. This disparity is not accidental.
Even worse, both Obama's Prague speech on a nuclear-weapons-free world and the first U.S. Nuclear Posture Review since 2001, heavily determined by the White House, point toward unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States, whatever the success of international negotiations. The president believes strongly, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that lowering U.S. nuclear capabilities toward zero will induce would-be proliferators around the world--Iran and North Korea take note--to give up their own nuclear-weapons programs. This is what Obama means by "strengthening" the regime established by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and what Gordon Brown has already proposed in giving up one of Great Britain's four nuclear-missile submarines.
On several occasions in 2009, Obama and Russian President Medvedev announced agreements on future dramatic cuts in both nations' nuclear arsenals and strategic delivery systems. Obama has already unilaterally reduced U.S. efforts in the missile-defense field, and there is every prospect of returning to some version of an antiballistic missile treaty. The Russians, of course, are delighted to agree to these reductions. For even if the international price of oil were again to rise dramatically, Russia would remain incapable of sustaining its nuclear forces anywhere near U.S. levels. "Mutual and balanced" reductions thus commit Russia merely to their most optimistic projections of their own capabilities and serve essentially to restrain the United States. In fact, "equal" levels severely and disproportionately disadvantage the United States because of our obligations to provide nuclear umbrellas for NATO, Japan, and others. Russia has no comparable need.
Multilaterally, Obama has been even more activist, enshrining his objectives in Security Council Resolution 1887 (indeed, even chairing the council session that adopted it) and convening a global summit on "nuclear security" in 2010. Obama has promised U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which was actually defeated by majority vote in the Senate in 1999). He has pledged to renew negotiations for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty as well as a treaty for the prevention of an arms race in space. He favors creating and strengthening so-called nuclear-free zones around the world and has urged all states not already party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to join as non-nuclear-weapons states, meaning that Israel, Pakistan, and India would have to give up their nuclear weapons (which won't happen in any of their cases). Finally, Secretary of State Clinton promised active U.S. involvement in drafting an Arms Trade Treaty for conventional weapons, which is a thinly disguised route to achieve domestic gun-control objectives long blocked in the normal legislative process.
All these objectives will meet fierce domestic opposition in the Senate and elsewhere. But make no mistake; Obama knows where he wants to go and is working hard to get there.
Obama's second leading policy concern is international agreement on global warming. This is not the place to re-debate global warming, but the climate-change True Believers clearly see little appeal in anything less than statist, command-and-control direction of global behavior. Obama's efforts will draw the U.S. more fully into this fold.
Political reality may have doomed the possibility of a full-up treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2009, but that setback has not dimmed Obama's multilateral enthusiasm. Environmentalists have focused blame for the absence of a legally binding treaty on the United States, as Congress is unable to enact cap-and-trade in Obamamania's first year. In response, Obama will likely move more aggressively in multilateral negotiations to create a successor to Kyoto despite congressional inaction. In so doing, he will be following a now familiar strategy for American leftists, which is to internationalize problems on which they cannot make progress domestically. They have attempted in recent decades, with varying degrees of success, to do so on a host of issues: gun control, the death penalty, abortion, and the "rights of the child" among them.
The strategy is to reach agreement with like-minded leaders of other countries, whose governments are likely to be far to the Left of America's political center of gravity. Then, treaty or other international agreement in hand, activists return to the Senate to announce that the rest of the world is determined to do "X" and that America cannot allow itself to be "isolated" along with Somalia, Burma, China, or other assorted holdouts. Thus, on global warming, Obama will likely focus on international approaches to reach his goals, perhaps using executive agreements rather than treaties to bypass the Senate and domestic political roadblocks. Similarly, he will increase efforts to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, which global-warming activists are touting as a backdoor to increasing environmental regulation.
Third--both enabling and following from the first two foreign-policy imperatives--"global governance" and "international law" will become growth industries under Obama. To the UN Security Council, Obama said, "The world must stand together. And we must demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise, and that treaties will be enforced." This dovetails nicely with the sentiments of the incoming president of the European Union, former Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, who made clear in his November 19 acceptance speech that "2009 is also the first year of global governance with the establishment of the G-20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet." As our post-American President Obama well knows, the European Union is a continuing font of ideas on global governance, always eager to share its own form of bureaucratic control and accompanying "democratic deficit" worldwide. Now the new European president has a rapt pupil in the Oval Office and acolytes scattered throughout Washington's foreign-policy establishment.
In many respects, the renunciation of "torture" in interrogating captured terrorists, the commitment to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and the criminal trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other defendants in U.S. courts are about making sure that "international law is not an empty promise." These steps are, perilously, also decisions about retreating from a war paradigm to a law-enforcement paradigm in dealing with terrorism. But it was not coincidental that Obama's first applause line in the General Assembly came when he referred to renouncing "torture" and shutting down Gitmo.
There is much more global governance in the works. The Obama administration sought and won re-election to the new UN Human Rights Council, a body that the Bush administration voted against creating in 2006 and that it subsequently refused to join. The new council has proved itself just as antithetical to American interests as was its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, but mentioning yet another reversal of Bush policy won Obama a further round of applause in the General Assembly.
There will undoubtedly be more such applause to come. Secretary Clinton has committed to ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Whatever the pros and cons of these agreements, the larger question is how much "law" the Obama administration is prepared to make outside the ever growing U.S. Code we already possess. To Obama's internationalist sensibility, the offense, of course, is that laws "made in the U.S.A." by freely elected representatives of our own citizenry are too "exceptional" and too "parochial" to hold weight in this interconnected world. Mere "municipal" laws, as international-law scholars refer to them, don't pass John Kerry's "global test" of legitimacy for American foreign policy. President Obama clearly wants to fix that problem.
Secretary Clinton opined, in Nairobi last summer, that it was "a great regret but it is a fact we are not yet a signatory" to the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court. So it was no surprise when the State Department confirmed on November 16 that the United States will now participate as an observer in meetings of the court's members. Observer status is manifestly a step toward the administration's ill-disguised ultimate objective of re-signing the Rome Statute, ratifying it, and becoming a full member of the court. Obviously, all these and other steps have implications not only for the United States but also for close allies like Israel, which were protected by earlier U.S. opposition.
Barack Obama's blueprint for the United States spells trouble for American autonomy, self-governance, and defense, all key elements of national sovereignty. His undisguised indifference to repeated diminutions of that sovereignty is entirely consistent with the views of his European admirers, who, at their level, would like to see their nation-states dissolve into the European Union. In the end, however, the United States is exceptional and will not melt into any larger or global union; it will simply become less able to protect itself and its constitutional decision-making system. That is clearly where our first post-American president's policies will take us.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.

Underwear Bomber Pleads Not Guilty

2010-01-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

By ALEX P. KELLOGG

Associated Press

An unmarked Chevrolet Tahoe on Friday entered the Theodore Levin United States Courthouse as a United States Marshal looked on.

DETROIT -- Terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded not guilty Friday in a federal court in Detroit on a six-count indictment for allegedly attempting to blow up a Detroit-bound plane and murder its 279 passengers and 11 crew members.
Mr. Abdulmutallab entered the courtroom just before 2 p.m. Friday shackled by his feet and wearing a white T-shirt, khaki pants and blued shoes.

WSJ's John Bussey joins Kelsey Hubbard on the News Hub to discuss President Obama's speech on national security. Although some might have expected an announcement on overhauling the system, John says, that's not the case.

He is accused of strapping explosives in his pants that failed to detonate and instead set him on fire on a Christmas day Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. His trip originated in Nigeria, where his father had earlier alerted authorities to his radical turn.
U.S. officials had information that could have led them to block Mr. Abdulmutallab from boarding the plane, Obama administration officials said yesterday, but intelligence analysts failed to assemble the picture of the plot. Representatives of the militant group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, have claimed credit for organizing the attack.

Judge Mark A. Randon presided Friday, asking the suspect a series of questions during the brief hearing about his mental state and fitness to stand trial Friday. When asked, he told a judge he had taken pain medication in the last day.
Mr. Abdulmutallab made his first appearance in court amid crowds of journalists. Scores of Muslim Americans held up anti-terrorism mantras on posters and waved large American flags outside the coutroom. A handful of Nigerian-born Americans joined in, with signs such as "Nigerians Are Against Terrorism."
Mr. Abdulmutallab will remain detained but has the right to a hearing on the matter. His next appearance in court was not immediately set Friday.
No new details were provided in an indictment earlier this week as to how the suspect was able to board a plane in Amsterdam with two types of explosives hidden in his pants, or how he gained a U.S. visa.

Why Switzerland Has The Lowest Crime Rate In The World

2010-01-06T16:45:00.000-08:00

Screw Gun Control

Olbermann Sinks To New Low To Protect Obamas "Image"

2010-01-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

Some of the media's talking heads are so desperate to absolve the Obama administration of any responsibility for what could have been the a brutal terrorist attack on Christmas day, they have devised some quasi-conspiracy theories to explain how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to board a plane bound for Detroit.

One such libtalker, Keith Olbermann, suggested that the nation's various intelligence agencies may have intentionally withheld information from law enforcement officials in order to make the other branches of the intelligence community look bad. Olbermann's guest, MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolff also suggested such a conspiracy might have been afoot (video and transcript below the fold - h/t Hot Air's Allahpundit).

Sometimes being such fans of President Obama makes liberal media types tie themselves into knots. As I documented earlier today, the New York Times went to great lengths to insist America's rising debt is not the administration's fault.

MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann decided to try his hand at the absurd apologetics Tuesday by concocting a wild vision of intelligence officials who care nothing about the country's safety, and only about their bureaucratic "turf."

OLBERMANN: ...are people thought to have been deliberately withholding information so that the dots could not be connected?

WOLFF: The question is, was this information that was shared -- remember, there was some sharing of information but it involves the father of this in the end terrorist who walks in to see the CIA officials in a foreign embassy. This is an american embassy in a foreign country. You know, that information, was it shared fully? Why wasn't it shared fully? The question there is, again, cork up or conspiracy? Was there a reason these agencies were at war with each other that prevented that intelligence from being shared?

OLBERMANN: Is the implication there that there is at least a possibility somebody understood how serious this could be and yet withheld information to make some other part of the counterterrorism system look bad?

WOLFF: That has got to be an area that the white house is looking into and, you know, motives can be hard to assess because it's not clear that this person was easily identified as a terrorist, even with the father coming forward saying they had concerns. Was that more of a family concern or were there enough fingerprints here about the radicalization of this individual to suggest that it should have been taken to a different level? At the very least, a security level beyond more than a nominal sharing of information. That's where this inquiry is, this internal inquiry for the moment, has to go.

OLBERMANN: Well, certainly, not to get too far ahead of what the information the white house doesn't have and presumably thus you don't have and certainly I don't have, but that seems to be what you're describing at least in theory is a far greater threat than a guy with explosives on an airplane whether or not he succeeds in blowing them up.

WOLFF: Well, it's the most important line of defense. I don't know that it's a threat in itself but you can defend every airport as much as you like. In the end the most efficient, safest borderline for security has got to be human intelligence. There seems to have been plenty of human intelligence in this case.

It seems that in an effort to shield the Obama administration from criticism--most notably his Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who has been under pressure to resign after she initially (and puzzlingly) insisted that security measures worked as designed. Olbermann and Wolff attempt to divert the blame from security officials to intelligence officials.

This is hardly the first hint at conspiracy theory Olbermann has uttered on air. He came very close to suggesting that the Bush administration was complicit in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He seems quite willing to use attacks (successful and unsuccessful) on the United States for political purposes--to shield those who share his views and attack those who do not.

Dems Drop The Other Shoe: Universal Voter Registration

2010-01-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

By James Simpson

Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats with no apparent concern for their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago, "What do they know that we don't?"

We may have found out. It's called universal voter registration. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund described the Democrat plan recently at a David Horowitz Freedom Center forum. Watch the video:

Fund describes the proposal as follows:

In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: 'take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver's license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be ...'

Fund anticipates that Congress will attempt to ram this legislation through, as with the health care bill. What a surprise! Fund covers the vote issue at greater length in his book, How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections.

Leftist groups are already arguing that universal voter registration will solve all the problems with our voting system. But the left created most of these problems. The radical leftist Nation Magazine, for example, absolutely loves the idea of universal voter registration. This is the same magazine, however, that advanced Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven's Manufactured Crisis strategy. The Cloward/Piven strategy was designed to undermine government institutions by overwhelming them with impossible demands for services. Cloward and Piven focused on welfare, housing, and voting as the main targets of this strategy, and the radical group ACORN was specifically created for the purpose of executing it.

The Nation article enthusiastically lists Cloward/Piven-inspired organizations like Project Vote, the ACORN group where President Obama cut his teeth. It also discusses the left's efforts to push enforcement of the Motor Voter law and explains how universal voter registration could assist in these efforts. Cloward and Piven were the ones who crafted Motor Voter legislation in the early 1980s and pushed for its enactment until 1993, when President Clinton signed it into law.

Cloward and Piven considered Motor Voter to be their crowning, lifetime achievement. The picture at right, from White House photo archives, shows Cloward (light gray suit) and Piven (green coat and navy dress) standing directly behind Clinton at the Motor Voter signing ceremony.

The left has predictably launched vicious smear attacks against John Fund for bringing universal voter registration to our attention. A Google search of the issue brings up any number of nasty ad hominem attacks. Most notable is Media Matters, the leftist group whose sole purpose seems to be to smear Republicans and defend the left's indefensible policies. They put up this gem: "Right-Wing Ass Weasel John Fund Doesn't Like Universal Voter Registration because of ACORN."

The problems with universal voter registration are numerous and obvious. Many states' lists include vast numbers of illegals, including some states which allow illegals to obtain drivers licenses; because many homeowners have more than one home, there will be duplicates; because so many people are on so many separate federal and state government agency lists, there will be duplicates; and because so many lists exist with little or no cross-checking capability, all of these duplicates are likely to go uncorrected. Add to this the fact that Dems hope to extend voting rights to felons, and the whole thing begins to look like a nationwide Democrat voter registration drive facilitated by taxpayers.

Universal voter registration will create massive vulnerabilities to systemic voter fraud nationwide, and if Democrats have proven anything in recent years, it is that they can win elections that way. The George-Soros-funded Secretary of State project (SOS) was designed to take advantage of such vulnerabilities and may have been developed in anticipation of the universal voter registration plan. Al Franken's stolen election in Minnesota was a trial run for the SOS project. Longtime ACORN friend Mark Ritchie was elected Minnesota Secretary of State in 2006 with Soros's SOS and ACORN money, and what followed in Norm Coleman's Senate runoff election was a frightening demonstration of just how far Democrats will go to win. Franken won the runoff, and the Democrats got their filibuster-proof sixty-vote Senate majority.

The Motor Voter law was correctly identified as a facilitator of vote fraud. One of the few legal issues Barack Obama actually participated in as a lawyer was a 1995 suit against the State of Illinois, which he brought on behalf of ACORN. Then-Republican Governor Jim Edgars saw the newly passed Motor Voter act as creating the potential for massive vote fraud and refused to implement it. With the assistance of the Clinton Justice Department, Obama's legal team won that suit. Obama himself actually participated very little, a strategy that seems to have served him well in life. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, after identifying himself in court proceedings, Obama sat back and let "the heavy-hitters at the Justice Department make the arguments."

It is not surprising that the Democrats are now choosing to push this new initiative, for universal voter registration will be Motor Voter on turbochargers. And who better to sign it into law than the president from ACORN?

Puttin’ the fear of Putin into terrorists

2010-01-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

Despots normally don’t do much for us. So we’re not big fans of Russian Prime Minister and shadow Premier Vlad Putin.
But while our president kowtows to terrorists and pays for their defense attorneys, Putin lets them know exactly what kind of reception awaits them in Russia. And you have to admire that about him.

A French journalist challenged Putin’s approach to terrorism and the Russian’s told him what’s what.
Journalist: …Don’t you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
Putin: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We are multiconfessional. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He’ll make sure nothing grows back.
Is it just us or does the look in Putin’s eyes reminds you of Dirty Harry staring down at the bleeding bank robber on the street and saying, “You have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Watch them both and see if you don’t agree.
Unfortunately, we know he’s giving our President and our Secretary of State the same steely-eyed glare and scaring the hell out of them.

OBAMACARE: How is it Unconstitutional? Let Me Count The Ways

2010-01-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

When CNSNews.com asked Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.) where the Constitution authorizes Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance, Leahy would not directly answer the question he claimed that "nobody" questioned Congress's authority to do this. Obviously he hasn't been listening.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was equally dismissive of the question of where the Constitution authorized Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance. When reporter Matt Cover asked her the question, she said: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs similarly dismissed the issue without directly saying where the Constitution authorized the federal government to force people to buy health insurance. When CNSNews.com White House Correspondent Fred Lucas asked Gibbs to comment on the fact that some Republicans were questioning the constitutionality of forcing Americans to buy health insurance, Gibbs said: “I won't be confused as a constitutional scholar, but I don't believe there's a lot of--I don't believe there's a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity of what they're commentating on.” Or in other words, Huh?

Actually there are five provisions included in the Obamacare bills that may very well be unconstitutional. They were outlined by Betsy McCaughey in today's NY Post.

Section 3403 of the Senate health bill, establishing a commission to cut Medicare spending, says the law can't be changed or repealed in the future. This whopper shows that Congress thinks its work should be set in stone. Wrong. The people always have the right to elect a new Congress to change or repeal what a previous Congress has done.

A Senate health-bill amendment mysteriously allocates $100 million to an unnamed facility that "shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a state's sole public academic medical and dental school" (Sec. 10502, p. 328-329). Why not name the facility?

This pork deal was arranged by Sen. Chris Dodd for the University of Connecticut Health Center, although 11 hospitals in the nation technically meet these specifications. If Congress wrote the provision in Polish or Russian to keep the public in the dark, it would be unconstitutional. The language is a deception. The fact that legislators commonly do this makes it more damaging, not less so.

The bills require you to enroll in a "qualified health plan," whether you want it or not. Forcing people to buy insurance obviously reduces the number of uninsured. But Congress doesn't have the authority to force people to buy a product.

Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Nev.) said on the Senate floor, "If Congress may require individuals to purchase a particular good or service . . . We could simply require that Americans buy certain cars . . . for that matter, we could attack the problem of obesity by requiring Americans to buy fruits and vegetables."

Some Congress members claim the "general welfare clause" of the Constitution empowers them to impose a mandate. But they're taking the phrase out of context. The Constitution gives Congress power to tax and spend for the general welfare, but not to make other kinds of laws for the general welfare.

The Senate bill (pages 320-324) claims the "interstate commerce" clause of the Constitution gives Congress this authority. But for half a century, states have regulated health insurance. In fact, individuals are barred from buying insurance in any state except where they live, the antithesis of interstate commerce.

Congressional majorities have frequently resorted to the commerce clause to justify their lawmaking. In FDR's first term, Congress cited it to pass the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave the federal government power to micromanage local businesses, setting wages and hours and even barring customers from selecting their live chickens at the butcher. Two Brooklyn brothers, owners of Schechter Poultry Corp., a kosher chicken business, challenged that interference. In 1935, the US Supreme Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional.

In 1995, the high court again admonished Congress against using the commerce clause as a basis for expanded lawmaking, even when the purpose is as worthy as keeping handguns out of a school zone (US v. Lopez). The court ruled that Congress must stick to its enumerated powers and leave states to police school zones (and, perhaps, mandate health insurance).

Never before has the federal government intruded into decisions made by doctors for privately insured patients, except on narrow issues such as drug safety. Nothing in the Constitution permits it. But the Senate bill makes you enroll in a plan and then says that only doctors who do what the government dictates can be paid by your plan.

"Qualified plans" can contract only with a doctor who "implements such mechanisms to improve health-care quality as the [current or future] secretary [of Health and Human Services] may by regulation require" (Sec. 1311, p. 148-49). That covers all of medicine, from heart care to child birth, stents to mammograms.

Finally, the "takings clause" of the Fifth Amendment bars government from taking your property without compensation. It should protect everyone, no matter how unpopular -- even insurance companies, but Congress ignored it in writing the health bill. The Senate version goes beyond reining in insurance-company abuses, a just cause, and actually caps insurance-company profit margins at well below current levels, robbing shareholders. Next year, Congress could impose similar caps on profit margins of bodegas, pizzerias and grocers, by arguing that food -- also a necessity -- is too expensive. Your business could be next.

Right now there could be up to five parts of the Obamacare thrown out by the courts, these are by no means the only one. So stay tuned.

California Voters Face Show Trial In Kangaroo Court

2010-01-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

by Maggie Gallagher
On Monday, Jan. 11, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker will put the people of California on trial for voting against gay marriage.
The case will be a show trial in a kangaroo court. I don't say that lightly of any federal judge, but Judge Walker's extraordinary bias has already been flagrantly on display.
Take the trial itself. The constitutionality of Proposition 8 is not really a matter for a trial of fact. It's a question of law. But Judge Walker ordered one anyway. Why? Ordinarily a trial judge's rulings of fact cannot be questioned by higher courts. So the more of his opinions that Judge Walker can stuff into the box of "trial of fact" instead of "review of law," the more power he will have over this historic case.
Next Judge Walker issued an extraordinary ruling that the private intentions of Prop. 8 proponents -- ideas by definition never communicated to voters -- were properly the subject of this trial. So people who worked on the campaign have been put on trial, subpoenaed for all their e-mails and personal correspondence. This is an enormous personal headache, one which will (as intended) discourage participation in the political process in the future.
The people who enacted Prop. 8 were not the campaign manager or executive committee of Protect Marriage, but the 7 million voters who passed it after a free and fair election. The constitutionality of a law passed by voters has never been held to depend on private communications of the campaign committee.
But Judge Walker actually thought he could order the Prop. 8 campaign to turn over private campaign strategy memos. (Even the liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could not swallow that ruling and overturned it.)
"These are kangaroo-court procedures," distinguished lawyer Ed Whelan noted in National Review Online's Bench Memos this week.
But the third outrageous ruling by Judge Walker is the worst of all: On Dec. 22, he ordered the trial televised -- in defiance of federal rules -- without proper notice and public comment. Informed of his error, Judge Walker responded by hastily posting a notice New Year's Eve, thus allowing comments for only five business days, more or less signaling his determination to put this trial on TV. Why?
Whelan points out that the Judicial Conference of the United States opposes televising federal trials in part because doing so "could jeopardize ... the safety of trial participants" and "produce intimidating effects on litigants, witnesses and jurors."
But this is no ordinary trial. This is a trial in a case where thousands of ordinary citizens have already faced a wave of hatred for participating in democracy. On Oct. 22, the Heritage Foundation released a report titled "The Price of Prop. 8," which concluded that "supporters of Proposition 8 in California have been subjected to harassment, intimidation, vandalism, racial scapegoating, blacklisting, loss of employment, economic hardships, angry protests, violence, at least one death threat, and gross expressions of anti-religious bigotry." (Read it at www.heritage.org.)
To deliberately and needlessly expose these people to a new wave of publicity and attacks by televising the trial is outrageous.
Full disclosure: As the president of the National Organization for Marriage, which created a ballot initiative committee -- NOM California -- that worked with Protect Marriage, I was intimately involved in putting Prop. 8 on the ballot. So I know dozens of people who have been personally threatened, some of whom still live in fear today when they walk outside their door as a result of an organized effort to distribute personal addresses of donors to Prop. 8. NOM is involved in a separate federal lawsuit to protect donors' constitutional rights in future marriage amendment battles.
At stake in this case is not only the future of marriage in all 50 states, but the future of democracy, the future of fair play, ordinary decency and common sense. Not to mention a little thing like constitutional limits on the power of judges.
After Prop. 8, gay couples continue to enjoy unmolested all the legal civil rights of marriage under California law through civil unions. Who will stand up for the core civil rights of the people of California and the rest of the USA to participate in democracy without fear?
Certainly not Judge Vaughn Walker.