Blinders firmly in place

Unsafe border practice

The Washington Times reports on some shady security practices going on at border crossings in El Paso.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Texas have been ordered to abbreviate national security checks at one of the nation"s busiest ports of entry to speed up travel between the United States and Mexico, according to official documents and multiple interviews with agents.

An Aug. 16 memorandum from CBP El Paso field office Director Luis Garcia directs agents to limit inspections of vehicle and pedestrian border crossers as wait times escalate. The document, obtained by The Washington Times, sets new guidelines that border inspectors say undermine efforts to prevent terrorists and other criminals from entering the United States.

This undermines our efforts at national security, doesn't it?

Crime facts

Heather Mac Donald has a thought-provoking article out at City Journal about the need for honest and rational discussion about black crime rates.

These specific facts about the Bell shooting are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of data points that reveal a hard truth: any given violent crime in New York is 13 times more likely to have a black than a white perpetrator. While most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection, the incidence of criminal activity among young black males is off the charts. “A black kid between the ages of 18 and 24 is the scariest thing to cops,” says a police attorney, “because they know how crazy it can get.” And this is true whatever the officer’s race.

The high crime rate among minorities in this country needs to be addressed -- not swept under the carpet for the sake of political correctness.

Recommended.

[Via Michelle Malkin.]

Why we must secure our borders

This disturbing report talks about the 2005 DEA report describing jihadist terrorst cells in the USA teaming with the Mexican drug cartels.

The 2005 DEA report outlines several incidents in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells in the U.S. are funding terrorism networks overseas with the aid of Mexican cartels. These sleeper cells use established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes to move narcotics — and other contraband — in and out of the United States, the report said.

Scary, isn't it? Read the rest . . .

New life for John Doe?

It appears that some of our congressmen do, in fact, have backbones. Allahpundit has the rundown on how the John Doe provision is back in the Homeland Security bill.

After nearly a week of intense, behind-the-scenes wrangling, congressional negotiators late Tuesday agreed to include in the pending Sept. 11 security bill sweeping liability protections for citizens who report suspicious activity they fear might be linked to terrorism…

Ethanol -- not ready for prime time

Ethanol mixed with gasoline is quite popular as a means to reduce America's dependence upon imported oil. The problem is that the ethanol industry is not quite ready, in terms of production and technology, to supply the volume required by America.

The problem is, ethanol really isn't ready for prime time. The only economical way to make ethanol right now is with corn, which means the burgeoning industry is literally eating America's lunch, not to mention its breakfast and dinner. And though ethanol from corn may have some minor benefits with regard to energy independence, most analysts conclude its environmental benefits are questionable at best.

Go read the whole thing.

Our Democrat Congress at work

Concerning homeland security, the Democrats seem to be sinking to new lows by portraying themselves as correcting a Republican-caused problem, when in fact, it was Democrats who caused the problem in the first place.

Consider the record. Under a Republican-controlled House, a majority of Democrats voted against the following bills, all of which were drafted with commission recommendations in mind:

• The commission stated: "The House and Senate homeland security committees should have exclusive jurisdiction over all counterterrorism functions of the Department of Homeland Security." Yet every House Democrat in the 109th Congress voted against making the Committee on Homeland Security permanent.
• The commission stated: "The REAL ID Act has established standards for state-issued IDs acceptable for federal purposes, though states' compliance needs to be closely monitored." But 152 House Democrats in the 109th Congress voted against the REAL ID Act.
• The commission stated: The United States should develop "a common coalition approach toward detention and humane treatment of capture[d] terrorists... for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply." But 162 House Democrats in the 109th Congress voted against the Military Commissions Act, which establishes guidelines for the detention and trial of terrorist suspects.

I guess this period of time will go down in American history as the '100 Hours of Hypocrisy'.

It seems that there are very few statesmen left in Washington D.C., anymore.

Please pardon my cynicism as regards our new Congress. It is neither charitable, nor Christian-like. I am struggling with my attitude, right now.

Border security is a joke

It is reported that National Guardsmen were overrun at the border.

A U.S. Border Patrol entry Identification Team site was overrun Wednesday night along Arizona's border with Mexico.

According to the Border Patrol, an unknown number of gunmen attacked the site in the state's West Desert Region around 11 p.m. The site is manned by National Guardsmen. Those guardsmen were forced to retreat.

If this is true, we need to stop talking about border security and start actually doing it.

Back to the future

R. James Woolsey, co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, and director of central intelligence from 1993 to 1995, has a new years op-ed about using hybrid, plug-in, and ethanol technologies in combination to more than double the mileage of current hybrids. This kind of utilization of technologies would not only serve to conserve oil, but would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions, facilitate America attaining energy independence, contribute to our national security, and reduce consumers' fuel costs.

Gentlemen, Start Your Plug-Ins
How does 500 miles a gallon sound to you?

BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY
Monday, January 1, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

An oil and security task force of the Council on Foreign Relations recently opined that "the voices that espouse 'energy independence' are doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the foreseeable future." Others have also said, essentially, that other nations will control our transportation fuel--get used to it. Yet House Democrats have announced a push for "energy independence in 10 years," and in November General Motors joined Toyota and perhaps other auto makers in a race to produce plug-in hybrid vehicles, hugely reducing the demand for oil. Who's right--those who drive toward independence or those who shrug?

Bet on major progress toward independence, spurred by market forces and a portfolio of rapidly developing oil-replacing technologies.

In recent years a number of alternatives to conventional oil have come to the fore--oil sands, oil shale, coal-to-diesel and coal-to-methanol technologies. But their acceptability to a new Congress, quite possibly the next president, and a public increasingly concerned about global warming will depend on their demonstrating affordable and effective methods of sequestering the carbon they produce or otherwise avoiding carbon emissions.

Ethanol's appeal rose a few years ago when it became clear that genetically modified biocatalysts could break down the cellulose in biomass and thus enable ethanol's production from a wide range of plant life. This means that, compared with corn, little fossil fuel is needed during biomass cultivation and land use presents much less of a problem. Indeed two years ago the National Energy Policy Commission (NEPC), making reasonable assumptions about improved vehicle efficiency and biomass yields over the next 20 years, estimated that just 7% of U.S. farmland (the amount now in the Soil Bank) could produce enough biomass to provide half the fuel needed by U.S. passenger vehicles, and that production costs for cellulosic ethanol were headed downward toward around 70 cents per gallon. Further, conversion of only a portion of industrial, municipal and animal wastes--using thermal processes now coming into commercial operation--appears to be able to yield an additional several million barrels a day of diesel or, with some processes, methanol.

But in spite of the technological promise of alternative liquid fuels, skeptics rightly point out that it will take time to build production facilities and learn the practicalities of operating biorefineries and shifting industry from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates. Most of all there is a sense of investor caution, driven by memories of the mid-'80s and the late '90s when sharp drops in oil prices, driven in part by increased production from Saudi reserves, bankrupted such undertakings as the Synfuels Corporation. Also, industry support for moving away from oil dependence has long been weak outside agribusiness, and consumers see little immediate savings from using alternative liquid fuels.

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All this is likely to change decisively, because electricity is about to become a major partner with alternative liquid fuels in replacing oil.

The change is being driven by innovations in the batteries that now power modern electronics. If hybrid gasoline-electric cars are provided with advanced batteries (GM's announcement said its choice would be lithium-ion) having improved energy and power density--variants of the ones in our computers and cell phones--dozens of vehicle prototypes are now demonstrating that these "plug-in hybrids" can more than double hybrids' overall (gasoline) mileage. With a plug-in, charging your car overnight from an ordinary 110-volt socket in your garage lets you drive 20 miles or more on the electricity stored in the topped-up battery before the car lapses into its normal hybrid mode. If you forget to charge or exceed 20 miles, no problem, you then just have a regular hybrid with the insurance of liquid fuel in the tank. And during those 20 all-electric miles you will be driving at a cost of between a penny and three cents a mile instead of the current 10-cent-a-mile cost of gasoline.

Utilities are rapidly becoming quite interested in plug-ins because of the substantial benefit to them of being able to sell off-peak power at night. Because off-peak nighttime charging uses unutilized capacity, DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates that adopting plug-ins will not create a need for new base load electricity generation plants until plug-ins constitute over 84% of the country's 220 million passenger vehicles. Further, those plug-ins that are left connected to an electrical socket after being fully charged (most U.S. cars are parked over 20 hours a day) can substitute for expensive natural gas by providing electricity from their batteries back to the grid: "spinning" reserves to help deal with power outages and regulation of the grid's voltage and amperage.

Once plug-ins start appearing in showrooms it is not only consumers and utility shareholders who will be smiling. If cheap off-peak electricity supplies a portion of our transportation needs, this will help insulate alternative liquid fuels from OPEC market manipulation designed to cripple oil's competitors. Indian and Chinese demand and peaking oil production may make it much harder for OPEC today to use any excess production capacity to drive prices down and destroy competitive technology. But as plug-ins come into the fleet low electricity costs will stand as a substantial further barrier to such market manipulation. Since OPEC cannot drive oil prices low enough to undermine our use of off-peak electricity, it is unlikely to embark on a course of radical price cuts at all because such cuts are painful for its oil-exporter members. Plug-ins thus may well give investors enough confidence to back alternative liquid fuels without any need for new taxes on oil or subsidies to protect them.

Environmentalists should join this march with enthusiasm. Replacing hydrocarbons with fuels derived from biomass and waste reduces vehicles' carbon emissions very substantially. And replacing gasoline with electricity further brightens the environmental picture. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute has shown that, with today's electricity grid, there would be a national average reduction in carbon emissions by about 60% per vehicle when a plug-in hybrid with 20-mile all-electric range replaces a conventional car.

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Subsidizing expensive substitutes for petroleum, ignoring the massive infrastructure costs needed to fuel family cars with hydrogen, searching for a single elegant solution--none of this has worked, nor will it. Instead we should encourage a portfolio of inexpensive fuels, including electricity, that requires very little infrastructure change and let its components work together: A 50 mpg hybrid, once it becomes a plug-in, will likely get solidly over 100 mpg of gasoline (call it "mpgg"); if it is also a flexible fuel vehicle using 85% ethanol, E-85, its mpgg rises to around 500.

The market will likely operate to expand sharply the use of these technologies that are already in pilot plants and prototypes and heavily reduce oil use in the foreseeable future. And given the array of Wahhabis, terrorists and Ahmadinejad-like fanatics who sit atop the Persian Gulf's two-thirds of the world's conventional oil, such reduction will not be a disservice to the nation.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Sounds almost too good to be true doesn't it? Yet it is a definite possibility. One that we may want to investigate, develop, and advocate.

You disagree? Then shut up!

Peggy Noonan has a thoughtful op-ed up at OpinionJournal about the intolerence of the political Left for dissenting opinions.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

The Sounds of Silencing
Why do Americans on the left think only they have the right to dissent?

Friday, October 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Four moments in the recent annals of free speech in America. Actually annals is too fancy a word. This all happened in the past 10 days:

At Columbia University, members of the Minutemen, the group that patrols the U.S. border with Mexico and reports illegal crossings, were asked to address a forum on immigration policy. As Jim Gilchrist, the founder, spoke, angry students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables. "Having wreaked havoc," said the New York Sun, they unfurled a banner in Arabic and English that said, "No one is ever illegal." The auditorium was cleared, the Minutemen silenced. Afterward a student protester told the Columbia Spectator, "I don't feel we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. . . . The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration."

On Oct. 2, on Katie Couric's "CBS Evening News," in the segment called "Free Speech," the father of a boy killed at Columbine shared his views on the deeper causes of the recent shootings in Amish country. Brian Rohrbough said violence entered our schools when we threw God out of them. "This country is in a moral freefall. For over two generations the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum. . . . We teach there are no moral absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children." This was not exactly the usual mush.

Mr. Rohrbough was quickly informed he was not part of the legitimate debate, either. Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post: "The decision . . . to air his views prompted a storm of criticism, some of it within the ranks of CBS News." A blog critic: Grief makes people say "stupid" things, but "what made them put this man on television?" Good question. How did they neglect to silence him?

Soon after, at Madison Square Garden, Barbra Streisand, began her latest farewell tour with what friends who were there tell me was a moving, beautiful concert. She was in great form and brought the audience together in appreciation of her great ballads, which are part of the aural tapestry of our lives. And then . . . the moment. Suddenly she decided to bang away on politics. Fine, she's a Democrat, Bush is bad. But midway through the bangaway a man in the audience called out. Most could not hear him, but everyone seems to agree he at least said, "What is this, a fund-raiser?"

At this, Ms. Streisand became enraged, stormed the stage and pummeled herself. Wait, that was Columbia. Actually she became enraged and cursed the man. A friend who was there, a liberal Democrat, said what was most interesting was Ms. Streisand made a physical movement with her arms and hands--"those talon hands"--as if to say, See what I have to put up with when I attempt to educate the masses? She soon apologized, to her credit. Though apparently in the manner of a teacher who'd just kind of lost it with an unruly and ignorant student.

On "The View" a few days earlier it was Rosie O'Donnell. She was banging away on gun control. Guns are bad and should be banned. Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who plays the role of the young, attractive mom, tentatively responded. "I want to be fair," she said. Obviously there should be "restrictions," but women have a right to defend themselves, and there's "the right to bear arms" in the Constitution. Rosie accused Elizabeth of yelling. The panel, surprised, agreed that Elizabeth was not yelling. Rosie then went blank-faced with what someone must have told her along the way is legitimately felt rage. Elizabeth was not bowing to Rosie's views. Elizabeth needed to be educated. The education commenced, Rosie gesturing broadly and Elizabeth constricting herself as if she knew physical assault were a possibility. When Rosie gets going on the Second Amendment I always think, Oh I hope she's not armed! Actually I wonder what Freud would have made of an enraged woman obsessed with gun control. Ach, classic projection. Eef she had a gun she would kill. Therefore no one must haf guns.

---

There's a pattern here, isn't there?

It is not only about rage and resentment, and how some have come to see them as virtues, as an emblem of rightness. I feel so much, therefore my views are correct and must prevail. It is about something so obvious it is almost embarrassing to state. Free speech means hearing things you like and agree with, and it means allowing others to speak whose views you do not like or agree with. This--listening to the other person with respect and forbearance, and with an acceptance of human diversity--is the price we pay for living in a great democracy. And it is a really low price for such a great thing.

We all know this, at least in the abstract. Why are so many forgetting it in the particular?

Let us be more pointed. Students, stars, media movers, academics: They are always saying they want debate, but they don't. They want their vision imposed. They want to win. And if the win doesn't come quickly, they'll rush the stage, curse you out, attempt to intimidate.

And they don't always recognize themselves to be bullying. So full of their righteousness are they that they have lost the ability to judge themselves and their manner.

And all this continues to come more from the left than the right in America.

Which is, at least in terms of timing, strange. The left in America--Democrats, liberals, Bush haters, skeptics of many sorts--seems to be poised for a significant electoral victory. Do they understand that if it comes it will be not because of Columbia, Streisand, O'Donnell, et al., but in spite of them?

What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace--of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together. The Democratic Party hasn't had enough of this kind of thing since Bobby Kennedy died. What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few. Such as: Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

More urgency for closed borders, please?!

Bill Crawford at All Things Conservative quotes from a news story that describes our porous southern border. And that Arab-speaking people are crossing it regularly.

Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez of Zapata County, Texas told Cybercast News Service that Iranian currency, military badges in Arabic, jackets and other clothing are among the items that have been discovered along the banks of the Rio Grande River. The sheriff also said there are a substantial number of individuals crossing the southern border into the U.S. who are not Mexican. He described the individuals in question as well-funded and able to pay so-called "coyotes" - human smugglers - large sums of money for help gaining illegal entry into the U.S.

Is anyone in Washington listening?

More reason for a wall

In order to help protect our outgunned law enforcement officers.

"This type of incident is a very good example of why I will not allow my deputies to patrol the river banks or the levees anywhere close to the river," he said. "We do have drug trafficking gangs, human trafficking gangs, that will not hesitate to fire at us."

And the occasional armed raid across the border.

Recommended reading.

Bordering on environmental disaster

Bridget Johnson has an article in USA Today about how drug smugglers and illegal immigrants are trashing our land. One more compelling reason to secure our borders. Here's how she starts:

Every time I go down to the Mexican border, I'm struck by a down and dirty realization: This beautiful land looks like a dump. Recently I was at a waist-high border vehicle barrier in a valley northeast of Tecate, Baja California. As far as the eye could see, strewn past barbed wire or collecting knee-deep in culverts, were water bottles, food wrappers, used paper products such as toilet paper and maxi pads, even felt shoe covers designed to obscure tracks.

From California to Texas, illegal immigrants and drug runners leave such calling cards on their trek north.

I recommend you read the rest.

Petrodependency and funding terrorism

Victor Davis Hansen makes some good points about the war on terror.

One of his points really struck a chord with me:

Another undercurrent to this war is the abject failure to do anything about imported petroleum — the hundreds of billions that accrued to the Middle East and Gulf when petroleum skyrocketed from $30 to $70 a barrel. Without such excesses of free-floating and impossible-to-trace petrodollars, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Al-Zarqawi would have remained clownish portraits on the pathetic street posters of a Jericho or Zarqa. Instead, we are indirectly paying for their IEDs.

The truth is that as long as American petroleum demand, coupled with restrictions on our own energy development, helps drive the world oil price up, we are simply funding psychopaths who otherwise would have no viable economic means of support. Without Saudi petrol money, Wahhabism, the godhead of Islamic fascism, devolves into just another localized lunatic sect. So we talk seriously about new alternative energy, and seriously do nothing — in the vain hope that the price soon collapses or, barring that, we can stop the guy on a motorbike in Damascus or Ramadi from delivering millions in cash satchels from Saudi financiers to al Qaeda killers.

Yet, when the fifth anniversary of this war approaches this September, we are no closer to energy independence than we were in 2001. There is no better proof of this than our continual appeasement of rich sheiks who have ensured that the venom of their own incoherent imams reaches billions.

If America were to stop having to import oil products from overseas, our foreign policy could be firmer versus those countries who weild their petroleum politically. Also, the overabundance of petrodollars floating around would be greatly reduced, thus putting a squeeze on such "luxuries" as funding terrorism. Finally, the price of oil would plummet, thus bringing down profit-margins and reducing further the resources available to support terrorism.

By greatly reducing or eliminating our dependence on oil, this country could seriously damage the terrorists' financial support.

And we can all take part in that. So why not show your patriotism by advocating development of alternative sources of energy (ANWR, nuclear/wind/geothermal/solar power) and by reducing your consumption of energy -- and show countries like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran what our economic muscle can do.

Liberal vs. Conservative

Dennis Prager, over at Townhall has an op-ed piece out discussing his views on who hates the other more - liberals or conservatives? Here's an excerpt:

As Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, said on national TV, "Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans', is we don't think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night." Republicans don't care about starving children. Liberals deem conservatives to be racist, homophobic, war mongering, money worshipping and sexist. It makes perfect sense to hate such people. I would, too.

The converse is not true. Conservatives tend to view liberals as immature and foolish. But childish adults and fools don't merit the hatred that racists do.

I'm not sure he is 100% on target, but he makes some compelling observations. Food for thought.

A wrong approach to immigration

OpinionJournal published an op-ed on Saturday about current legislative moves regarding immigration. Mostly they are wrong moves, but there is some hope for a viable, comprehensive, immigation bill.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

All Cops, No Economics
The House's restrictionist bill would create more illegal immigrants.

Saturday, March 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The immigration debate is finally picking up some Beltway steam, which is long overdue. The problem is that it's moving in a direction that could do real damage to the economy, not to mention to the Republican Party.

Any sensible immigration reform would focus not just on keeping illegals out of the country, but also on why they're coming and how to get the estimated 11 million illegals already here out of the shadows. Yet last year the House whooped through a bill that expands enforcement and nothing else.

We doubt voters elected a Republican Congress to build walls along the Rio Grande and Canada and punish businesses for hiring willing workers. But since Representative James Sensenbrenner and other House GOP leaders have ignored President Bush's request for comprehensive reform, soberer types in the Senate will have to keep Republican restrictionists from running the party over a cliff.

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Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter is cobbling together a bill pulled from measures previously introduced by John McCain, John Cornyn and others. And while Mr. Specter's current proposal meets the President's requirement for broader reform, it still ignores some basic economic realities and thus won't solve the problem.

For starters, the Senator's guest-worker program would require participants to leave the U.S. after six years and remain in their home country for an entire year before returning to the U.S. That kind of forced turnover could mean huge labor disruptions for U.S. businesses, and the likely result would be more illegal aliens, as some workers exit the program and enter the black market rather than returning home.

This is the same mistake the restrictionists made in 1986, when President Reagan signed a bill legalizing three million workers but didn't create a mechanism--dispensing enough green cards--for the economy to get the workers it needed in the future. Some 500,000 people continue to enter the U.S. illegally every year, and the strong economy and low jobless rate (4.8%) are evidence that these undocumented workers aren't "stealing" jobs but simply filling them.

The U.S. dispenses only about 10,000 green cards annually for unskilled workers. And by not providing enough paths to permanent residency for those who want to stay, we're setting ourselves up for another large illegal population down the road. Under current law, foreign workers in high-tech fields can extend their stay if an employer sponsors them for a green card. Why should the same rules that apply to Intel's engineers not also apply to Marriott's chambermaids and California's farm hands?

Like the House bill, Mr. Specter's proposal also includes over-the-top security measures like expanding the definition of "alien smuggling" to include church soup-kitchen operators and people who take in relatives who are here illegally. Mr. Specter would also create an army of federal agents and prosecutors to "investigate" immigration violations. But it makes little sense to start raiding businesses and driving foreigners further underground without first expanding the legal ways for the economy to get the workers it needs.

At least Mr. Specter isn't proposing to deport illegals already here en masse, which isn't practical in any case. But he still wants to create an 11 million-strong subclass of noncitizens who would be allowed to continue working in the U.S. but have little chance of ever receiving a green card. People in this new status would be subject to deportation if they're out of work for more than 45 days, which lays the foundation for all manner of exploitation. Workers need mobility and the freedom to quit unsatisfactory jobs.

In theory, Mr. Specter's proposal puts these current illegal residents on course for a possible green card. But the reality is that they would be placed at the end of a very long queue that already contains millions of people, and very few would ever see normal status in their lifetime because the annual caps make for a very slow-moving line.

As public policy, it's also hard to see the benefit of keeping 11 million largely Latino residents in permanent "conditional" status instead of allowing (and encouraging) them to become full-fledged members of American society. Relegating so many people to second-tier status sends precisely the wrong message about assimilating to U.S. norms, and which political party sends that message won't be lost on Hispanic voters.

---

The good news is that there's still time for Mr. Specter to cherry-pick better ideas from his Senate colleagues. A good bipartisan guest-worker plan introduced by Senators McCain and Ted Kennedy would allow employers to sponsor workers for green cards. As for illegals already here, Messrs. McCain and Kennedy would allow them to earn green cards and perhaps even citizenship over a multiyear period if they pay a fine, meet certain work requirements and learn English.

None of this will appease the small but vocal "no amnesty" crowd, but restrictionists put forth no solutions other than greater militarization of the border and harassment of employers, which we know from experience won't work alone. If the real goal of immigration reform is to have people "obey the rules," let's make sure the rules are sensible.

That might be too tall an order for the current Congress, which is making up policy based on the latest polls. Mr. Bush is right to insist on comprehensive reform, and we hope he backs up his rhetoric with a veto if it comes to that. He'll be doing the economy, and his own party, a big favor.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Terrorism on our home turf

This post should impress upon us all that the terrorist threat is very real, and that it is here in the U.S.

Now will someone please explain to me again why we should be upset by the NSA monitoring communications of suspected terrorists?

Port security

OpinionJournal has an op-ed posted that disagrees with the general political sentiment that a UAE-owned company should not manage the operations of six U.S. ports.

The voluble Senator [Lindsey Graham] said this is no time "to outsource major port security to a foreign-based company" and that "most Americans are scratching their heads wondering, 'Why this company, from this region, now?' "

Some of us are scratching our heads all right, but we're wondering why Mr. Graham and others believe Dubai Ports World has been insufficiently vetted for the task at hand. So far, none of the critics have provided any evidence that the Administration hasn't done its due diligence. The deal has been blessed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency panel that includes representatives from the departments of Treasury, Defense and Homeland Security.

I think I am beginning to realize that this kerfluffle is much ado about nothing. ('Much ado about nothing' seems to be a trademark of the Angry Extremes of America's political spectrum anymore.)

At any rate, the article is worth reading. I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

UPDATE: I'm no longer convinced this is such a harmless transaction. There is evidence that a thorough analysis of this change in port management was not accomplished during the government's review.

Michelle Malkin has an excellent and comprehensive roundup of the port security story that I highly recommend you read.

Here's an opposing viewpoint:

Ports of Politics
How to sound like a hawk without being one.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is the latest Republican to broadcast his "independence" from President Bush on homeland security, yesterday joining Senator Lindsey Graham, Representative Peter King and numerous state politicians in calling on the Administration to stop a deal that would allow a United Arab Emirates company to manage six major U.S. ports.

The Democrats are also piling on, and we'll speak to that in a moment, but this behavior of Republicans strikes us as peculiar coming from people who claim to support the war on terror. Mr. Graham told Fox News that the Administration's decision allowing the state-owned Dubai Ports World to run commercial operations at U.S. ports was "tone deaf politically." The voluble Senator said this is no time "to outsource major port security to a foreign-based company" and that "most Americans are scratching their heads wondering, 'Why this company, from this region, now?' "

Some of us are scratching our heads all right, but we're wondering why Mr. Graham and others believe Dubai Ports World has been insufficiently vetted for the task at hand. So far, none of the critics have provided any evidence that the Administration hasn't done its due diligence. The deal has been blessed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency panel that includes representatives from the departments of Treasury, Defense and Homeland Security.

Yes, some of the 9/11 hijackers were UAE citizens. But then the London subway bombings last year were perpetrated by citizens of Britain, home to the company (P&O) that currently manages the ports that Dubai Ports World would take over. Which tells us three things: First, this work is already being outsourced to "a foreign-based company"; second, discriminating against a Mideast company offers no security guarantees because attacks are sometimes homegrown; and third, Mr. Graham likes to talk first and ask questions later.

Besides, the notion that the Bush Administration is farming out port "security" to hostile Arab nations is alarmist nonsense. Dubai Ports World would be managing the commercial activities of these U.S. ports, not securing them. There's a difference. Port security falls to Coast Guard and U.S. Customs officials. "Nothing changes with respect to security under the contract," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday. "The Coast Guard is in charge of security, not the corporation."

In a telephone interview yesterday, Kristie Clemens of U.S. Customs and Border Protection elaborated that "Customs and Border Protection has the sole responsibility for the cargo processing and cargo security, incoming and outgoing. The port authority sets the guidelines for the entire port, and port operators have to follow those guidelines." Again, nothing in the pending deal would affect that arrangement.

---

The timing of this sudden uproar is also a tad suspicious. A bidding war for the British-owned P&O has been going on since last autumn, and the P&O board accepted Dubai's latest offer last month. The story only blew up last week, as a Florida firm that is a partner with P&O in Miami, Continental Stevedoring and Terminals Inc., filed a suit to block the purchase. Miami's mayor also sent a letter of protest to Mr. Bush. It wouldn't be the first time if certain politicians were acting here on behalf of private American commercial interests.

Critics also forget, or conveniently ignore, that the UAE government has been among the most helpful Arab countries in the war on terror. It was one of the first countries to join the U.S. container security initiative, which seeks to inspect cargo in foreign ports. The UAE has assisted in training security forces in Iraq, and at home it has worked hard to stem terrorist financing and WMD proliferation. UAE leaders are as much an al Qaeda target as Tony Blair.

---

As for the Democrats, we suppose this is a two-fer: They have a rare opportunity to get to the right of the GOP on national security, and they can play to their union, anti-foreign investment base as well. At a news conference in front of New York harbor, Senator Chuck Schumer said allowing the Arab company to manage ports "is a homeland security accident waiting to happen." Hillary Clinton is also along for this political ride.

So the same Democrats who lecture that the war on terror is really a battle for "hearts and minds" now apparently favor bald discrimination against even friendly Arabs investing in the U.S.? Guantanamo must be closed because it's terrible PR, wiretapping al Qaeda in the U.S. is illegal, and the U.S. needs to withdraw from Iraq, but these Democratic superhawks simply will not allow Arabs to be put in charge of American longshoremen. That's all sure to play well on al Jazeera.

Yesterday Mr. Bush defended his decision to allow the investment to go ahead, and he threatened what would be his first veto if Congress tries to block it. We hope this time he means it.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

The other side of the port issue

Jack Kelly, as usual, is looking at some compelling arguments that counter those who are condemning the UAE taking over the management of six U.S. ports.

Though I'm still not entirely convinced, it does seem that this is not as straightforward an issue as I first thought it was.

You should read it. It is definitely food for thought.

On national security

The director of the CIA, Porter Goss, has an article posted on the New York Times website about the serious ramifications of intelligence leaks.

Nowadays, security is everyone's business.

Well worth reading.

NSA "wiretapping"

Though this op-ed tends to concentrate on slamming the New York Times (not necessarily a bad thing in this case), it does a good job of summarizing the actual communication surveillance that is taking place. And why that is not a bad thing.

Leakage

Spook86 has a good post about the leaky intelligence agencies we have in America.

He also alludes to the serious consequences of security leaks -- something that I can corroborate.

A final note: during my spook days, I saw a classified analysis of the impact of media leaks over the past ten years. The impact of these disclosures--in terms of blown sources and lost intel information--was absolutely staggering. The senior official who prepared the report is now retiring. I hope he will publish his unclassified version of the study in the near future. The public needs to know the real impact when classified information finds its way into print or broadcast, with no regard for the security consequences.

Spook86 has some very interesting things to say. Highly recommended.

Lake Charles, LA -- disaster area

Lake Charles, Louisiana is still reeling from the double devastation of huricanes Katrina and Rita.

Something like $10 billion worth of damage has been done to the area.

"We are on our knees," said Calcasieu Parish Police Jury President Hal McMillin during a recent tour of the area.

Unlike some other Louisiana state and city officials, though, Lake Charles officials have a can-do attitude, and they are steadily working to recover.

But they still need our help.

"Please don't forget us," Swift said. "We need help here."

On Islam, Intelligent Design, and Darwinism

Mustafa Akyol has a very thought-provoking article about some seemingly unrelated things that give insight into how Muslims perceive us "Westerners".

This is a fairly long read, but he's tackling a heavy subject, and it is well worth your time.

Homeland Insecurity

Michelle Malkin has a good piece up at Townhall.com about how our borders are not secure.

Do not be fooled by DHS chief Michael Chertoff's tough-sounding rhetoric. While the Washington muckety-mucks pay lip service to reforming the nation's broken detention and deportation system, catch-and-release of immigration lawbreakers remains the order of the day -- not only at the border, but all across the country's interior.

It is definitely scary to see how big this problem really is.

Camp Katrina

Go check out the new blog Camp Katrina. It was recently started by Specialist Van T. who has just returned from deployment to New Orleans in support of Operation Vigilant Relief. The blog consists of posts and pictures about the disaster relief efforts throughout the region.

It is well worth checking out now and watching in the future . . .

Oklahoma bomber questions

Mark Davis, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News, raises some serious questions about the suicide bomber who blew himself up outside of a football stadium.

Superdome eyewitness

Associate Editor Matt Welch interviewed Major Ed Bush, public affairs officer for the Louisiana National Guard, who was in the Superdome the entire time that there were evacuees present. Major Bush describes what really happened in the Superdome during and after Katrina. Here's a taste:

[MJR Bush] But New Orleans, I guess my last point is, I kind of feel upset. Because I have some pictures of a Dad reading stories to his kid. I have a picture of a lady who -- I don't know what the hell she was thinking when she brought it -- but she brought her clown suit, and make-up, and she's in full clown garb, and she's got a wig on, and a nose and everything, and she sat there for days and painted kids' faces all day long. I have 20 amazing stories of people taking care of each other for every one incident of someone stealing, or someone taking somebody's stuff, or someone trying to get into somebody else's business, or someone laying their hands on somebody.

New Orleanians have been kind of cheated, because now everybody thinks that they just turned to animals, and that there was complete lawlessness and utter abandon, when that wasn't the case. Because if there was, we would have completely lost control of the Dome. And we never did. People just kind of hung on, through the heat and through everything, until they got on a bus and left.

I ended up wondering if the press were reporting about a different Superdome during the Katrina disaster . . . because MJR Bush's words directly contradicts the hysteria-filled rhetoric we were bombarded with for most of that first week -- by ostensibly professional reporters like Brian Williams, no less.

You owe it to yourself, and the the people of New Orleans, to read this first-hand account of what really went on there.

07 Oct 2001

Alan Dowd, over at American Enterprise, reminds us about the other anniversary.

. . . it should come as no surprise that after 9/11, Americans responded yet again by taking the battle to the enemy. In fact, the first counterstrike against al Qaeda actually took place on 9/11 itself, when passengers on that fourth plane-turned-missile stormed the cockpit of Flight 93 and prevented al Qaeda completing its mission.

What they began on that doomed jetliner, the US military continued and expanded on October 7, 2001.

He points out something about the unique American character.

Recommended.

Presidential press conference

President Bush steps out and explains how we are winning the war in Iraq.

I wish he would do this more often. The American people need to hear this stuff.

Condi at Princeton

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice delivered an impressive speech at Princeton this past weekend.

People still differ about what the September 11th calls us to do. And in a democratic society, that debate is healthy and just and right. If you focus only on the attacks themselves and believe they were caused by 19 hijackers, supported by a network called al-Qaida, and operating from a failed state -- Afghanistan -- then our response can be limited. The course of action presumes that we are still living in an ordinary time.

But if you believe, as I do and as President Bush does, that the root cause of September 11th was the violent expression of a global extremist ideology, an ideology rooted in the oppression and despair of the modern Middle East, then we must speak to remove the source of this terror by transforming that troubled region. If you believe as we do, then it cannot be denied that we are standing at an extraordinary moment in history.

It's worth reading the rest.

Dine for America

Need a good excuse to dine out tonight while helping disaster relief efforts?

On October 5, 2005, restaurants across the country will band together in a "Dine for America" day, a national fundraising effort for the American Red Cross to help the survivors, victims, their families and other arising needs from the Hurricane Katrina and Rita disasters.

The Dine for America website has a database of participating restaurants.

Poll: gun control vs. immigration

The results of an interesting poll concerning immigration and gun control.

The survey, commissioned by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), found that 70 percent of the respondents believe border control is more important, while only 23 percent favor more gun control. Seven percent of the respondents were undecided. The survey was conducted Sept. 6-7, by randomly contacting more than 1,150 households around the country. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9 percent, Zogby said.

"An overwhelming majority of American citizens think it is far more important to stop the flood of illegal aliens into this country than it is to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners," said SAF founder Alan M. Gottlieb. "Disarming American citizens is not now, and never has been the solution to violent crime, especially when it appears that a growing number of those violent crimes are being committed by people who are in this country illegally."

[Hat tip to David at The Waterglass.]

What he said . . .

Jack Kelly in his blog, Irish Pennants, expresses this much better than I could:

If Bush gets a clue, embraces a porkbuster package, and couples it with a sound plan to streamline the baroque Homeland Security bureaucracy, he can recover his reputation as a strong leader, and re-energize fiscal conservatives who have good reason to be discouraged now.

If not, Republicans will deserve to lose, even if Democrats don't deserve to win.

I guess I'm more of a fiscal conservative than I thought . . .

Relief vouchers

Kathryn Newmark (quite a productive family, those Newmarks), over at The American Enterprise, has published an article about school vouchers as a part of the federal Katrina relief effort.

Katrina left an estimated 372,000 students without schools. To help other schools absorb these students, the administration has proposed $2.6 billion in aid, which includes up to $7,500 per K-12 student for the 2005-06 school year. And the federal money will follow students to both public and private—the Department of Education is setting aside $488 million to compensate families for the costs of private school tuition.

It makes for interesting reading.

Entitlements' legacy

Philip Wallach shares his concerns about the burgeoning entitlements budgets in this country. Here's a taste:

But even apart from these concerns, we will be pinned and wriggling on the wall by the simple arithmetic of the budgetary black hole our (fore)fathers have created. Right now, a little more than one in ten of our federal tax dollars goes to debt service. This is a mere pittance when compared to what we face in the future. Our own Comptroller General, David Walker, has warned that if we stayed our current budgetary course, by 2040 we might be required to pay nearly all of our federal taxes to service the debt left to us by the big spenders now in charge. These are not trifling concerns.

We owe it to our children to read this and ponder upon its ramifications.

Katrina examined

Jack Kelly gives us three compelling reasons for a thorough investigation of the Katrina readiness/relief efforts.

Perspective

Michael Barone reminds us about the big picture. Here's an excerpt:

A world spinning out of control: That is what the old-line broadcast networks seem to be showing us. But I see other patterns. George W. Bush has consistently asserted that one reason for removing Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was to advance freedom and democracy in the Middle East. In spite of the improvised explosive devices, that seems to be happening. Lebanon's Cedar Revolution was as inspiring an example of people power as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Libya has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. Egypt, by far the largest Arab nation, had its first contested election this month, and, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius writes from Cairo, "the power of the reform movement in the Arab world today ... is potent because it's coming from the Arab societies themselves and not just from democracy enthusiasts in Washington." Which is evidence that Bush was right: Muslims and Arabs, like people everywhere, want liberty and self-rule. Afghanistan has just voted, and Iraq is about to vote a second time this year. Violence continues, but the more important story is that democracy and freedom are advancing.

He also covers the economy, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and America's lack of popularity with the rest of the world. A good read.

The "other" rally in D.C.

A first-hand account, and well worth your time.

After Katrina -- what went wrong

John Fund, over at OpinionJournal, talks about the perils of sending loosely-controlled aid to Louisiana. And he doesn't hold back:

No state turns out better demagogues than Louisiana--the state that Huey Long ruled with an near-fascistic fist and that inspired the new Sean Penn version of "All the King's Men" that hits movie theaters this November. While the Bush administration and Congress aren't in danger of being fried as witches, they better figure out that they and the taxpayers are about to be fleeced like sheep as they ship south $62 billion in emergency aid with few controls or safeguards.

I have reprinted the whole thing in the extended entry.

A Swamp of Corruption

In Katrina's wake, Louisiana's political culture needs a cleanup too.


Monday, September 26, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Perhaps no footage from Hurricane Katrina was replayed more often than the "Meet the Press" clip of Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, La., telling Tim Russert that bureaucrats had "committed murder" in the storm's aftermath. He sobbed as he told about a colleague's mother drowning in her nursing home after begging her son on the phone for four days to save her from the rising waters. Talk show host Don Imus said he had never seen such gripping testimony on TV in his life.

But MSNBC.com later found the story didn't hold up. Eva Rodrigue, the 92-year-old mother of Thomas Rodrique, the parish's emergency services director, did drown--but not because federal or state officials failed to rescue her. Mr. Rodrique said his mother died the day of the hurricane because the nursing home's owners ignored commands to evacuate. The owners are now under indictment for negligent homicide. Mr. Rodrique says his mother never spoke with him, and he can't explain why his boss, Mr. Broussard, got it so wrong.

Mr. Broussard returned to "Meet the Press" yesterday to punch back at critics of his obviously embellished statement. "What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death?" he roared. When Mr. Russert continued to point out the discrepancies in his account, Mr. Broussard told him "Man, get out of my face" and then said the bureaucrats and officials who failed his region "should be strung up. Those people should be burned at the stake."

---

No state turns out better demagogues than Louisiana--the state that Huey Long ruled with an near-fascistic fist and that inspired the new Sean Penn version of "All the King's Men" that hits movie theaters this November. While the Bush administration and Congress aren't in danger of being fried as witches, they better figure out that they and the taxpayers are about to be fleeced like sheep as they ship south $62 billion in emergency aid with few controls or safeguards.

More will be coming. Last week, Louisiana's two senators didn't even blink when they asked the feds for an ultimate total of $250 billion in assistance just for their state. "We recognize that it's a very high number," Sen. Mary Landrieu admitted. "But this is an unprecedented national tragedy and needs an unprecedented national response."

Even if the total ends up far short of that figure, the opportunity for fraud and waste will be unprecedented. "We're getting a lot of calls" on emergency aid abuses, reports Gen. Richard Skinner, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. Last week, police officers found a treasure trove of food, drinks, chainsaws and roof tarps in the home of Cedric Floyd, chief administrative officer for the Jefferson Parish suburb of Kenner. Mr. Floyd is one of several city workers who will likely be charged with pilfering.

Despite assurances from President Bush, "the government is fighting this war [on waste] with Civil War weapons, and we're just overwhelmed," Joshua Schwartz, co-director of the George Washington University Law School's procurement law program, told Knight Ridder. Democrats are already scoring political points. Rep. David Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, is lamenting the lack of accountability in the aid package. He is calling for "the beginning of some new thinking" on how to handle disaster relief.

Put bluntly, the local political cultures don't engender confidence that aid won't be diverted from the people who truly need and deserve it. While the feds can try to ride herd on the money, here's hoping folks in the region take the opportunity to finally demand their own political housecleaning. Change is past due. Last year, Lou Riegel, the agent in charge of the FBI's New Orleans office, described Louisiana's public corruption as "epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of government is exempt."

Louisiana ranks third in the nation in the number of elected officials per capita convicted of crimes (Mississippi takes top prize). In just the past generation, the Pelican State has had a governor, an attorney general, three successive insurance commissioners, a congressman, a federal judge, a state Senate president and a swarm of local officials convicted. Last year, three top officials at Louisiana's Office of Emergency Preparedness were indicted on charges they obstructed a probe into how federal money bought out flood-prone homes. Last March the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered Louisiana to repay $30 million in flood-control grants it had awarded to 23 parishes.

Much of the region has long had a relaxed attitude towards corruption. ABC's Cokie Roberts, whose parents, Hale and Lindy Boggs, both represented New Orleans in Congress, was only half-joking when her first suggestion for speeding reconstruction was releasing convicted former governor Edwin Edwards from prison because he "knows how to get things done."

But there is room for optimism. "The hurricane was so big and traumatic it could jolt the relaxed political culture," says Ron Faucheux, a Democratic former state legislator from New Orleans. He also notes that 2007 will inject new blood into Louisiana's Legislature when term limits kick in for the first time and force almost half its old-boy members to step down.

---

As for New Orleans, no city in America would better serve its most vulnerable residents with a clean sweep of its institutions. Just this summer, associates of former mayor Marc Morial were indicted for alleged kickbacks involving public contracts. Last month the FBI raided the home and car of Rep. William Jefferson as part of a probe into allegations he had misused his office.

It is the city's dysfunctional police force that needs immediate attention. Lt. Gen. Steven Baum, chief of the Pentagon's National Guard bureau, lamented the poststorm "disintegration" of the force. City residents have long endured men in blue who not only fail to fight crime but sometimes engage in it, with more than 50 officers going to prison in the past dozen years, two of them to death row. When one police district was caught altering its data, Chief Eddie Compass said, "I don't need an outside agency coming in. I think we have proven that we are capable of taking care of our own house."

Indeed, many local officials are quick to attack any outsiders who question the local way of doing things. Sen. Landrieu is especially sensitive since politics is her family's business. Her father was mayor of New Orleans, her aunt sits on the city's school board, and her brother is the state's lieutenant governor. She did a passable imitation of the overwrought Aaron Brossard when she told ABC News that if President Bush utters any criticism of how local officials responded to the disaster "I might have to punch him--literally."

But some questions must be asked before city residents decide whether to return. "We can't go back to the way we've done things," says former congressman Bob Livingston, a Republican. He notes that the Orleans Parish Levee Board allowed money to be diverted from levees into many other projects. Those included a local casino, a convention center and a Mardi Gras fountain. "We were trying to be good neighbors," former board member Jim Livingston (no relation to Bob) explained to me.

Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who grew up in New Orleans, says the area must leave behind an economy and political culture that belongs to the last century. He notes that Houston has become the South's energy capital, Atlanta its commercial capital and Charlotte its financial center. "Katrina provides a chance to give up populism and embrace reform," he says. The area has given the country so much--in music, in cuisine, in style. But it has also bred a fatalistic attitude which has left too many people with little belief that things can be better. As William Faulkner put it, people too often endure rather than hope.

---

The massive federal aid now flowing to the region should give victims of Katrina and Rita some hope--along with the knowledge the country has embraced them. It is up to them to seize the opportunity and make a fresh start. If that means abandoning some of the comfortable practices of the past and electing fewer demagogues, the next generation will appreciate that Katrina's survivors chose not just to rebuild their homes but to begin "some new thinking."

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

After Katrina -- what went right

Lou Dolinar, retired firefighter and retired reporter for Newsday, has an article up that provides us a new perspective on the Katrina disaster relief effort -- what went right. Here's an excerpt:

Largely invisible to the media's radar, a broad-based rescue effort by federal, state and local first responders pulled 25,000 to 50,000 people from harm's way in floodwaters in the city. Ironically, FEMA's role, for good or ill, was essentially non-existent, as was the Governor's and the Mayor's. An ad-hoc distributed network responded on its own. Big Government didn't work. Odds and ends of little government did.

It's a good read that illustrates some good things about America and its people. I recommend it.

Amerika

Phin, over at Phin's Blog, and with tongue firmly planted in cheek, has pointed us toward a better way to achieve socialism in America.

Heh.

Good questions

Peggy Noonan asks some pointed questions about the seemingly new direction the Republican party, and our current administration, is headed.

Here are some questions for conservative and Republicans. In answering them, they will be defining their future party.

If we are going to spend like the romantics and operators of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society;

If we are going to thereby change the very meaning and nature of conservatism;

If we are going to increase spending and the debt every year;

If we are going to become a movement that supports big government and a party whose unspoken motto is "Whatever it takes";

If all these things, shouldn't we perhaps at least discuss it? Shouldn't we be talking about it? Shouldn't our senators, congressmen and governors who wish to lead in the future come forward to take a stand?

And shouldn't the Bush administration seriously address these questions, share more of their thinking, assumptions and philosophy?

I've put the whole piece in the extended entry.

'Whatever It Takes'

Is Bush's big spending a bridge to nowhere?


Thursday, September 22, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

George W. Bush, after five years in the presidency, does not intend to get sucker-punched by the Democrats over race and poverty. That was the driving force behind his Katrina speech last week. He is not going to play the part of the cranky accountant--"But where's the money going to come from?"--while the Democrats, in the middle of a national tragedy, swan around saying "Republicans don't care about black people," and "They're always tightwads with the poor."

In his Katrina policy the president is telling Democrats, "You can't possibly outspend me. Go ahead, try. By the time this is over Dennis Kucinich will be crying uncle, Bernie Sanders will be screaming about pork."

That's what's behind Mr. Bush's huge, comforting and boondogglish plan to spend $200 billion or $100 billion or whatever--"whatever it takes"--on Katrina's aftermath. And, I suppose, tomorrow's hurricane aftermath.

---

George W. Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce? The great Bush spending spree is about an arguably shrewd but ultimately unhelpful reading of history, domestic politics, Iraq and, I believe, vanity.

This, I believe, is the administration's shrewd if unhelpful reading of history: In a 50-50 nation, people expect and accept high spending. They don't like partisan bickering, there's nothing to gain by arguing around the edges, and arguing around the edges of spending bills is all we get to do anymore. The administration believes there's nothing in it for the Republicans to run around whining about cost. We will spend a lot and the Democrats will spend a lot. But the White House is more competent and will not raise taxes, so they believe Republicans win on this one in the long term.

Domestic politics: The administration believes it is time for the Republican Party to prove to the minority groups of the United States, and to those under stress, that the Republicans are their party, and not the enemy. The Democrats talk a good game, but Republicans deliver, and we know the facts. A lot of American families are broken, single mothers bringing up kids without a father come to see the government as the guy who'll help. It's right to help and we don't lose by helping.

Iraq: Mr. Bush decided long ago--I suspect on Sept. 12, 2001--that he would allow no secondary or tertiary issue to get in the way of the national unity needed to forge the war on terror. So no fighting with Congress over who put the pork in the pan. Cook it, eat it, go on to face the world arm in arm.

As for vanity, the president's aides sometimes seem to see themselves as The New Conservatives, a brave band of brothers who care about the poor, unlike those nasty, crabbed, cheapskate conservatives of an older, less enlightened era.

---

Republicans have grown alarmed at federal spending. It has come to a head not only because of Katrina but because of the huge pork-filled highway bill the president signed last month, which comes with its own poster child for bad behavior, the Bridge to Nowhere. The famous bridge in Alaska that costs $223 million and that connects one little place with two penguins and a bear with another little place with two bears and a penguin. The Bridge to Nowhere sounds, to conservative ears, like a metaphor for where endless careless spending leaves you. From the Bridge to the 21st Century to the Bridge to Nowhere: It doesn't feel like progress.

A lot of Bush supporters assumed the president would get serious about spending in his second term. With the highway bill he showed we misread his intentions.

The administration, in answering charges of profligate spending, has taken, interestingly, to slighting old conservative hero Ronald Reagan. This week it was the e-mail of a high White House aide informing us that Ronald Reagan spent tons of money bailing out the banks in the savings-and-loan scandal. This was startling information to Reaganites who remembered it was a fellow named George H.W. Bush who did that. Last month it was the president who blandly seemed to suggest that Reagan cut and ran after the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Poor Reagan. If only he'd been strong he could have been a good president.

Before that, Mr. Mehlman was knocking previous generations of Republican leaders who just weren't as progressive as George W. Bush on race relations. I'm sure the administration would think to criticize the leadership of Bill Clinton if they weren't so busy having jolly mind-melds with him on Katrina relief. Mr. Clinton, on the other hand, is using his new closeness with the administration to add an edge of authority to his slams on Bush. That's a pol who knows how to do it.

At any rate, Republican officials start diminishing Ronald Reagan, it is a bad sign about where they are psychologically. In the White House of George H.W. Bush they called the Reagan administration "the pre-Bush era." See where it got them.

Sometimes I think the Bush White House needs to be told: It's good to be a revolutionary. But do you guys really need to be opening up endless new fronts? Do you need--metaphor switch--seven or eight big pots boiling on the stove all at the same time? You think the kitchen and the house might get a little too hot that way?

The Republican (as opposed to conservative) default position when faced with criticism of the Bush administration is: But Kerry would have been worse! The Democrats are worse! All too true. The Democrats right now remind me of what the veteran political strategist David Garth told me about politicians. He was a veteran of many campaigns and many campaigners. I asked him if most or many of the politicians he'd worked with had serious and defining political beliefs. David thought for a moment and then said, "Most of them started with philosophy. But they wound up with hunger." That's how the Democrats seem to me these days: unorganized people who don't know what they stand for but want to win, because winning's pleasurable and profitable.

But saying The Bush administration is a lot better than having Democrats in there is not an answer to criticism, it's a way to squelch it. Which is another Bridge to Nowhere.

---

Mr. Bush started spending after 9/11. Again, anything to avoid a second level fight that distracts from the primary fight, the war on terror. That is, Mr. Bush had his reasons. They were not foolish. At the time they seemed smart. But four years later it is hard for a conservative not to protest. Some big mistakes have been made.

First and foremost Mr. Bush has abandoned all rhetorical ground. He never even speaks of high spending. He doesn't argue against it, and he doesn't make the moral case against it. When forced to spend, Reagan didn't like it, and he said so. He also tried to cut. Mr. Bush seems to like it and doesn't try to cut. He doesn't warn that endless high spending can leave a nation tapped out and future generations hemmed in. In abandoning this ground Bush has abandoned a great deal--including a primary argument of conservatism and a primary reason for voting Republican. And who will fill this rhetorical vacuum? Hillary Clinton. She knows an opening when she sees one, and knows her base won't believe her when she decries waste.

Second, Mr. Bush seems not to be noticing that once government spending reaches a new high level it is very hard to get it down, even a little, ever. So a decision to raise spending now is in effect a decision to raise spending forever.

Third, Mr. Bush seems not to be operating as if he knows the difficulties--the impossibility, really--of spending wisely from the federal level. Here is a secret we all should know: It is really not possible for a big federal government based in Washington to spend completely wisely, constructively and helpfully, and with a sense of personal responsibility. What is possible is to write the check. After that? In New Jersey they took federal Homeland Security funds and bought garbage trucks. FEMA was a hack-stack.

The one time a Homeland Security Department official spoke to me about that crucial new agency's efforts, she talked mostly about a memoir she was writing about a selfless HS official who tries to balance the demands of motherhood against the needs of a great nation. When she finally asked for advice on homeland security, I told her that her department's Web page is nothing but an advertisement for how great the department is, and since some people might actually turn to the site for help if their city is nuked it might be nice to offer survival hints. She took notes and nodded. It alarmed me that they needed to be told the obvious. But it didn't surprise me.

Of the $100 billion that may be spent on New Orleans, let's be serious. We love Louisiana and feel for Louisiana, but we all know what Louisiana is, a very human state with rather particular flaws. As Huey Long once said, "Some day Louisiana will have honest government, and they won't like it." We all know this, yes? Louisiana has many traditions, and one is a rich and unvaried culture of corruption. How much of the $100 billion coming its way is going to fall off the table? Half? OK, let's not get carried away. More than half.

Town spending tends to be more effective than county spending. County spending tends--tends--to be more efficacious than state spending. State spending tends to be more constructive than federal spending. This is how life works. The area closest to where the buck came from is most likely to be more careful with the buck. This is part of the reason conservatives are so disturbed by the gushing federal spigot.

Money is power. More money for the federal government and used by the federal government is more power for the federal government. Is this good? Is this what energy in the executive is--"Here's a check"? Are the philosophical differences between the two major parties coming down, in terms of spending, to "Who's your daddy? He's not your daddy, I'm your daddy." Do we want this? Do our kids? Is it safe? Is it, in its own way, a national security issue?

---

At a conservative gathering this summer the talk turned to high spending. An intelligent young journalist observed that we shouldn't be surprised at Mr. Bush's spending, he ran from the beginning as a "compassionate conservative." The journalist noted that he'd never liked that phrase, that most conservatives he knew had disliked it, and I agreed. But conservatives understood Mr. Bush's thinking: they knew he was trying to signal to those voters who did not assume that conservatism held within it sympathy and regard for human beings, in fact springs from that sympathy and regard.

But conservatives also understood "compassionate conservatism" to be a form of the philosophy that is serious about the higher effectiveness of faith-based approaches to healing poverty--you spend prudently not to maintain the status quo, and not to avoid criticism, but to actually make things better. It meant an active and engaged interest in poverty and its pathologies. It meant a new way of doing old business.

I never understood compassionate conservatism to mean, and I don't know anyone who understood it to mean, a return to the pork-laden legislation of the 1970s. We did not understand it to mean never vetoing a spending bill. We did not understand it to mean a historic level of spending. We did not understand it to be a step back toward old ways that were bad ways.

I for one feel we need to go back to conservatism 101. We can start with a quote from Gerald Ford, if he isn't too much of a crabbed and reactionary old Republican to quote. He said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."

The administration knows that Republicans are becoming alarmed. Its attitude is: "We're having some trouble with part of the base but"--smile--"we can weather that."

Well, they probably can, short term.

Long term, they've had bad history with weather. It can change.

---

Here are some questions for conservative and Republicans. In answering them, they will be defining their future party.

If we are going to spend like the romantics and operators of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society;

If we are going to thereby change the very meaning and nature of conservatism;

If we are going to increase spending and the debt every year;

If we are going to become a movement that supports big government and a party whose unspoken motto is "Whatever it takes";

If all these things, shouldn't we perhaps at least discuss it? Shouldn't we be talking about it? Shouldn't our senators, congressmen and governors who wish to lead in the future come forward to take a stand?

And shouldn't the Bush administration seriously address these questions, share more of their thinking, assumptions and philosophy?

It is possible that political history will show, in time, that those who worried about spending in 2005 were dinosaurs. If we are, we are. But we shouldn't become extinct without a roar.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," forthcoming in November from Penguin, which you can preorder from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Landfall

Rita has made landfall well east of the Houston/Galveston area (where my in-laws' and many other family' and friends' homes are located). Louisiana and far southeast Texas are being hammered right now.

Please continue to pray for the people who are affected by this storm.

Rita on the horizon

Though it looks as if Rita will not be the monster storm that was initially expected, and it doesn't appear to be hitting the Galveston-Houston area dead on, it is still a strong storm capable of wreaking massive destruction. A lot of people are in danger.

Please pray for those in Rita's path.

Rita looms

My wife's parents arrived at our house early this morning from the Clear Lake area just north of Galveston. It took them 10 hours to get here. It normally takes about 4.5 hours non-stop. The evacuation is massive.

And so is the potential for death and destruction. And not just near the coast. Some local meteorologists are saying that there is a good chance that Rita will be a Cat 1 hurricane when it reaches us -- 300 miles inland.

Please pray for everyone in the storm's path.

This is the 'Age of Irony'

At least, it is in the Anchoress' opinion. And she makes a very good case for that. She cites a New York Times article that is reporting (in a disapproving sort of way) about how elite college co-eds are saying that they want to quit work to raise their kids when the time comes. Here's a taste of her post:

Reality check, honey, child-rearing still is a "private" issue and parents are still their children's first teachers.

Clearly the "it takes a village" mentality, wherein children are popped out and plopped into the care of others while the superior sorts take on the world, still has a welcome home in the minds of some of these academics, but I think the young women about whom they are fretting are bringing very healthy and thoughtful opinions to the matter. After all, why would a well-educated woman with confidence in her values feel it a "better" idea to leave her child with a less-educated woman who has no heartfelt interest in that child's well-being, than to raise the child herself?

IMO, it boils down to personal choices. The parents-to-be need to decide beforehand how the family will approach child-rearing. There is no right answer. What matters is that the parents stay connected with one another and engaged with their children. Love trumps all, but quality time spent with and for your child is an important manifestation of your love for him or her.

There is much more good stuff on the topic. It's a good read. Recommended.

Energy policy

Pete Du Pont has some encouraging words about our energy futures.

I've reprinted the whole thing in the extended entry.

The Other Recovery

Après le déluge, a new energy policy.


BY PETE DU PONT

Tuesday, September 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the White House, Congress and thousands of citizens have stepped forward to begin the recovery. But Katrina also requires a second response, for its other serious impact was on America's energy supplies. It shut down Gulf Coast petroleum and natural gas production, disabling eight refineries, which account for 10% of U.S. production capacity, and more than 100 Gulf of Mexico oil and gas platforms. According to the federal Minerals Management Service, "nearly 60 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's normal daily oil production remained blocked from the market because of [hurricane] evacuations." So the price of oil hit $70 per barrel, and America's energy challenges came into focus.

American petroleum consumption is way up--from about 15 million barrels a day in the early 1980s to more than 20 million today. But domestic petroleum production is way down--from just over 11 million barrels a day in 1970 to about eight million today. America used to have more than 300 refineries in operation. We now have half that number, and the newest refinery in America was built almost 30 years ago. To meet these shortfalls we import 12 million barrels of petroleum a day from foreign nations.

The liberal establishment seized upon all these pessimistic data, hinting that an American Armageddon was just around the corner. China's oil consumption has doubled since 1995, India's is following the same path, and together they will soak up the world oil supply and limit our global imports. Jimmy Carter tells us drilling for more oil in Alaska would be too damaging to the environment; Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois insists that we must "stop using our SUVs and trucks and be more economical"; Joan Claybrook of the Naderite group Public citizen says we need "adjustable price controls" on oil and "an excess profits tax retroactive to January 2005" on oil companies. The New York Times concludes we must reduce our "blatantly excessive demand" for oil.

But America is neither doomed nor dumb when it comes to energy production. The Department of Energy reports that it requires half as much energy to produce a dollar of gross domestic product today than it did 30 years ago. Oil refineries are improving--their capacity has increased by one-third, from 12,000 barrels a day to nearly 17,000 over 35 years. New technology has increased automobile mileage from 13.5 miles a gallon to more than 22, so the cost per mile driven has been declining.

---

So what are the solutions to the petroleum supply problems that Katrina has finally brought to the public's attention? Simply put, America needs a new and expansive energy policy.

First, we need to build new refineries and build them faster. We know how to do it but lack the political will. Because of substantial and complex federal, state and local permit requirements and regulation, obtaining construction permits takes years--more than five just to get air quality permits in the case of a proposed new refinery in Arizona--and costs the oil industry about $5 billion a year in regulatory and capital costs to bring them into compliance with increasing government regulation. We need a simpler, faster permitting process so domestic refinery production can expand to meet growing demands.

Second, we need to drill for more oil in America. For starters, there are 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, making ANWR the equivalent of an oil-exporting nation. Then there are the energy resources off America's coasts. They are estimated to contain 16 billion barrels of oil and 70 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In 1981 Congress banned new offshore drilling, but as we have seen in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling is clean and safe. From our thousands of offshore oil-drilling platforms, there has not been a significant spill in 25 years. And of course when drilling for natural gas there aren't any oil spills at all.

Third, the construction of additional nuclear power plants would generate electricity and reduce petroleum consumption. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that plants now operate at 90% of capacity (up from 59% in 1980), and their "operating costs have fallen from 3.31 cents per kilowatt-hour in 1988 to 1.7 cents, which is slightly lower than coal and much lower than the cost of natural gas fired plants."

---

Finally, the world is not only not running out of oil; there are substantial untapped supplies of oil and gas around the globe. Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates--and the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power--noted in the Washington Post at the end of July that "there will be a large, unprecedented build up of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels per day--from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels per day--a 20 percent increase."

That increase will come not in America, but in OPEC countries like Saudi Arabia , Algeria and Libya, and others such as Canada, Kazakhstan, Brazil and Russia. It will drive the supply up and the price of petroleum products down.

Mr. Yergin points out that there are always dire predictions of the end of oil--remember the "permanent oil shortage" of the 1970s--but that technology overcomes such doomsday predictions. For example, in the late 1970s the deepest water an offshore platform could drill in was 600 feet; today it is 10,000 feet. Today the Gulf of Mexico contains 800 manned drilling platforms and thousands of unmanned ones, all linked to the coast by 33,000 miles of underwater pipelines. Technology has made that possible, and technology will continue expanding our oil supply access.

So the risks we face are not what Mr. Yergin terms "below ground" geological or lack-of-resource risks. "Rather, they are 'above ground'--political instability, outright conflict, terrorism, or slowdowns in decision-making on the part of governments in oil-producing countries." Meeting these challenges will not be easy, but markets work. Thus, as Mr. Yergin says, "the U.S. government should work to encourage global energy trade, for a more open system would be better for our security."

In short, substantial quantities of oil and gas are out there, and America will be more secure, stable and prosperous if we gain access to them. Recovering from the disaster of Katrina is our first responsibility; securing adequate supplies of energy comes next.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Conventional Wisdom regarding WMD

Scott Johnson provides us a slew of quotes by Democrats about Saddam's WMD threat over the last 10-15 years. Just to refresh everyone's memory about the conventional wisdom prior to 2003.

I found it refreshing to see that my memory of times past was, indeed, correct -- and that all of those who claim Bush lied about Iraqi WMD are either trying to rewrite history or are just plain ignorant of the truth.

NOLA Timeline

This article provides an interesting timeline for the Louisiana relief effort before, during, and after Katrina made landfall. It is published by Northside Journal News, a newspaper based in central Louisiana. You'll find that it contradicts much of the hysterical reporting that was being spouted two weeks ago.

Despite Governor Blanco's reluctance to coordinate the state's efforts with federal assistance, President Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana two full days before Katrina hit the Louisiana coast. The move allowed FEMA to begin staging relief supplies for immediate distribution in New Orleans once the storm had passed. The president's emergency declaration also allowed FEMA to coordinate all disaster relief efforts and to provide appropriate assistance in a number of Louisiana parishes. All that was left to do was wait for Kathleen Blanco to request Federal assistance. Under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which was revised after 9/11, the Federal Government and FEMA are not allowed to interfere with local operations unless they are authorized by state and local leaders.

Meanwhile Blanco had her own advisors insisting that the President was actually making a request for federal takeover of the Louisiana National Guard, and asking to put Louisiana State Police under federal control. They were concerned that this would be the same as martial law and lead to abuse of power by the federal government.

Our President's NOLA speech

Here is the transcript of President Bush's New Orleans speech.

I thought he did a very good job at articulating his care and concern for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He also did a good job of outlining his plans for restoring the entire area of devastation, and the steps being taken to improve both federal and state responses to future disasters.

Why rebuild?

Klaus Jacob, over at the Washington Post poses an interesting question: Why rebuild New Orleans?

China to be the next USSR?

This op-ed builds a case that we are setting ourselves up for trouble with China in the future. Here's a quote:

The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies' delight.

When China completes its run up the broad alley we have afforded it, it will much sooner be the other pole in a once-again bipolar world, which will create the opportunity for terrorists in the guise of liberation movements to gather under its wing, as they did with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Ironically, in reconfiguring the military to focus primarily on terrorism, we may not only give China a great opening, but create for the terrorists a new lease on life.

The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America's borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines.

I don't buy all of his assertions, but he does make some good points.

The whole thing is in the extended entry.

'They Are All So Wrong'

Four years after 9/11, Washington keeps courting strategic error.


BY MARK HELPRIN

Friday, September 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore--purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats--and to Bushmen like "Kip" Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry-on ice-picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five-inches long.

---

For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along.

The underlying corollary to this reflex of appeasement is the notion that our military options are constrained financially, as if we are not a nation of stupendous wealth and it has not been the American tradition since the Civil War to spend, in support of war, with the intensity of war itself. In 1945, we devoted 38.5% of GNP to defense, the equivalent of $4.76 trillion now. The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of that and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000. A false sense of constraint has arisen in every quarter of society. It is the ethos of the administration, the press, the civilian side of the Pentagon, and many of the prominent uniformed military brought to high rank in recent years.

They are all so wrong. In violating established tradition and throwing aside advantage and elemental common sense, they waste American lives. And for what? What moral construction would allow anyone to spend more than 2,000 dead and tens of thousands of wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan--so far--while insisting without major exception that cutting costs is a virtue? When is holding back from one's troops at war the reinforcements, armor and basic equipment they need a virtue rather than a sin?

Is it not the duty of the secretary of defense, his chiefs, and the wide array of generals to press energetically--even to the point of resignation--for whatever is necessary (not the minimum, but a safe surplus) to support the armies in the field? If they do not, who will? Had the president gone to Congress on September 12 and asked for almost anything, he would have been granted it. But he never did. This was a fundamental strategic error. If you must go to war, do not do so hesitantly, with half a heart. And in answer to the rationale that the casualties of this war are relatively light, one does not decently measure casualties against those of previous wars, but in terms of whether they can be avoided.

Apart from the paucity of armored vehicles, body armor, and other staples of battle, the chief problem of prosecuting the Iraq war has been the size and scale of the force. Despite inaccurate claims of unprecedented speed in the advance to Baghdad, the three weeks of halting action it took to get there, with lines of supply that are to this day poorly protected, were both spur and instruction for the insurgency. In what is only apparently a paradox, the military objective should have been less the conquest of territory and echelons than of morale, and, to accomplish this, territory and echelons would have to have been subdued with the blinding speed, shock and awe of the Six-Day and Gulf wars. The instant the Arab world realized that the promised shock and awe had not materialized, the insurgency was born.

We then nurtured it by deploying a fraction of the ratio (10:1) long experience indicates is necessary for suppression; by dismissing the enemy as mere "thugs," when, although they are thugs and worse, they have the thousand-year motivation of their civilization defending its heartland from Persians, Mongols, Shiites, and now Christians; and by gratuitously elevating our aims from the purely defensive to the transcendental, while steadily diluting the little power we have in the hope of forcing the entire Arab and Muslim worlds to a new politics. From a country where they have been held down in their beleaguered enclaves for two-and-a-half years, how are 140,000 soldiers to transform the highly aggressive and deeply rooted political cultures of 1.2 billion people?

---

Ceaselessly, we court strategic error. At the end of the Cold War, assuming that history had concluded, we discarded too much military power. This continues through the present, rationalized by reference to transformation. But it is yet further error to believe that military-technical evolution can make up for the kind of deficiencies and poor strategic judgments from which no machine can save an army. Continual and remarkable innovation is both indispensable and expensive, but President Clinton required budgetary choice between innovation and everything else, and his successor has yet to disagree. The root of the error that offers transformation as a substitute for so much that is crucial is the conviction that having both would exceed reasonable military expenditures and somehow break the common weal.

Having made many wrong choices, we find ourselves at yet another strategic crossroads, where invisibly to the general public we are about to choose wrongly again. We are reshaping the military into a gendarmerie, configured for small wars, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and nation-building, all at the expense of the type of force that could deter or defeat a rising China. Although we need a gendarmerie, we cannot do without heavy formations and the many additional ships required for a navy--now less than half the size of the Reagan fleet and shrinking--to exploit our natural advantage in the Pacific.

The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies' delight.
When China completes its run up the broad alley we have afforded it, it will much sooner be the other pole in a once-again bipolar world, which will create the opportunity for terrorists in the guise of liberation movements to gather under its wing, as they did with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Ironically, in reconfiguring the military to focus primarily on terrorism, we may not only give China a great opening, but create for the terrorists a new lease on life.

The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America's borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines.

Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation's presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill-supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next.

Mr. Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor, is Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Hillsdale College. He is the author, most recently, of "Freddy and Fredericka" (Penguin, 2005).

Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

9/11 plus four years

Please pause sometime today, and think of that horrible day four years ago when our national naivete was torn away with the sight of airplanes full of innocents being flown into buildings full of innocents.

By evil men.

There are some in this country who have forgotten or ignored the message sent to us that day -- in the form of a note pinned with a knife to the chest of a loved one. I feel sorry for them. I cannot understand how someone can take such a message and regard it as somehow the fault of this nation that terrorists -- evil men -- hate us and want to terrorize and kill us. And there are some who actually believe that if we leave the pustules of terrorism in this world alone, that they will reciprocate by leaving us alone. But that view ignores one of the lessons of 9/11/2001, because at that time this nation, myself included, was largely pretending that terrorists did not exist -- or were at least not going to be a danger to us. So we were leaving them alone then. And they murdered innocent people regardless.

We know better now.

Remember the men and women who died four years ago at the hands of evil men. Remember the heros who willingly entered those burning buildings and did not return. Remember the courage of those Americans who caused Flight 93 to crash into the Pennsylvania countryside rather than allow the evil men who flew it to accomplish their mission of terror and death.

Remember those since then who have fought and died in foreign lands in our country's defense -- who have taken the fight to those evil men, so that they no longer have the luxury of deciding how, where, and when they will murder innocent Americans. Support this fight so as to ensure that all innocent citizens of all nations will one day be spared from the black-hearted, evil pestilence called terrorism.

That is the best way that we can honor those who died on 11 September 2001.

You are part of Katrina relief efforts

Please prayerfully consider giving to a reputable charity for hurricane Katrina relief. A lot of people have lost family, friends, homes, and jobs. A lot of work has to be done to restore the three-state area devastated by the storm.

My family has donated to the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR). We also have assembled health kits to send to Sager Brown, the UMCOR dissemination facility located in Baldwin, LA. Additionally, our church is involved in feeding and providing other relief to the 115+ refugees that have been arriving in our East Texas community since last Thursday.

Every little bit helps . . .

Military relief for Katrina victims

To learn more about the Katrina relief efforts that our military is undertaking, check out this link.

Anarchy in city hall

Bryan Preston, from Junkyard Blog has been looking into the New Orleans crisis management nightmare. Here is some of what he says:

Instead of acknowledging the faults that lie at city level and stepping in to organize relief efforts, Louisiana and New Orleans officials spent most of last week lashing out at the Bush administration, though its response was three times faster than the response to hurricane Andrew just 13 years ago. Government actually got quicker at doing something, in spite of the massive increase in the number of lawyers on the public dime in the intervening years. The locals blamed the feds even though the administration, whatever its faults, was ahead of all local officials when it came to declaring a state of emergency and requesting a mandatory evacuation. A massive butt-covering exercise is underway in Louisiana as I write, so massive it is second only to the actual relief and law and order efforts going on in the vast Katrina destruction zone.

Preston goes on to reference instances of attempted blame-shifting, then he addresses the question of all of those city and school buses in New Orleans that could have been used to transport evacuees to safety, yet ended up being flooded in a bus park with the rest of the city:

The buses I mentioned earlier and have blogged about extensively all weekend are evidence of and a symbol for those failures. They sit unused and waterlogged, their empty seats representing lives lost to the flood. Their useless presence in flooded parking lots demonstrate that the best plan is useless if it's never implemented. And they fact of their unuse demonstrates a deeper pathology at work in New Orleans government: The entire thing was rotted from the inside out. New Orleans' government was a disaster waiting to happen.

Then Mr. Preston goes on to point out that the gross failure of the city government in this crisis was symptomatic of its generally poor condition:

New Orleans' city government was an abscess. I say "was," by the way, because for all intents and purposes it ceased to exist some time last week--probably at about the same time the local officials realized that their multiple failures were bound to lead to major loss of life. Its emergency management czar, one Terry Ebbert, squealed about an absence of command and control over the relief effort, when it was his job to establish that command and control. The police department is two-thirds gone after about 1,000 officers deserted in the face of the flood and the looters--some of whom were police officers themselves. Mayor Nagin sent up a profanity-laced diatribe against the federal government that should have been delivered in front of a mirror. The abscess at city hall failed its citizens. It is guilty of gross negligence leading to death for many of its most vulnerable citizens. As the wretched condition of its school system demonstrates, long before it collapsed last week, the municipal government of New Orleans was a total and unmitigated disgrace.

He paints a sad picture, but much of what I have read tends to back up Mr. Preston's claims -- so do not dismiss them lightly. Read the rest, do some independent research, then make up your own mind about it.

Katrina's Kidz

If you'd like to help out kids who are victims of hurricane Katrina, go read this post at Boudicca's Voice.

New Orleans realities

Richard Baehr, at The American Thinker has published a very good article that attempts to dispel several of the myths surrounding the New Orleans tragedy brought on by hurricane Katrina. He starts with this:

There will be plenty of time to argue about who was responsible for the slow response in New Orleans this week in dealing with those who did not choose to leave, or were unable to leave the city before the hurricane hit. The catastrophe that followed, when the levees gave way, and 80% of the city, and many of the surrounding suburbs flooded, was far worse than the hurricane itself. Already many seem to have forgotten that New Orleans officials thought they had escaped Katina’s wrath as the storm moved north from the Gulf on Monday, prior to the levees giving way.

I recommend you read the rest.

Aggie hurricane relief

For the latest on what Texas A&M University is doing to help out the victims of hurricane Katrina, click on this link.

Some highlights:

- Providing food and shelter to 300+ refugees in Reed Arena.
- Pledged to accomodate/enroll up to 1000 students from disaster-area
colleges.
- Provided 10 buses and drivers for use in San Antonio to shuttle refugees.
- Pledged $200,000 to help refugee students and families.

Rumsfeld in-depth

An excellent article about Donald Rumsfeld.

It is from this suite of rooms that Rumsfeld has become one of the most loathed and revered men in the world. The man is too impatient, too damned arrogant, too beyond politics, and just too stubborn for his own good. He is the famously combative, two-time SecDef (both youngest and oldest ever) who chews up and spits out experienced reporters in what are easily the most skillfully performed press conferences since John Kennedy walked the earth. He has brilliantly executed a couple of wars, and badly botched a peace. Let us stipulate all these truths just to move the conversation along.

But something else has been going on in this office, and it's nothing short of the most profound transformation of the U. S. military since World War II-a historic process that will, paradoxically, yield a force Americans haven't seen since our frontier days. The United States had one Defense Department on January 20, 2001, and it will have a very different one by January 20, 2009. Donald H. Rumsfeld, thirteenth and twenty-first secretary of defense, is the reason why.

Recommended reading.

NOLA Observations

Some pertinent observations about the tragedy-in-progress that is New Orleans by the conservative Federalist Patriot newsletter.

I've reprinted the entire thing in the extended entry. It is well worth reading because it provides a counter-balance to all of the "analysis" going on in the mainstream media right now.

Observations on the decent, the dire and the despicable...

Finally, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, water is flowing out of New Orleans as Lake Pontchartrain recedes to its normal stage. After the water levels inside and outside the levees equalize, much of New Orleans' real estate will still be about eight feet under, where it will remain until levees are repaired and pumps activated, likely in four to eight weeks. A huge swath of Mississippi and Alabama is also drying out from this devastating storm -- a storm that left some thousand dead and wreaked incalculable human suffering on more than a million survivors, most of whom are now homeless and jobless.

In a sense, the shock this week was reminiscent of that Tuesday morning almost four years ago -- but the death and destruction of 9/11 occurred in two hours, whereas Katrina's mayhem is an ongoing disaster. As it was with 9/11, our response to catastrophic events such as those witnessed this week define us as a people; it reveals, proportionally, both the best and worst of our citizens and our society.

But the media coverage has not been proportional. For five days and counting, the 24-hour news recyclers have played an endless loop of footage featuring misery and destruction accompanied by thematic tunes and graphics -- surreal. Those cameras have captured loss and suffering amid misery and looting. To be sure, that's what they do best -- but there is much more to this story than meets the camera eye.

How we respond to catastrophe says a lot about our character as Americans. Unfortunately, there were very few cameras this week focused on hundreds of thousands of decent people responding to very difficult circumstances with great courage and resolve. At ground level, most who lost all their material possessions remained thankful -- grateful that they, their families and their friends, were alive. You know the type. Their glass is always half full and they live for the next sunrise, not the last sunset. Their stories reflect the true American spirit.

Additionally, those who suffered losses are far outnumbered by relatives, friends and strangers who have lent a hand and donated material goods, services and money. These folks have opened their churches, homes and businesses to provide shelter for refugees invited into their communities. Thousands of Americans from around the nation, professionals and laborers alike with expertise necessary for recovery efforts, have left their homes and families in order to volunteer their assistance. Countless millions are offering daily prayer for victims. As each day has passed, the ranks of those stepping forward to help their displaced countrymen have grown exponentially. This is the face of America, but the cameras have not captured these images.

This is the America that volunteered thousands of personnel and billions of dollars to help with the recovery effort in South Asia after last December's Tsunami.

Further, due in part to federal planning efforts by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, federal, state, and local government agencies have responded to this crisis side by side, expeditiously delivering emergency support to those who would not -- or could not -- evacuate in advance of the hurricane or its residual flooding. National, state and local leaders have set aside petty political differences in a unified effort to care for the immediate and intermediate needs of those left homeless. They have also begun to work out a comprehensive recovery plan for the region.

That notwithstanding, the media focus has been almost exclusively on two percent of the affected population who have yet to be evacuated -- not only the TV media, but the print media as well. Friday morning, The Washington Post's headline read "A City of Despair and Lawlessness". Apparently The New York Times got the memo, too; their headline read "Despair and Lawlessness Grip New Orleans".

Consequently, there is plenty of media coverage on official complaints that services have not been delivered fast enough, that rescue efforts have been too slow, and that there have been competing agendas. "We are watching this devastation unfold on our televisions for days and you have to ask: where is the federal government?" queried Sen. Frank Lautenberg. "We should have had a significant amount of troops and supplies there on the ground Monday."

Apparently Mr. Lautenberg is "logistically challenged." He missed, for example, the fact that when the levees failed, President George Bush activated 15,000 National Guardsmen (5,000 more on the way), who were joined by thousands of police officers, physicians and emergency-management specialists from around the nation. Within 24 hours of the levees failing, there were 50 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, 25 Urban Search and Rescue task forces, eight swift-water rescue teams, two Incident Support Teams, and 1,700 trucks loaded with water, ice, meals, medical supplies, generators, tents and tarps en route. Additionally, FEMA coordinated massive relief efforts with DHS, DoD, HHS and other agencies with relief capabilities -- indeed, an armada is now on its way.

However, as this column has noted before, individual preparedness is the foundation of national preparedness. The federal government does not have, nor has it ever maintained, enough emergency-relief inventories to alleviate all suffering in a catastrophe of this magnitude. What it does maintain will, at best, meet only minimal needs and may not be available for days or even weeks depending on the nature of the catastrophe. (FederalistPatriot.US posts an excellent resource page ["Recommended Action Plan" | http://FederalistPatriot.US/useprpc/] with all you need to know about emergency preparedness measures for yourself and your family.)

Mr. Lautenberg will have to cut his summer vacation short and return to Washington, though, as President Bush will be asking Congress for $10 billion to cover immediate relief expenditures for FEMA alone.

Lautenberg, however, is not alone in using this tragedy as political fodder. As President Bush was welcoming Bill Clinton to the White House yesterday to assist with fundraising for disaster relief, former Clinton senior advisor and noted White House hatchet man Sid "Vicious" Blumenthal opined, "The Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war. ... The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge."

Apparently Sid has forgotten the Senate's diversion of domestic infrastructure funding to cover the 700-percent cost overrun for Ted Kennedy's Big Dig boondoggle. Perhaps that $16 billion American tax payers spent on 7.5 miles of Boston highway could have been better spent on levee improvements in New Orleans -- but we digress.

The fact is, the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana have been arguing for decades with the federal government over who should foot the bill for the NO's gambit on developing ever-widening areas of the sinking swamp around the city. Every elected official in Louisiana knew that the city was on borrowed time with its category-three levees. The eventuality of a cat-four or cat-five hurricane was accepted as a "moral hazard." Indeed, Katrina ended that debate, and American taxpayers will now be saddled with the cost of the levee and the total recovery effort.

Naturally, there were also some AlGorite eco-nuts who actually blamed President Bush and Mississippi governor Haley Barbour for the hurricane. "As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi's Gulf Coast," protested Robert Kennedy Jr., "it's worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush's iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2. ... In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour's memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailing for the Mississippi coast." (Are we to understand that Jr. is now taking his rhetorical cues from Pat Robertson?)

Despite assertions about "global-warming hurricanes," renowned meteorologist Dr. William Gray, in a recent interview with Discover magazine (which has advocated the theory of human-induced global warming), begged to differ: "This human-induced global-warming thing...is grossly exaggerated. ... I'm not disputing there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was global cooling in the middle '40s to the early '70s. Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical...about this global-warming thing. But no one asks us." Gray was described by Discover magazine's editors as one of "the world's most famous hurricane experts." But what do they know. (For an exposition on the causes of global warming, see ["The Earth Day Before Yesterday" | http://federalistpatriot.us/alexander/edition.asp?id=304]).

On the topic of fossil fuel, OPEC oil topped $70/barrel this week, though it costs the money-grubbing cartel a mere $4/barrel to produce. (If memory serves, we liberated this region from tyranny twice in recent history, yet no offer of reduced oil prices to help alleviate our refining crisis has been forthcoming.) President Bush will surely be blamed for our high gas prices and our limited refining capabilities -- but those casting the blame are the same folks who have blocked construction of a single U.S. refinement facility since 1976.

Back in the Big Easy, the ugliest American face projected around the world this week has been that of the looters. Though they represent far fewer than one percent of those displaced by the hurricane and its flooding, their repulsive actions commanded about 50 percent of field TV broadcasts.

On Canal Street, a man sloshing through hip-deep water with ten pairs of jeans over his shoulder was asked if he was salvaging merchandise from his store. His reply? "No, that's everybody's store." Sadly, that has been the norm throughout the French Quarter, where looters have ripped iron gates from storefronts and taken everything they could lay their hands on. These loathsome creatures have filled industrial-size garbage bags with clothes and jewelry and floated them down the street on pieces of plywood, even as National Guardsman sloshed by on survivor-rescue details. Looters also targeted drug stores and at one point threatened to raid a children's hospital that hadn't been evacuated. Relief trucks have been ambushed and robbed by marauding gangs. Ambulances have been overturned. Nursing homes have been invaded. Stories of rape and murder are now emerging.

"We will do what it takes to bring law and order to our area," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. "I'm just furious. It's intolerable." Here we would advise Ms. Blanco that in the aftermath of a devastating natural disaster, and under a state of martial law, the NOPD should be empowered to discharge their weapons when confronted by these riotous gangs -- though preferably not while CNN cameras are rolling. Alas, by this time next week, Al $harpton and Je$$e Jack$on will have landed, insisting that these hoodlums are actually the victims.

Regardless of the bleak and chaotic face the 24-hour news recyclers have put on this tragedy, the real face of America is that of a million Patriots who have courageously persevered, and tens of millions who are helping lift them up from tragedy -- but that face is too mundane for news editors, whose primary concern is market share and advertising revenue.

Flat tax

John Fund, over at OpinionJournal, makes a case for a national flat tax to replace our current income tax.

I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry. It makes for interesting reading.

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

The World Is Flat

But America is a laggard in the tax-reform revolution.


Monday, August 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Next month's report of the White House tax reform commission will likely stop short of advocating a complete scrapping of the tax code. But look for it to have warm words for how well the flat tax is promoting economic growth in the more than dozen places--ranging from Ukraine to Hong Kong--that have adopted variations of it.

It's about time the concept of taxing all income at a single rate, which presidential candidate Steve Forbes and then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey broached a decade ago, once again takes center stage. It's increasingly popular overseas, with Romania and the republic of Georgia adopting it last January. Greece is likely to introduce a 25% single rate for both corporate and personal income next month. If Poland's opposition parties win next month's elections they are likely to introduce a flat tax. In Italy, the Bruno Leoni Institute has just published an interview with former finance minister and current defense minister Antonio Martino detailing his support of the flat tax.

Even Germany, normally a center of intellectual stagnation when it comes to tax policy, has gotten the bug. Angela Merkel, the candidate of the conservative Christian Democrats in the Sept. 18 election, has appointed radical reformer Paul Kirchhof as her spokesman on taxes. While her party's manifesto falls far short of advocating Mr. Kirchhof's idea of a single rate of 25% for companies and individuals, she has stoutly defended his approach: "It's important that there is a man who wants to go further in principle and, when there is room for maneuver, says, now we can go the next step."

To everyone's surprise the stodgy German media are now consumed with debate over the flat tax. Berlin's left-leaning Der Tageszeitung noted that under Mr. Kirchhof's proposal generous exemptions would mean a family of four would pay tax only on its portion of income that was over $42,000 a year. With the current German tax system now operating with 90,000 rules and 418 tax exemptions it asked, "Isn't an understandable tax system good for all? . . . Kirchhof stands for clarity." The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany's most respected paper, noted that while the idea has been predictably attacked by unions and some business interests, "massive resistance by people representing particular interests and associations is the most certain sign that this is the right path to take."

In Britain, die-hard opponents of the flat tax, such as Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, were caught censoring portions of an internal Treasury paper on the subject that was obtained under the recently effective Freedom of Information Act. The unexpurgated version, leaked to the Daily Telegraph, found that a flat tax would likely make Britain more attractive to foreign investors, eliminate economic distortions and create a "mini-economic boom." The paper noted that under flat-tax systems in other European countries the rich end up paying a larger share of total tax revenues. In flat-tax countries, taxpayers in the highest brackets move from consumption or tax-sheltered investments to more productive, taxable investments. Many higher earners work harder or take additional risks, rewarded by higher after-tax returns.

Indeed, the Brussels-based Center for a New Europe notes that none of the countries that have adopted the flat tax are seriously contemplating any retreat from it. Flat-tax pioneer Estonia is even reducing its rate by two percentage points a year until it drops to 20% in 2007. Since the tax's inception in 1994, Estonia has had an average growth of 5.2% a year, and now also ranks fourth (out of 155 countries) in the Index of Economic Freedom, published by The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation.

After being mired in stagnation for years, in 2001 Russia implemented a flat tax of 13% for individuals, along with a 15% rate for most business income. The economy grew 7.3% last year, thanks in part to underground activity going legitimate, more than doubling revenues from income taxes. Even the New York Times, which opposes a flat tax in the U.S., has praised, President Vladimir Putin for "radically simplifying the code and slashing rates." On a trip to flat-tax Slovakia earlier this year, President Bush, extolled those who are using the flat tax "to attract capital and create economic vitality."

---

Here at home the flat tax is still routinely ridiculed. When Mr. Forbes floated the idea in 1995, President Clinton joked that Republicans were becoming "the party of flat-earthers and flat-taxers." But he has also told friends privately that he got a real scare during the 1992 primaries when Jerry Brown championed a flat tax. Mr. Brown won applause from audiences by pointing out that under our current system the rich will always be able to hire experts to lobby for tax loopholes and avoid the higher rate traps set for them.

That logic and the practical realization of it in country after country is winning adherents from all walks of life in the U.S. Donald Trump is full of praise for Mr. Forbes's new book, "Flat Tax Revolution." Actor Clint Eastwood praises a flat tax because it would mean "a little old lady on a home computer [could do] the work of all these thousands of bureaucrats and accountants." A variation on the flat-tax idea, junking the income tax in favor of a single-rate national sales tax is also gaining popularity. "The Fair Tax," a new book by Rep. John Linder and radio talk-show host Neal Boortz, is currently topping best-seller lists.

So here's hoping the Bush tax reform commission is bold enough to at least propose some steps towards a dramatic flattening of the income tax code. It may be a matter of long-term economic survival. America's taxes on profits are around 40%, when you combine federal, state and local levies. With the possible exception of Japan, that rate is about the highest of any developed nation in the world today. If the U.S. doesn't adopt the flat tax it may find itself losing jobs, capital and ambitious entrepreneurs to nations with a more ambitious growth agenda.

Alvin Rabushka, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, believes it's only a matter of time before an emerging economic superpower like China or India goes the flat-tax route. His book on the subject has just been published in Chinese, with a preface by Lou Jiwei, the vice minister of finance. If China adopted a flat tax, more than a quarter of the world's population would be filling out tax returns on the back of a postcard. That would leave them a lot of time and money to eat our economic lunch.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Bush's latest challenge

This analysis from the New York Times is really spot-on about President Bush's options in dealing with the Katrina catastrophy -- and the potential political consequences. Here's a taste:

But the current president, in contrast, prides himself as a crisis manager. He observed in a debate with Vice President Al Gore in 2000 that natural catastrophes were "a time to test your mettle."

The next few weeks will determine whether he can manage several challenges at once, in the chaos of Iraq and the humanitarian and economic fallout along the Gulf Coast.

Success could help him emerge from a troubled moment in his presidency, when his approval ratings have hit an all-time low. But it is hardly assured.

It takes free registration, but I recommend that you read it.

Hurricane Katrina: Blog for Relief Day

The full extent of destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina is still not known, but it is clear that it has killed thousands and displaced millions of people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Please hold the survivors in your thoughts and prayers.

There is something else that you can do: Get involved in volunteer efforts to help the victims of this national tragedy. Or donate money to one of the many relief agencies that are already rushing aid to that devastated gulf coast region.

I am donating to the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) - UMC Disaster Relief Fund. The UMCOR's main distribution center is located in Baldwin, Louisiana -- some 60 miles away from the disaster area. It suffered some damage, but is operational, and is working feverishly to provide relief to the victims of Katrina.

Also: Check out Glenn Reynold's site, Instapundit, for many more links to relief agencies.

And Michelle Malkin is a good resource for what is going on down there.

You can also check out this aggregate page of bloggers who are contributing to Katrina relief efforts.

Technorati Tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina

Hit count

Jack Kelly over at Irish Pennants describes an informal survey he conducted looking into information dissemination in the media.

I did a Google search a few minutes ago. The "storied" LtCol. Kurilla has been mentioned 5,420 times. The most decorated Marine in this conflict, Capt. Brian Chontosh, drew 10,700 hits. There were 14,500 for Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, the first woman to win the Silver Star since World War II. Sgt. Paul Smith, the only Medal of Honor winner in the conflict has drawn 1,010,000 hits. But all their mentions together pale into insignificance compared to the 4,970,000 hits for Cindy Sheehan. I think this tells us all we need to know about the priorities of the "mainstream" media.

Sad, isn't it?

Iraq DOES = Vietnam

At least it does in the way most of the mainstream media portrays it.

The result of a media obsession with body counts can be defeatism. The Vietnam War's 1968 Tet Offensive provides a sobering example.
In Tet, our soldiers inflicted a stinging strategic defeat on the North Vietnamese. American and South Vietnamese losses were a mere fraction of those suffered by Communist forces, which had massive casualties. Nevertheless, the American media -- preoccupied with American body bags -- portrayed Tet as a disastrous defeat for the United States.

Tet was a propaganda victory for the Communists and a turning point in the war. The media's depiction undermined American confidence and contributed to our eventual decision to turn tail and leave. The people of Southeast Asia, including more than 1 million desperate boat people, paid a horrific price.

You should read the whole piece.

Hollywood hate

Here's a description of what Hollywood's real feelings about our country are. It is given by an insider (though maybe not one any longer). And it just confirms what many people have been saying for a while now.

If true, this is sad . . .

Think gas prices are high here?

Check out the gas prices around the world!

I travelled abroad quite a bit a few years ago, and noted then that they were paying four to five dollars a gallon in most European countries.

We really have it good in this country when it comes to the price of gasoline. Even at today's prices . . .

Woeful reporting

Jack Kelly has a post about a news report gone bad.

I find it hard to believe that a reporter can take the facts given in this story and turn them into such a twisted farce of reality.

"She Does Not Speak for Me"

Ronald Griffin, father of one of our own soldiers who died in Iraq, disagrees with Cindy Sheehan about the war. Here is an excerpt:

Thirty-five years ago, a president faced a similar dilemma in Vietnam. He gave in and we got "peace with honor." To this day, I am still searching for that honor. Today, those who defend our freedom every day do so as volunteers with a clear and certain purpose. Today, they have in their commander in chief someone who will not allow us to sink into self-pity. I will not allow him to. The amazing part about talking to the people left behind is that I did not want them to stop. After speaking to so many I have come away with the certainty of their conviction that in a large measure it's because of the deeds and sacrifices of their fallen heroes that this is a better and safer world we now live in.

I've reprinted it all in the extended entry.

She Does Not Speak for Me

My son died in Iraq--and it was not in vain.


BY RONALD R. GRIFFIN

Thursday, August 18, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

I lost a son in Iraq and Cindy Sheehan does not speak for me.

I grieve with Mrs. Sheehan, for all too well I know the full measure of the agony she is forever going to endure. I honor her son for his service and sacrifice. However, I abhor all that she represents and those who would cast her as the symbol for parents of our fallen soldiers.

The fallen heroes, until now, have enjoyed virtually no individuality. They have been treated as a monolith, a mere number. Now Mrs. Sheehan, with adept public relations tactics, has succeeded in elevating herself above the rest of us. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida declared that Mrs. Sheehan is now the symbol for all parents who have lost children in Iraq. Sorry, senator. Not for me.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times portrays Mrs. Sheehan as a distraught mom standing heroically outside the guarded gates of the most powerful and inhumane man on earth, President Bush. Ms. Dowd is so moved by Mrs. Sheehan's plight that she bestowed upon her and all grieving parents the title of "absolute moral authority." That characterization epitomizes the arrogance and condescension of anyone who would presume to understand and speak for all of us. How can we all possess "absolute moral authority" when we hold so many different perspectives?

I don't want that title. I haven't earned that title.

---

Although we all walk the same sad road of sorrow and agony, we walk it as individuals with all the refreshing uniqueness of our own thoughts shaped in large measure by the life and death of our own fallen hero. Over the past few days I have reached out to other parents and loved ones of fallen heroes in an attempt to find out their reactions to all the attention Mrs. Sheehan has attracted. What emerges from those conversations is an empathy for Mrs. Sheehan's suffering but a fundamental disagreement with her politics.

Ann and Dale Hampton lost their only child, Capt. Kimberly Hampton, on Jan. 2, 2004, while she was flying her Kiowa helicopter. She was a member of the 82nd Airborne and the company commander. She had already served in Afghanistan before being deployed to Iraq. Ann Hampton wrote, "My grief sometimes seems unbearable, but I cannot add the additional baggage of anger. Mrs. Sheehan has every right to protest . . . but I cannot do that. I would be protesting the very thing that Kimberly believed in and died for."

Marine Capt. Benjamin Sammis was Stacey Sammis's husband. Ben died on April 4, 2003, while flying his Super Cobra helicopter. Listen to Stacey and she will tell you that she is just beginning to understand the enormousness of the character of soldiers who knowingly put their lives at risk to defend our country. She will tell you that one of her deepest regrets is that the world did not have the honor of experiencing for a much longer time this outstanding Marine she so deeply loved.

Speak to Joan Curtin, whose son, Cpl. Michael Curtin, was an infantryman with the 2-7th 3rd ID, and her words are passionately ambivalent. She says she has no room for bitterness. She has a life to lead and a family to nurture. She spoke of that part of her that never heals, for that is where Michael resides. She can go on, always knowing there will be that pain.

Karen Long is the mother of Spc. Zachariah Long, who died with my son Kyle on May 30, 2003. Zack and Kyle were inseparable friends as only soldiers can be, and Karen and I have become inseparable friends since their deaths. Karen's view is that what Mrs. Sheehan is doing she has every right to do, but she is dishonoring all soldiers, including Karen's son, Zack. Karen cannot comprehend why Mrs. Sheehan cannot seem to come to grips with the idea that her own son, Casey, was a soldier like Zack who had a mission to complete. Karen will tell you over and over again that Zack is not here and no one, but no one will dishonor her son.

My wife, Robin, has a different take on Mrs. Sheehan. She told me, "I don't care what she says or does. She is no more important than any other mother."

---

By all accounts Spc. Casey Sheehan, Mrs. Sheehan's son, was a soldier by choice and by the strength of his character. I did not have the honor of knowing him, but I have read that he attended community college for three years and then chose to join the Army. In August 2003, five months into Operation Iraqi Freedom and after three years of service, Casey Sheehan re-enlisted in the Army with the full knowledge there was a war going on, and with the high probability he would be assigned to a combat area. Mrs. Sheehan frequently speaks of her son in religious terms, even saying that she thought that some day Casey would be a priest. Like so many of the individuals who have given their lives in service to our country, Casey was a very special young man. How do you decry that which someone has chosen to do with his life? How does a mother dishonor the sacrifice of her own son?

Mrs. Sheehan has become the poster child for all the negativity surrounding the war in Iraq. In a way it heartens me to have all this attention paid to her, because that means others in her position now have the chance to be heard. Give equal time to other loved ones of fallen heroes. Feel the intensity of their love, their pride and the sorrow.

To many loved ones, there are few if any "what ifs." They, like their fallen heroes before them, live in the world as it is and not what it was or could have been. Think of the sacrifices that have brought us to this day. We as a country made a collective decision. We must now live up to our decision and not deviate until the mission is complete.

Thirty-five years ago, a president faced a similar dilemma in Vietnam. He gave in and we got "peace with honor." To this day, I am still searching for that honor. Today, those who defend our freedom every day do so as volunteers with a clear and certain purpose. Today, they have in their commander in chief someone who will not allow us to sink into self-pity. I will not allow him to. The amazing part about talking to the people left behind is that I did not want them to stop. After speaking to so many I have come away with the certainty of their conviction that in a large measure it's because of the deeds and sacrifices of their fallen heroes that this is a better and safer world we now live in.

Those who lost their lives believed in the mission. To honor their memory, and because it's right, we must believe in the mission, too.

We refuse to allow Cindy Sheehan to speak for all of us. Instead, we ask you to learn the individual stories. They are glorious. Honor their memories.

Honor their service. Never dishonor them by giving in. They never did.

Mr. Griffin is the father of Spc. Kyle Andrew Griffin, a recipient of the Army Commendation Medal, Army Meritorious Service Medal and the Bronze Star, who was killed in a truck accident on a road between Mosul and Tikrit on May 30, 2003.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Have you seen this email?

"Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?" the anonymous polemic asks, in part. "Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?"

"Of course we didn't know!" the message concludes. "Our media doesn't tell us!"

I haven't actually seen this one, though I've received some variants in the past. This email has actually motivated members of the Associated Press to evaluate the nature of their reporting about events in Iraq.

And guess what? They sorta kinda think that there may be a teensie weensie perception of bias.

Heh. They really don't get it. But at least they're trying. And they may succeed. There is hope.

In the meantime, there are people like Arthur Chrenkoff who are trying their darndest to get the other side of the news out to people.

Data mining

Hiawatha Bray at The Boston Globe makes a pretty darn good case for the use of data mining in the war on terrorists.

Data mining has too much promise for us to NOT use it against terrorism. After all, it is already being used by various retailers for marketing purposes. Why are we not using it against terrorists?

A technology that may have helped spot Atta and other terrorists is being suppressed by Congress, for no particularly good reason.

That technology is ''data mining," the use of sophisticated software and powerful computers to spot patterns of activity hidden in vast amounts of apparently random data. It's used routinely by businesses seeking new ways to empty our wallets.

When you swipe one of those discount cards at the supermarket, you're letting the retailer make a record of everything you buy. Thus the store develops a profile of its customers' tastes and buying habits. Mining this data can reveal patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed.

For instance, purchases of bottled water may increase whenever there's a sale on sirloin steak. Data mining uncovers thousands of these nearly invisible correlations, and marketing wizards use the results to maximize the store's profits.

But data mining can also be used to spot interesting patterns in other kinds of data. Just by crunching credit card numbers, you could find out that there's some guy in Chicago who's been buying an awful lot of fertilizer -- the kind that can be turned into truck bombs. Or someone in New York who does a lot of travel to exotic foreign locales, and who also signs up for courses on how to fly jumbo jets.

And, yes, it could be abused. And our privacy could be greatly diminished. But well-crafted laws could restrict it's use against law-abiding citizens while making the techniques available to better ensure our security.

Isn't that a worthwhile reason?

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly.]

Good economic news

Business Week reports on a report from the Congressional Budget Office that supports the position that our economy is improving. Despite what many folks would have us believe . . . Here's an excerpt (emphasis added):

AUG. 15 5:41 P.M. ET

The federal budget-deficit picture turned brighter Monday as congressional scorekeepers released new estimates showing the level of red ink for the current fiscal year would drop to $331 billion.

The new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which does budget analysis for lawmakers in Washington, gave the latest proof that surging revenues and a steadily growing economy are combining to bring the deficit down from a record $412 billion posted last year. CBO predicts a $314 billion deficit for the budget year starting Oct. 1.

The people

Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online has a pretty interesting take on polls and the people.

It’s very rare to hear a politician with public opinion on his side say, “I don’t believe in polls.� It’s only when the public disagrees with him that a pol will say polls “don’t mean anything.� This is especially true during elections. A candidate down in the polls will either dismiss polls as “meaningless� or cite some minor finding — a huge surge among diabetics named Todd — as proof of underlying momentum. But once the polls — or even a show of hands at the local Jiffy Lube — favor him, suddenly the polls are divine.

He does a good job of mingling humor with some astute observations. Recommended.

Profiling

Dorothy Rabinowitz makes a good case for using profiling to help make us safer from murderous terrorists. She also puts the ACLU squarely in the terrorists' camp.

Read about it in the extended entry.

The ACLU thinks cops are a bigger threat than terrorists.


BY DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Thursday, August 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

"Blood must flow. There must be widows, there must be orphans."--jihadist Fayiz Azzam addressing a gathering in Atlanta, 1990

"We conquer the land of the infidels, and we spread Islam by calling the infidels to Allah."--from a speech by Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, outlining the plan for Islamic world rule, at an event sponsored by the Islamic Charity Project International, Detroit, 1991

"He is now extremely anxious when he sees police officers in the subway system."--from a description, by the New York Civil Liberties Union, of one of the complainants who joined its lawsuit against the New York City Police Department, August 2005

---

A solemn handful of plaintiffs surrounded New York Civil Liberties Union head Donna Lieberman last week as she announced the agency's latest lawsuit--this one targeted at new procedures allowing for the random inspection of bags carried onto the subways. This will not come as a surprise--the agency has had an exceptionally busy few years, since 9/11, campaigning against expanding police powers, increased surveillance and other antiterror measures, all of which, the NYCLU and likeminded watchdogs regularly inform us, pose a greater danger than any that might come from the terrorists themselves. How Americans of normal intelligence respond to this reasoning should make entertaining reading someday.

Most of those entering the subways these days are, it seems, unperturbed by the prospect of a bag check, and not a few have made clear their approval of such precautions. Indeed, in its latest war on the security search, the NYCLU has entered on decidedly iffy terrain: one close to home, psychologically, for masses of Americans (and not just those who take city trains and buses), all in a good position to weigh the sort of argument which holds that government security methods are a greater threat to them than terrorism.

It was a war undertaken even as the pictures of the London bombings remain fresh in memory--along, of course, with those of the devoted jihadists, shown (via surveillance cameras) sprinting through that city's transportation system after their attempt at a second strike. Who can forget the faces of this crew, as it rushed furtively about through empty corridors and train cars--a sight that lent a special touch of nightmare immediacy to the picture unfolding in Britain these last weeks. The pictures revealed, as none had before, the scope of the Islamic terrorist apparatus and support groups operating from within--a threat not limited to Britain.

Which is one reason why, in the matter of the subway searches and the lawsuit against New York City and its police commissioner, all the sides to the conflict and what they stand for are perfectly clear to most people. Matters must have seemed even clearer to those who followed the news of the NYCLU's press conference a few days ago, at which the agency announced the legal action and introduced five plaintiffs who had signed on. Among them was a lawyer, quoted above, a traveler so apprehensive about being searched that he took alternative routes: even so he remained, according to the claim, extremely anxious at the sight of police in the subways. A sad case, doubtless. One also wildly at odds with the reactions of most subway travelers, who tend to feel good at the sight of police officers in the subways--the more of them the better, preferably in close proximity.

Good feelings come, to be sure, in all forms. Another of the NYCLU plaintiffs told how, when a member of the police force asked if he could look in his bag, he declared, "Absolutely not"--and walked away. With the other plaintiffs, he declared himself affronted by the police request, the invasion of his privacy, by the threat to personal freedom, not to forget the Constitution. Not everyone gets to go on trips like this with a MetroCard.

---

Taking affront at government security measures in wartime is, of course, a choice available only to a free people, as is the right to cavil ceaselessly about the alleged erosion of our liberties, the dark night of oppression settling on us daily, as the NYCLU has so conspicuously done these last years--though not without echoing choruses from its parent organization, the ACLU, and various crank outposts of the libertarian movement.

Lurking at the center of the current struggle, ostensibly about snooping in bags, violation of constitutional rights and such, is the question of racial profiling--an incendiary issue that has set off a rhetorical war to match. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared an ironclad ban on anything smacking of profiling with an eye to any particular ethnicity or race. If we have learned anything, the mayor recently declared, "it's that you can't predict what a terrorist looks like."

To which Howard Safir, former police commissioner in the Giuliani administration, retorted on a "Hardball" interview, "We know what the 19 hijackers looked like on 9/11"--and also, he went on to note, what the London train bombers looked like, what those who bombed the Cole looked like, and more. The current mayor's posture on profiling was, he declared, an exercise in public relations that could never work.

Who, listening to this, would not know at once which of these responses better represented common sense and honesty?

The head of the NYCLU, in turn, charged not only that the random bag searches didn't work but that they were also likely to lead to racial profiling. She explained how this would happen in a statement that would require, of those who read it, the deciphering talents of the Enigma codebreakers: "Although the NYPD claims that they are conducting searches that are purely random, the large number of people entering the transit system and the lack of control over that traffic result in people being selected for search in a discretionary and arbitrary manner, which creates the potential for impermissible racial profiling."

---

Among other lessons of 9/11, we have learned the cost of squeamishness that prevented closer scrutiny of young Arab men entering the country even when their behavior raised suspicions. In an exceptionally powerful series airing on the National Geographic Channel on Aug. 21 and 22, titled "Inside 9/11," an airline ticket-taker recalls being stunned by the strange look on the face of customer Mohamed Atta--particularly the unsettling fury the man exuded. Still, he could not bring himself to raise any alarm: indeed, when he heard later that the plane Atta was on had been one of those that crashed in the terror attacks, the agent felt terrible. Terrible because he had been suspicious of the passenger and thought he could be a terrorist and now the poor man was dead. It was a while before the ticket agent grasped that the man he suspected was, in fact, hijacker-in-chief and pilot of the plane.

As the admirable Tony Blair is now discovering after announcing his determination that "multiculturalist concerns" will not be allowed to impede the struggle to rid his nation of terrorists, a thorny road lies ahead. Islamic civil rights organizations and others immediately warned that the only result of his efforts would be to "alienate" young Muslims. Translation: cause them to become terrorists. In short, the prime minister must accede to blackmail in his dealing with Muslim communities.

Ethnic/racial profiling may not, in fact, work very well as a security strategy--but the frenzy of the attacks it has excited tells more than we may want to know about our post-9/11 condition. Large numbers of citizens of every religion and ethnicity lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. Today, a strategy designed to help ensure that such a calamity will not again occur has been converted to a bizarre race-discrimination issue, subordinated to the concerns and ambitions of politicians. This won't, in the end, do much for the office-seekers and -holders now competing for the honor of delivering the most hysterical denunciations of ethnic and racial profiling. What, after all, can citizens (black and brown among them) think of leaders still prepared to argue that young Arab males receive no more scrutiny than the famous 80-year-old little grandmother--and that the people's security lies in measures clearly the least suited to assuring their safety?

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Varifrank and Cindy Sheehan

Varifrank has an excellent and thought-provoking post about the actions of Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas.

He really does a good job of addressing her issues.

I recommend it.

The other half of 9/11

Edward Morrissey, also known as Captain Ed (who blogs at Captain's Quarters), has an informative article about a terrorist named Mohammed Afroze who was the leader of an Al-Qaeda cell that planned to launch simultaneous attacks on 9/11/2001 against Britain, Australia, and India.

Captain Ed adds some commentary to his article in his blog post of 11 August 2005. He concentrates on the danger that our news media is exposing us to by not telling us the whole story about the depth and breadth of the terrorist threat to this nation and its people.

This continues to make life dangerous for Americans and free people around the world. If the media cannot truly depict the issues surrounding global Islamofascist terror, the ignorance they promote about its goals will result in a collapse of will to keep those goals from becoming reality.

I highly recommend you read both the article and the blog post . Then think about it.

It frightens me to see this happening. We Americans can be so gullible sometimes. And now we're being informed by a bunch of gullible, ignorant, possibly deceptive journalists.

Not a formula for success.

Presidential vacations

Michael Barone, senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, has a post up about why it is okay for our presidents to take vacations.

Broken promise

Brent Bozell calls it like he sees it about the manistream media's "neutral" reporting. Here's a taste.

You already know the media's response to the criticism: It's not their job to lead the cheers but to "tell the truth." That "truth," in their eyes, is the war was an unjustified, costly and ill-planned quagmire. Our news media can proclaim it is not their job to help President Bush win the war on terrorists in Iraq. But their job ought to be to cover all of Iraq, and not just show the American people a stilted nightly horror movie, a dinner plate of Terrorist Helper.

I can't say that I disagree . . .

Fiscal responsibility . . .

. . . is something we don't seem to have in Washington, D.C.

Jeff Jacoby has an op-ed at Boston.com entitled The Republican Pork Barrel, but after looking at some of the specifics -- like who (and how many) voted for the bill, and whose states benefitted from the imbedded pork -- it seems to be more of a bi-partisan pork barrel.

AT $286.4 BILLION, the highway bill just passed by Congress is the most expensive public works legislation in US history. In addition to funding the interstate highway system and other federal transportation programs, it sets a new record for pork-barrel spending, earmarking $24 billion for a staggering 6,376 pet projects, spread among virtually every congressional district in the land. The enormous bill -- 1,752 pages long -- wasn't made public until just before it was brought to a vote, and so, as The New York Times noted, ''it is safe to bet that none of the lawmakers, not even the main authors, had read the entire package."

That didn't stop them from voting for it. It passed 412 to 8 in the House, 91 to 4 in the Senate.

It's worth the read -- if only to see how truly wasteful our congressional representatives are.

Profiling

David Galernter, on the L.A. Times website: You object to profiling? Fuhgedaboutit

Charles Krauthammer, on the washingtonpost.com website: Give Grandma a Pass

Karen Hughes' new job

Anne Applebaum discusses Karen Hughes' new job. It isn't going to be easy . . .

On Marriage -- sort of

Ed Morrissey, who blogs at The Captain's Quarters has an op-ed up at The Daily Standard website entitled Exit Strategies. It's about commitment. Here's a taste:

It's no coincidence that marriage continues to struggle as a social structure in an age that devalues commitment and looks for exit strategies regardless of the endeavor.

It's not just about commitment in marrige, though, so you should go and read the rest.

Supporters of Cosby's cause

Heather Mac Donald has an interesting, affirmative article that highlights several black leaders who agree with Cosby on what is needed (and not needed) to liberate blacks from the shackles of welfare and despair. It's a long article, but quite worth your time. Here's how it begins:

When Bill Cosby, in a speech to the NAACP last May, let fly a merciless condemnation of black illegitimacy, educational apathy, and the idea that white racism causes black social problems, political commentators dropped their jaws. They remained stunned when he vented similar frustration to audiences across the country over the next six months. Sure, “civil rights� advocates have been known, on rare occasions, to criticize self-defeating black behavior, but convention requires that after briefly denouncing, say, black-on-black crime (as if black-on-white crime would be okay), the “leader� should turn his attention to the racial injustice that allegedly causes such crime and harp on that for the next year or so. This Cosby refused to do. “It’s not what [the white man] is doing to you; it’s what you’re not doing,� he thundered in Detroit.

The reaction of black audiences was just as unexpected. Rather than take offense, they waited hours in line, in blistering heat and freezing cold, to hear Cosby deliver his impassioned plea for bourgeois behavior.

The rest of the article is about other pioneering blacks: talk show host Rapheal Adams, sheriff David A. Clarke, Republican recruiter Don Scoggins, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, and Vietnam veteran and anti-crime organizer Olgen Williams.

I highly recommend this. And it is not racist by any means. It does run contrary to the liberal line of reasoning, though.

Intel failures

What Jeff Jacoby said.

Strange men and missile launchers

Michelle Malkin describes a very real threat here in the U.S. -- terrorists with anti-aircraft missiles.

Yup, that's right. Many readers have e-mailed me about a recent report floating on the Internet that reveals military concerns about a suspicious trio of Middle Eastern men who apparently pointed a rocket launcher at low-flying aircraft near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma earlier this month. It's authentic. Battle Staff Directive #41, categorized as "For Official Use Only," was issued at Hill Air Force Base in Utah last week to raise a red flag about the incident at Tinker AFB:

"On 14 Jul 05, three individuals were observed outside of the perimeter of Tinker AFB, OK. They were looking through binoculars, taking pictures and one appeared to be holding a large weapon at chest level. The weapon appeared to be aimed towards a low flying aircraft. The three individuals were described as being of Middle Eastern decent and left the area when approached. The weapon was later identified as a rocket launcher (MANPAD) and the low flying aircraft to be a B-1 Bomber. FBI in Oklahoma City and AFOSI [Air Force Office of Special Investigations] determined the threat to be credible."

Ms. Malkin never fails to make you think. I recommend it.

We must continue to run the course

Austin Bay has an op-ed up on the Weekly Standard entitled Nervous in Baghdad. Here's a taste:

My bet is that the Iraqis will pull it off. By the end of 2006 the Iraqis plan to have 250,000 troops and policemen in uniform.

But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C. There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The U.S. military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class?

Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way. In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks--the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought--that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

It is well worth reading (it is a two-page article).

Neocon maturation

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column up at OpinionJournal that puts the Bush doctrine into a historical perspective that, frankly, is pretty darn impressive.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry. You really need to read it.

The Neoconservative Convergence

Some once famously dissenting ideas now govern U.S. foreign policy, maturing as they go.


BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism--has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

The era began with the senior George Bush and a classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without Kissinger--although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe its vision--the New World Order--captured the core idea: an orderly world with orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.

The elder Mr. Bush had two enormous achievements to his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure of imagination. Mr. Bush brilliantly managed the reconstitution of Germany and the restoration of the independence of the East European states, but he could not see far enough to the liberation of the Soviet peoples themselves. His notorious "chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, warning Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism," seemed to prefer Soviet stability to the risk of 15 free and independent states.

But we must not be retrospectively too severe. Democracy in Ukraine was hard to envision even a few years ago, let alone in the early 1990s, and Mr. Bush's hesitancy did not stop the march of liberation in the Soviet sphere. It was the failure of imagination in Mr. Bush's other area of triumph--Iraq--that had truly stark, even tragic, consequences.

Leaving Saddam in place, and declining to support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the first Gulf War, begat more than a decade of Iraqi suffering, rancor among our war allies, diplomatic isolation for the U.S., and a crumbling regime of U.N. sanctions. All this led ultimately and inevitably to a second war that could have been fought far more easily--and with the enthusiastic support of Iraq's Shiites, who to this day remain suspicious of our intentions--in 1991. One recalls with dismay that the first two of Osama bin Laden's announced justifications for his declaration of war on America were the garrisoning of the holy places (i.e., Saudi Arabia) by crusader (i.e., American) soldiers and the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. Both were a direct result of the inconclusive end to the first Gulf War.

Still, the achievements of the elder Mr. Bush far outweigh the failures. The smooth and peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire began, Saddam was stopped, and Arabia was saved. But then came the second, radically different experiment. For the balance of the 1990s, for reasons having nothing to do with foreign policy, realism was abruptly replaced by the classic liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration.

It is hard to be charitable in assessing the record. Liberal internationalism's one major achievement in those years--saving the Muslims in the Balkans and creating conditions for their possible peaceful integration into Europe--was achieved, ironically, in defiance of its own major principle. It lacked what liberal internationalists incessantly claim is the sine qua non of legitimacy: the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

Otherwise, the period between 1993 and 2001 was a waste, eight years of sleepwalking, of the absurd pursuit of one treaty more useless than the last, while the rising threat--Islamic terrorism--was treated as a problem of law enforcement. Perhaps the most symbolic moment occurred at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France in October 2000, after Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's peace offer at Camp David and instead launched his bloody second intifada. In Paris for another round of talks, Arafat abruptly broke off negotiations and was leaving the residence when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ran after him, chasing him in her heels on the cobblestone courtyard to induce him, to cajole him, into signing yet another worthless piece of paper.

Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked of the New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, "Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege." During its 7 1/2-year Oslo folly, the Clinton administration abused the privilege consistently.

---

Then came another radical change. By a fluke or a miracle, depending on your point of view, because of the confusion of a few disoriented voters in Palm Beach, Fla., this has been the decade of neoconservatism. Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that he works in very mysterious ways.

In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the president offered its most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

The remarkable fact that the Bush doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism's own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history. In the spring and summer of 2004, in the midst of increasing difficulties in Iraq, it was very widely believed that neoconservative policies had been run to the ground, that the administration that had purveyed them would soon be thrown out of office, and that internecine recriminations were about to begin over who lost the war on terror, the war in Iraq and indeed the reins of American foreign policy. One prominent columnist, speaking for the conventional wisdom of the moment, called the Bush project in Iraq "a childish fantasy." And this, from a friend of neoconservatism.

As for the liberals who had come on board the project of liberating Iraq, they took its perceived foundering as an opportunity to engage in a mass jumping of ship. Some justified their abandonment of the Bush doctrine on the grounds that it was they who had been betrayed--by an administration whose incompetence, mendacity, political opportunism and various other crimes had ruined a policy that would already have been crowned with success if only they had been in charge of postwar Iraq, calibrating brilliantly precise troop levels, calculating to three decimal places the required degree of de-Baathification, and overseeing just about every other operational detail according to the dictates of their own tactical genius.

Other liberals donned the guise of realists, who by the summer of 2004 were back in fashion. At the height of this new vogue, just before the November election, even John Kerry's advisers, noting that the liberal-internationalist critique of the war (namely, that it lacked international support and legitimacy) was not exactly winning converts, settled instead on a "realist" line of attack. From then on, Iraq would be known as the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," which, translated, meant that we should be chasing terrorists cave-to-cave in Afghanistan rather than pursuing an ideological crusade in the Middle East.

If you add to this mix the classical realists, from Brent Scowcroft to Dimitri Simes, who had opposed the entire project from the beginning and were now penning their I-told-you-so's, there seemed scarcely anyone left on board the neoconservative ship. But the most interesting about-face was that of some professed neoconservatives themselves. Among these, the most prominent was Francis Fukuyama, whose lead article in the summer 2004 National Interest was a "realist" attack on the entire ideological underpinnings of the Iraq war and the liberationist idea. The article's very title, "The Neoconservative Moment," made the mocking suggestion, also very much in vogue, that neoconservative foreign policy was finished, that its moment had come and gone, that it had been done in by Iraq, by its own overweening arrogance, and by its blindness to the realist wisdom that failure in Iraq was, as Mr. Fukuyama put it, "predictable in advance."

As it happens, Mr. Fukuyama had neglected to make that prediction in advance; at the time of the war and during the months of debate preceding it, he had been silent. Moreover, from the perspective of today, even his retroactive prediction in summer 2004 of inevitable and catastrophic failure in Iraq appears doubtful, to say the least. Getting a retroactive prediction wrong is quite an achievement, but it tells you much about the intellectual climate just a year ago.

---

Today, there is no euphoria regarding the Iraq project, but sobriety has replaced panic. Things have changed, and what changed them was four elections: two in the West, and two in the Middle East. First came the re-election in Australia of John Howard, a firm ally of the administration. This presaged the re-election of George W. Bush, which reaffirmed to the world America's staying power, gave popular legitimacy to the Bush doctrine, and established a clear mandate to continue the democratic project. The refusal of the American people last November to turn out a president who, rejecting an "exit strategy," pledged instead to remain until Iraqi self-governance had been secured, was a seminal moment.

The other two elections took place in the areas of our exertion: first the Afghan elections, scandalously underplayed by the American media, then the Iraqi elections, impossible to underplay even by the American media. The latter were a historical hinge point. After a string of other important steps in Iraq that had been confidently dismissed as impossible and certainly impossible to do on time--the writing of an interim constitution, the transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government--came the greatest impossibility of all: free elections as scheduled. The overwhelming popular turnout, in what was essentially a referendum on the insurgency and on the democratic idea, sent a clear-cut message. Those who had said that the Iraqis, like Arabs in general, had no particular interest in self-government were wrong--as were those who claimed that the insurgency was a nationalist, anti-imperialist and widely popular movement.

This is hardly to say that things have not remained difficult in Iraq. The insurgency is still raging. It has the capacity to kill, to instill fear, and perhaps ultimately to destabilize the elected government. What the election did do, however, was to confirm what was already suggested by the insurgency's clear lack of any political program, any political wing, any ideology, indeed even any pretense of competing for hearts and minds. The election exposed the insurgency as an alliance of Baathist nihilism and atavistic jihadism, neither of which has a large constituency in Iraq.

And that is hardly all. The elections newly empowered fully 80% of the Iraqi population--the Kurds and the Shiites--and created an indigenous representative leadership with a life-and-death stake in defeating the insurgency. By giving that 80% the political and institutional means to build the necessary forces, the elections infinitely improved the chances that a stable, multiethnic, democratic Iraq can emerge, despite the current mayhem. As Fouad Ajami wrote in The Wall Street Journal on May 16, upon returning from a visit to the region:

"The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. . . . By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world."

The elections' effect on the wider Arab world was likewise both immediate and profound. Millions of Arabs watched on television as Iraqis exercised their political rights, and were moved to ask the obvious question: Why are Iraqis the only Arabs voting in free elections--and doing so, moreover, under American aegis and protection? The rest is so well known as barely to merit repeating. The Beirut spring. Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. Open demonstrations and the beginnings of political competition in Egypt. Women's suffrage in Kuwait. Small but significant steps toward democratization in the gulf. Bashar Assad's declared intent to legalize political parties in Syria, purge the ruling Baath party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007, and move toward a market economy. (Not that Assad is likely to do any of this, but the fact that he must pretend to be doing it shows the astonishing reach of the Bush doctrine to date.)

Mr. Ajami has called this (in the title of a recent article in Foreign Affairs) the "Autumn of the Autocrats." Not the winter--nothing is certain, and we know of many democratizing movements in the past that were successfully put down. There are too many entrenched dictatorships and kleptocracies in the region to declare anything won. What we can declare, with certainty, is the falsity of those confident assurances before the Iraq war, during the Iraq war and after the Iraq war that this project was inevitably doomed to failure because we do not know how to "do" democracy, and they do not know how to receive it.

In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, the forces of democratic liberalization have emerged on the political stage in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. They have been energized and emboldened by the Iraqi example and by American resolve. Until now, it was widely assumed that the only alternative to pan-Arabist autocracy, to the Nassers and the Saddams, was Islamism. We now know, from Iraq and Lebanon, that there is another possibility, and that America has given it life. As the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, hardly a noted friend of the Bush doctrine, put it in late February in an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush doctrine. First, that the desire for freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. Second, that America is genuinely committed to democracy in and of itself. Contrary to the cynics, whether Arab, European or American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony but for liberation--a truth that on Jan. 30 even al-Jazeera had to televise. Arabs in particular had had sound historical reason to doubt American sincerity: six decades of U.S. support for Arab dictators, a cynical "realism" that began with FDR's deal with the House of Saud and reached its apogee with the 1991 betrayal of the anti-Saddam uprising that the elder Bush had encouraged in Iraq. Today, however, they see a different Bush and a different doctrine.

---

The Iraqi elections had one final effect. They so acutely embarrassed foreign critics, especially in Europe, that we began to see a rash of headlines asking the rhetorical question: Was Bush Right? The answer to that is: Yes, so far. The democratic project has been launched, against the critics and against the odds. That in itself is an immense historical achievement. But success will require maturation--a neoconservatism of discrimination and restraint, prepared to examine both its principles and its practice in shaping a truly governing philosophy.

In a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last year, I tried to draw a distinction between a more expansive and a more restrictive neoconservative foreign policy. I called the two types, respectively, democratic globalism and democratic realism.

The chief spokesman for democratic globalism is the president himself, and his second inaugural address is its ur-text. What is most breathtaking about it is not what most people found shocking--his announced goal of abolishing tyranny throughout the world. Granted, that is rather cosmic-sounding, but it is only an expression of direction and hope for, well, the end of time. What is most expansive is the pledge that America will stand with dissidents throughout the world, wherever they are.

This sort of talk immediately opens itself up to the accusation of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. After all, the United States retains cozy relations with autocracies of various stripes, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. Besides, if we place ourselves on the side of all dissidents everywhere, must we not declare our solidarity not only with democrats but with Islamist dissidents sitting in Pakistani, Egyptian, Saudi and Russian jails?

But we do not act this way, and we need not. The question of alliances with dictators, of deals with the devil, can be approached openly, forthrightly and without any need for defensiveness. The principle is that we cannot democratize the world overnight and, therefore, if we are sincere about the democratic project, we must proceed sequentially. Nor, out of a false equivalence, need we abandon democratic reformers in these autocracies. On the contrary, we have a duty to support them, even as we have a perfect moral right to distinguish between democrats on the one hand and totalitarians or jihadists on the other.

In the absence of omnipotence, one must deal with the lesser of two evils. That means postponing radically destabilizing actions in places where the support of the current nondemocratic regime is needed against a larger existential threat to the free world. There is no need to apologize for that. In World War II we allied ourselves with Stalin against Hitler. (As Churchill said shortly after the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.") This was a necessary alliance, and a temporary one: When we were done with Hitler, we turned our attention to Stalin and his successors.

During the subsequent war, the Cold War, we again made alliances with the devil, in the form of a variety of right-wing dictators, in order to fight the greater evil. Here, again, the partnership was necessary and temporary. Our deals with right-wing dictatorships were contingent upon their usefulness and upon the status of the ongoing struggle. Once again we were true to our word. Whenever we could, and particularly as we approached victory in the larger war, we dispensed with those alliances.

Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators. In 1986, we openly and decisively supported the Aquino revolution that deposed and exiled Marcos, and later in the '80s we pressed very hard for free elections in Chile that Mr. Pinochet lost, paving the way for the return of democracy.

---

Alliances with dictatorships were justified in the war against fascism and the Cold War, and they are justified now in the successor existential struggle, the war against Arab/Islamic radicalism. This is not just theory. It has practical implications. For nothing is more practical than the question: After Afghanistan, after Iraq, what?

The answer is, first Lebanon, then Syria. Lebanon is next because it is so obviously ready for democracy, having practiced a form of it for 30 years after decolonization. Its sophistication and political culture make it ripe for transformation, as the massive pro-democracy demonstrations have shown.

Then comes Syria, both because of its vulnerability--the Lebanon withdrawal has gravely weakened Assad--and because of its strategic importance. A critical island of recalcitrance in a liberalizing region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border, Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. Serious, prolonged, ruthless pressure on the Assad regime would yield enormous geopolitical advantage in democratizing, and thus pacifying, the entire Levant.

Some conservatives (and many liberals) have proposed instead that we be true to the universalist language of the president's second inaugural address and go after the three principal Islamic autocracies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Not so fast, and not so hard. Autocracies they are, and in many respects nasty ones. But doing this would be a mistake.

In Egypt, we certainly have liberal resources that should be supported and encouraged. But, keeping in mind the Algerian experience, we should be wary of bringing down the whole house of cards and thereby derailing any progress from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. Saudi Arabia has a Byzantine culture, and an equally Byzantine method of governance, which must be delicately reformed short of overthrow. And Pakistan, which has great potential for democracy, is simply too critical as a military ally in the war on al Qaeda to risk anything right now. Pervez Musharraf is no bastard; but even if he were, he is ours. We should be encouraging the evolution of democracy in all of these countries, but relentless and ruthless means--of the kind we employed in Afghanistan and Iraq and should, perhaps short of direct military invention, be employing in Syria--are better applied to enemies, not friends.

What is interesting is that the Bush administration, in practice, is proceeding precisely along these lines. It pushes on Hosni Mubarak, but gently. It moves even more gingerly with Saudi Arabia, fearing what may emerge in the short term if the royal kleptocracy is deposed. And, because Pakistan is so central to the war on terror, it disturbs not a hair on the head of Mr. Musharraf.

In short, the Bush administration--if you like, neoconservatism in power--has been far more inclined to pursue democratic realism and to consign democratic globalism to the realm of aspiration. This kind of prudent circumspection is, in fact, a practical necessity for governing in the real world. We should, for example, be doing everything in our power, both overtly and covertly, to encourage a democratic revolution in Iran, a deeply hostile and dangerous state, even while trying carefully to manage democratic evolution in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Indeed, the behavior of the Bush administration implies that in practice, the distinction between democratic realism and democratic globalism may collapse, because globalism is simply not sustainable.

---

Another important sign of the maturing of neoconservative foreign policy is that it is no longer tethered to its own ideological history and paternity. The current practitioners of neoconservative foreign policy are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. They have no history in the movement, and before 9/11 had little affinity to or affiliation with it.

The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Ms. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Mr. Cheney served as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism--not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers' past experience, more mature.

What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined and reshaped the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world. As a result, the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown even more vast than liberals could imagine. And even as the tent has enlarged, the great schisms and splits in conservative foreign policy--so widely predicted just a year ago, so eagerly sought and amplified by outside analysts--have not occurred. Indeed, differences have, if anything, narrowed.

This is not party discipline. It is compromise with reality, and convergence toward the middle. Above all, it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.

Mr. Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and an essayist for Time. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and in 2003 was a recipient of the Bradley Prize. This essay, in somewhat different form, was delivered in New York City in May as Commentary's first annual Norman Podhoretz Lecture, and it appears in the July/August issue of Commentary.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Teaching the Constitution

Cal Thomas, over at TownHall.com, urges President Bush to nominate a person for Supreme Court Justice who wants to restore the Constitution to it's "original intent". Here's an excerpt:

This is a battle worth fighting and worth winning. To restore the value and integrity of the Constitution would not only achieve a political and ideological victory, it would also serve future generations of Americans.

President Bush's opponents would be fighting the words of the Constitution and the intent of the Founders and that is pretty good company for the president to keep.

I recommend you read the whole article.

Still more (good) economic news

Good news on the US trade deficit: Trade gap unexpectedly shrinks 2.7 pct.

Also, good news on the US budget deficit: Sharp Rise in Tax Revenue to Pare U.S. Deficit

See my related post here.

SGT Bozik update

Blackfive has an update on Sgt. Bozik, the veteran of Iraq who married a Texas Aggie. He visited the White House. And was honored by our President.

Bush: End Farm Subsidies

Last Thursday, President Bush stated that the G8 was working to end farm subsidies.

President Bush said Thursday that he is seeking agreement with the European Union on a plan to eliminate by 2010 the $112 billion a year that wealthy countries spend subsidizing their farmers. "We want to work with the EU to rid our respective countries of agricultural subsidies," Bush said at a news conference in Gleneagles, Scotland, where he is attending a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

Here's a later report:

Leaders of the Group of Eight nations agreed Friday to work toward the abolition of farm-export subsidies and reduce subsidies on all agricultural products, though they stopped short of a broader proposal from President Bush. "We have made the commitment to end all export subsides," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at a news conference at the conclusion of the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. "We should set a credible end date" at the World Trade Organization’s December summit in Hong Kong, he said. Bush said Thursday that he’s seeking agreement with European Union leaders to scrap subsidies by 2010. Assistance should be ended as part of the so-called Doha Round of negotiations of the WTO, he said.

Bush’s appeal is the most farreaching yet by a political leader of a major industrialized nation, going beyond the proposals now being considered in the WTO. The EU has said it’s prepared to phase out farm-export subsidies provided more advanced developing countries make what European Trade Minister Peter Mandelson called "equivalent gestures."

Our President seems to be successfully pushing real solutions to our world's problems. Good for him.

Living through Dennis

Boudicca, whose blog is Boudicca's Voice, has parents who live in Pensacola and a best friend who lives in Navarre (very close to where Hurricane Dennis made landfall in the States). Boudicca and her family were visiting her parents last week. Her blog is filled with entries concerning the logistics of preparing for and evacuating from a hurricane. She also reports on the situation her parents found themselves in during the hurricane.

My description does not do it justice -- you need to read Boudicca's Voice to experience it. Bou does a good job of conveying the hopes, fears, frustrations, and challenges that she has gone through since Wednesday.

Call to Action

Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal is saying that it is time for us, as a nation, to put up or shut up about really reckoning with global terrorism.

And he is 100% correct. Here's an excerpt:

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

The entire op-ed is in the extended entry. And it's a good one.

'Close Guantanamo'?

Our politics fiddles while London burns.


BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, July 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

London's images of blood, toil, tears and sweat were seen by all the world's civilized people yesterday, and I think there is one thing they would agree on: You don't blow up the bus.

In cities everywhere men and women board buses daily for work or school, and you don't need a U.N. declaration on human rights to understand that part of the deal is that no one blows up the bus. You don't blow up the office building. You don't blow up the train. It's too easy. It is the most cowardly cheap shot one can imagine. But they keep doing it.

So maybe for starters, we don't want to close Guantanamo.

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

---

Every Islamic terrorist, from bin Laden and al-Zarqawi down to the next suicide bomber, knows how politics in the West works now. They know that many people of the West react to acts of violence differently than they did in 1940 when Winston Churchill demanded "Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be."

But there were no cameras and satellite feeds set up on every corner of that death-strewn road. Yesterday's attack produced another new-media first: Grainy video images fed by a cell phone from a bombed subway tunnel. If the American people had seen daily the up-close reality of every battle and bomb in 1943, might we have "withdrawn" before June 1944?

For bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the relatively small bombs they set off in Iraq or London are a second-grade weapon. Their large-bore weapons in the terror war are modern electronic news technology and, ironically, open democratic societies.

We think we're merely observers of events such as London's awful scenes yesterday or the Baghdad car bombs. No, if you watch television, you're on the battlefield. And some of us don't want to be there. Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi set off these bombs to pound the combatants at home, or in Congress, to make them put their hands on their head and, in effect, surrender. Suffering living-room shell shock, some do. The experience of seeing battlefield death or blown-up people from the couch is not normal.

What happened yesterday in London was an attack on the modern world by pre-modernists. Tony Blair said, "Our values will outlive theirs." Maybe. Ours might not, though, if against theirs of wanton murder, our answer is "close Guantanamo." But there is a better example of the fundamental inability of our politics to sustain seriousness against such a threat: the Bolton nomination to the U.N.

---

We know that Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and the Senate Democrats believe Mr. Bolton is temperamentally unfit to represent us at the U.N. Less well known is that in April 2004, the Security Council passed Resolution 1540 to prevent proliferation of "nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery"--what the terrorists will ultimately win with if they can get it.

Resolution 1540 outlaws A.Q. Khan-type networks, including state participation. It is a Chapter Seven action, and thus binding. It requires members to report their compliance measures in detail. It requires member states to "establish, develop, review and maintain appropriate effective national export and trans-shipment controls over such items."

We should want this if we indeed believe that a complex, globalized threat exists. Its success, however, depends on the will of the Security Council and whether its five Permanent Members will punish with sanctions any country not in compliance. Are you already ahead of me on this?

The one person in the world with the knowledge, experience and will to conceivably make 1540 work is John Bolton. At State Mr. Bolton ran the Security Proliferation Initiative, whose goals precisely parallel those of Resolution 1540. The SPI under Mr. Bolton, for example, helped to shut down the A.Q. Khan nuclear-weapon materials network.

Mr. Bolton is famous for his views of North Korea, but he is expert in the activities of one other incorrigible proliferator--Iran. Yesterday I asked a high international official, whose job is to develop global anti-terror structures, which states are still actively supporting terrorism. He said, "There are two, Syria and Iran."

If the U.S. Senate wanted to send a signal of resolve and seriousness to whoever bombed London, Democrats would join with Republicans their first day back to dispatch proven anti-terror warrior John Bolton straight to the U.N. They won't. They'll keep playing political fiddles while London burns.

The standard response to all this is that if George Bush and Tony Blair hadn't done Iraq, we'd all be as one in the war on terror. The standard response before September 11, was that if we weren't so close to terror-beset Israel, none of this would ever happen. For 30 years, the standard response to this terror has gotten many of us killed.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

I think it is time that our distinguished Senators in Washington, D.C. lay aside their petty politics, get off of their candy asses, and buckle down to the very serious long-term task of supporting the war on terrorism!

Class Act

Just wanted to point out what a class act I think this family is.

From the WTC to Baghdad

Daniel Henninger posted an op-ed with the subtitle September 11 and the collapse of national unity. His words are well worth our consideration.

I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

Ground Zero to Baghdad
September 11 and the collapse of national unity.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, July 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Fourth of July weekend begins today, and among the verities certain to occur is that every waking hour in four days people will be standing at the high wire fence near Church Street in lower Manhattan, staring at Ground Zero, at what's left of what we now call "September 11."

We know these visitors to Ground Zero will be there looking into this austere pit, because those of us who work nearby and walk past it see them there, every day. They came the moment they were allowed to on Dec. 30, 2001, at the famous viewing platform, and have come each day since, amid the disgusting cold winds of February and impossible August heat. But if their presence is a certainty, its meaning, of course, has gone up for grabs.

Nearly four years after what happened on September 11, we must now debate whether a linkage exists between that day and the war in Iraq. After President Bush associated the two several times in his defense of Iraq this week at Fort Bragg, both the House and Senate Democratic leaders pounded the linkage.

House Leader Nancy Pelosi was explicit: "He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq." Senate Leader Harry Reid said the September 11 references don't offer "a way forward" in Iraq and only remind us that bin Laden "is still on the loose." To be able to separate September 11 and Iraq into wholly unrelated realms may be possible for very smart people--but not everyone.

---

On a very warm Wednesday this past May, during Fleet Week in New York City, a passerby at Ground Zero encountered some 150 astonishingly young Marines in fatigues, wet with sweat after a run, standing at attention on the site's edge, outside the fence. They were from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and they appeared to be in the middle of a formal ceremony. Yesterday the organizer of the May event, Maj. Dave Anderson, explained they were laying a wreath to honor the victims of September 11, and that the three Marines chosen to lay the wreath had earned Purple Hearts while serving in Iraq. When the ceremony ended, he said, a woman came out of the crowd, crying, and grabbed his wrist to say that her brother had died in there that day, and she said to him, "When people see you Marines doing this, they'll know that you will take the fight forward."

So it is that below the level of exquisite analysis now common in our politics, some Americans do exist who credit a connection between September 11 and events in Iraq. Perhaps there will be a poll out in a few weeks that will expose their sentiment to the greater weight and rigor of statistical science.

In time even Pearl Harbor became more a symbol than the bloody reality that ultimately hurled American forces against a Germany that didn't attack us at Pearl Harbor. But time seems to pass faster today. The first Fourth of July after September 11 was a day of national unity, in sorrow but also in belief that the U.S. had to go on offense, over there, against the force that had hit us. Now there is no unity; September 11, the war in Iraq, pretty much anything George Bush does and even Afghanistan is a fair target.

After Mr. Bush delivered the speech on Iraq that many said, rightly, was overdue, David Letterman made jokes about the war. DNC Chairman Howard Dean dismissed it as the "darkness of divisiveness" and "pandering to fear." John Murtha, the party's top spokesmen on military affairs, said, "I believe they are going to cut and run." A Times reporter announced as well that "for the first time," Afghans are "feeling uneasy about the future."

The day following the president's speech, architect David Childs unveiled the latest design of the long-overdue tower intended to replace the twin towers in downtown Manhattan. If we must have an office building in this space so the Port Authority can restart its tax flows, and if it must be a "designed" 1,776-foot-high skyscraper, Mr. Childs's building is perfectly acceptable. But no, Ground Zero is first of all about one's politics now, so for the New York Times architecture critic, Mr. Childs's tall building "is an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power."

We've watched September 11 drift from unity of purpose to unhinged vituperation. The partisanship is easy to dismiss, but I believe the Bush team's deep disdain of a hostile opposition media has caused it to miss--until now--the need to organize a home front to support the remarkable sacrifice in Iraq. This failure may prove to be the one unforgivable thing.

---

As to September 11's stern symbol--Ground Zero--its place is secure no matter what New York's politics dumps into the Port Authority's 16 acres. The only true memorial that will ever be--that huge hole in the ground, that zero, a filthy, ripped and awesome aftermath--has been there to see for more than 3 1/2 years.

This is what it means to visit the memorial there now. A steel fence is on all four sides. On two of them, the Port Authority has hung simple descriptions and pictures of what happened there, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. You can read a short history of the two towers. You can read the names of each person who died there that day. After people absorb these things, they get very close to the fence and stare into the open space. Then they take some pictures, and then they go somewhere else.

By now anyone with sufficient desire or need has come to Ground Zero. By now unfathomable numbers have seen that hole in its barest form. They have taken the experience home with them. I think September 11 is going to be properly remembered, no matter what happens in lower Manhattan now. It remains for this administration to do the same for the commitments already made to Iraq and in Iraq.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Independence Day

As we celebrate this nation's birth today, I ask you to consider the sacrifices and deprivations that were suffered by so many in order that this great country would remain free. Men and women, adults and children, military and civilians have all suffered so that subsequent generations would be able to enjoy liberty, peace, happiness, and self-determination. Think about the liberties and security that we take for granted every day -- all because of those people who had the faith and the courage to build and defend this nation.

The pastor of our church writes a small column in the weekly church newsletter. His words this week spoke volumes to me for some reason -- it's a God thing, I suspect. And instead of writing a lot about what I think about freedom and liberty, I thought that our pastor's words -- and those from the ultimate life application guide, the Bible -- did a much better job of putting these concepts into perspective for me.

Indulge me, please, and read the rest in the extended entry.

The fourth, our freedom and our faith ... all fit together. The fourth, our freedom and our faith ... all form our heritage. The fourth, our freedom and our faith ... all fill our lives with hope.

As Americans, the fourth of July allows us to reflect on the bounty and beauty of our land. It gives us opportunity to remember the courage and commitment of those who fought for and forged our liberty. It calls to us to reclaim the principles of justice and righteousness that are the foundations of our nation.

As Christians, the fourth of July reminds us how our history is grounded in the religious faith of our forefathers and foremothers. It summons us to look beyond our civil liberty to the source of all freedom, Jesus Christ. The scriptures tell us that "if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed." (John 8:36). It invites us to embrace and live that freedom -- a freedom from fear, from shame, from sin in any form -- through faith in Christ. It urges us to use our liberty not as a license for doing whatever we want, but as a freedom to forgive and love. "You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love." (Galations 5:13).

Can you imagine how much greater a superpower the USA would be if all of its citizens conducted themselves accordingly?

Here is wishing you a safe and enjoyable Independence Day. . .

We don't need no steenkin recession!

Jerry Bowyer at Tech Central Station makes a good case supporting his claim that our economy is doing well. Here's a taste:

Admittedly, during the past three months the Civilian Labor Force is down a small 46,000, but since Bush's first election it's up 4.4 million and since his big tax cut in May 2003 it's up 1.7 million. It makes sense that when the economy booms, people flow back into the job market, not out of it.

In the process of showing how our economy must be moving upward, he debunks NYT columnist Paul Krugman's assertion that our economy is in ill health.

It's an interesting column.

[Hat tip to Kim du Toit.]

An American Hero and his heroic Aggie wife

This article does not tell the whole tale of a horribly wounded soldier's fight to survive. It also does not tell the whole tale about his special lady who has dedicated herself to his recovery. But it does tell you about a hero and his heroic wife. And it tells you about Aggie spirit.

“There are so many people from this area who didn’t even know me or Joey who helped us,� said Jayme Bozik, 24. “They’ve showed what the Aggie Spirit is all about.�

It is worth reading.

American History 101

John Fund has an interesting op-ed about this country's need to teach history to its children, and how we are not doing a good job of it. Here's an excerpt:

We are risking something very basic by failing to communicate the basic ideals of America and instead, as historian David McCullough told me, "raising a generation of students who are historically illiterate." But many of those students will eventually become curious, and without a solid grounding in the past, they could easily fall prey to revisionist history, whether it be of the Confederate or Oliver Stone variety.

I've put the entire article in the extended entry for your convenience. It's worth the read.

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

The American Story

Why failing to teach history is bad for democracy.


Monday, June 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

A few years ago, the National Constitution Center surveyed teenagers and found that while only about four in 10 could name the three branches of the federal government fully six in 10 could name all Three Stooges.

Everyone agrees we aren't teaching history well, but the direction of reform is controversial. Philadelphia's public schools have just announced they will mandate that all students take an African-American history course in order to graduate from high school. The theory is that the city's 185,000 public school students, two-thirds of whom are black, will finally become aware of their culture and gain self-esteem. Those who are not black will gain an appreciation of black history that is inadequately covered in current general social studies courses.

---

John Perzel is the GOP speaker of the Pennsylvania House and represents a largely white Philadelphia district. He isn't so sure this is the right approach. "I would like to see [students] master basic reading, writing and arithmetic," he wrote to city officials last week. "Once we have them down pat, I don't care what they teach. . . . They should understand basic American history before we go into African-American history."

Other critics note that schools already put on programs every February for Black History Month, something not done for other ethnic groups. They fear a separate course will diminish student understanding of the overall American experience. Back in the 1960s, novelist James Baldwin testified before Congress that the triumphs and tribulations of black history should be woven into all history courses, rather than segregated. Diane Ravitch, a leading education reformer, agrees that African-American history should be studied but hopes it will be "based on the best scholarship, not ideology or politics."

Dream on. What's more likely to happen is that the creation of a specific African-American history course will fuel demands from other groups, such as Hispanics or gays, for similar history mandates.

What will slip further down a memory hole will be the major reason why it is important for students to study our history: America is an exceptional country in that we were born out of a shared set of ideas--human liberty and opportunity, accompanied by a common set of values. It is often said that while being a Frenchman or German is bound up in ethnicity and ties to the soil, it is possible to become an American by adopting this nation's creed and beliefs.

We are risking something very basic by failing to communicate the basic ideals of America and instead, as historian David McCullough told me, "raising a generation of students who are historically illiterate." But many of those students will eventually become curious, and without a solid grounding in the past, they could easily fall prey to revisionist history, whether it be of the Confederate or Oliver Stone variety.

Yale professor David Gelernter says that "ignorance of history is destroying our judgment." He points to Sen. Dick Durbin's ignorant comment comparing the actions of U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay to those of Nazis and Soviets. His remarks went largely unremarked upon by fellow senators until talk radio made them an issue. Future leaders may make even more horrific missteps: a 2003 survey of seniors at the top 55 liberal arts colleges found that over half thought Germany, Italy or Japan had been a U.S. ally in World War II. The concern about historical amnesia crosses the political spectrum. Bill Moyers, the liberal PBS pundit, has said "we Americans seem to know everything about the last 24 hours but very little of the last 60 centuries or the last 60 years."

---

When Ronald Reagan delivered his 1989 farewell address to the nation, he noted there was "a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells," and he would make no exception. He told his audience that the "one that's been on my mind for some time" was that the country was failing to adequately teach our children the American story and what it represents in the history of the world. "We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important," he said. "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I am warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."

As well-meaning as Philadelphia's attempt to raise the self-esteem of black students may be, we should take time this coming Fourth of July to realize that our failure to teach America's story demands far more strenuous solutions.

---

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Kelo Commentary

"The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes... During oral arguments in February, Justice Antonin Scalia distilled the essence of New London's brazen claim: 'You can take from A and give to B if B pays more taxes?... That is the logic of the opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer"

-- Washington Post columnist George Will, writing on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling upholding a city's right to seize private property for the benefit of a private developer.

Kelo reverberates

I got this from the OpinionJournal Political Diary.

After celebrating the Supreme Court's decision yesterday to effectively give local governments carte blanche to seize land for private development, some local officials began quickly moving to use their new unlimited authority. Officials in the beachfront town of Freeport, Texas, announced they would move forward with plans to commandeer property owned by two seafood companies in order to allow the construction of a 900-slip private marina. Freeport will even be loaning the developers $6 million to finance the project, and if it fails the town won't be getting its money back. What is certain is that the displacement of the two seafood companies will cost scores of jobs.

The Supreme Court's decision, by a narrow majority with Justice Anthony Kennedy as swing vote, has prompted state Rep. Frank Corte, a Republican from San Antonio, to propose a state constitutional amendment limiting the power to condemn private land for use by other private entities. He says the amendment is now necessary in order to "limit a local governmental entity's power of eminent domain, preventing them from bulldozing residences in favor of private developers." No doubt there will be similar moves in other states as voters wake up to the realization that the Supreme Court has granted revenue-hungry local governments more or less unlimited authority to seize homes and businesses in order to achieve a "higher use" of the property.

-- John Fund

'Takings' Liberties

This op-ed at OpinionJournal.com makes some thought-provoking, yet alarming, points about the Kelo v. City of New London ruling that SCOTUS made yesterday in its interpretation of the Fifth Amendment and the rightful use of eminent domain. (I have copied the op-ed in the extended entry for your convenience.)

Bruce Barry at Pith in the Wind has posted his own thoughts in defense of the ruling. And he makes some good points of his own.

SCOTUSblog has some in-depth discussion about the ruling, as well.

Before you make up your mind about this ruling -- which conceivably could threaten the right to own property in this country -- you should check out all of these links, and others that are referenced.

I don't think it is as bad as it appears, but there is some interesting blurring of traditional liberal and conservative lines . . .

Kennedy's Vast Domain

The Supreme Court's reverse Robin Hoods.


Friday, June 24, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The Supreme Court's "liberal" wing has a reputation in some circles as a guardian of the little guy and a protector of civil liberties. That deserves reconsideration in light of yesterday's decision in Kelo v. City of New London. The Court's four liberals (Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) combined with the protean Anthony Kennedy to rule that local governments have more or less unlimited authority to seize homes and businesses.

No one disputes that this power of "eminent domain" makes sense in limited circumstances; the Constitution's Fifth Amendment explicitly provides for it. But the plain reading of that Amendment's "takings clause" also appears to require that eminent domain be invoked only when land is required for genuine "public use" such as roads. It further requires that the government pay owners "just compensation" in such cases.

The founding fathers added this clause to the Fifth Amendment--which also guarantees "due process" and protects against double jeopardy and self-incrimination--because they understood that there could be no meaningful liberty in a country where the fruits of one's labor are subject to arbitrary government seizure.

That protection was immensely diminished by yesterday's 5-4 decision, which effectively erased the requirement that eminent domain be invoked for "public use." The Court said that the city of New London, Connecticut, was justified in evicting a group of plaintiffs led by homeowner Susette Kelo from their properties to make way for private development including a hotel and a Pfizer Corp. office. (Yes, the pharmaceutical Pfizer.) The properties to be seized and destroyed include Victorian homes and small businesses that have been in families for generations.

"The city has carefully formulated a development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. Justice Kennedy wrote in concurrence that this could be considered public use because the development plan was "comprehensive" and "meant to address a serious city-wide depression." In other words, local governments can do what they want as long as they can plausibly argue that any kind of public interest will be served.

In his clarifying dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas exposes this logic for the government land grab that it is. He accuses the majority of replacing the Fifth Amendment's "Public Use Clause" with a very different "public purpose" test: "This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a 'public use.'"

And in a separate dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggested that the use of this power in a reverse Robin Hood fashion--take from the poor, give to the rich--would become the norm, not the exception: "Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."

That prospect helps explain the unusual coalition supporting the property owners in the case, ranging from the libertarian Institute for Justice (the lead lawyers) to the NAACP, AARP and the late Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The latter three groups signed an amicus brief arguing that eminent domain has often been used against politically weak communities with high concentrations of minorities and elderly. Justice Thomas's opinion cites a wealth of data to that effect.

And it's not just the "public use" requirement of the Fifth Amendment that's undermined by Kelo. So too is the guarantee of "just compensation." Why? Because there is no need to invoke eminent domain if developers are willing to pay what owners themselves consider just compensation.

Just compensation may differ substantially from so-called fair market value given the sentimental and other values many of us attach to our homes and other property. Even eager sellers will be hurt by Kelo, since developers will have every incentive to lowball their bids now that they can freely threaten to invoke eminent domain.

So, in just two weeks, the Supreme Court has rendered two major decisions on the limits of government. In Raich v. Gonzales the Court said there are effectively no limits on what the federal government can do using the Commerce Clause as a justification. In Kelo, it's now ruled that there are effectively no limits on the predations of local governments against private property.

These kinds of judicial encroachments on liberty are precisely why Supreme Court nominations have become such high-stakes battles. If President Bush is truly the "strict constructionist" he professes to be, he will take note of the need to check this disturbing trend should he be presented with a High Court vacancy.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]