The Washington Times is reporting that some clued-in conservatives are fearing a tax hike. I’m not a clued in conservative, but I’m still a little afraid.
Things have gone south between the president and conservatives. I was a loyalist holdout for quite some time, but have slipped into the opposition faction over the last year as I’ve seen the Iraq war effort become pussilanimous in the face of mounting Islamist violence. Still, I can smile when I reflect on the first term. George Bush came into office campaigning on a tax cut, and the story was “He can’t get that big of a tax cut.” So he countered by proposing a much bigger tax cut, and he ended up with a slightly bigger tax cut than he campaigned on. Then after he helped Republicans take back the Senate, he cut taxes again in 2003. The biggest domestic achievement of the first term of Bush the Younger was that the discussion was not “Can we raise taxes?,” but rather “How big will the tax cut be?” In a word, Glorious.
Shameful spending and a flagging war effort have since dulled the sheen of this administration. But there’s no conservative who doesn’t wax nostalgic about those glory days of tax cutting. I hope the next two years do not involve a tax hike of any sort; I’d like to have a few positive memories of this administration.
When everyone says you’re drunk, it’s time to sit down—or so goes an old saying. A newer one might be, “When Thomas Sowell and Susan Estrich agree, it’s time to give up.” Who wrote the following excerpts?
The goal is supposed to be to convict the guy who did it, not frame the guy you’ve got.
Somebody should tell that to Mike Nifong. Or to the judge who is in a position to do something about who prosecutes the Duke lacrosse players charged with rape.
What is going on in the prosecutors’ office in Durham North Carolina is disturbing in ways that go beyond the ugly allegations that started this case.
The District Attorney has clearly lost sight of his mission, and with it the last remnants of any ethical compass. The case has been characterized, since the outset, by a clear failure to follow the office’s own procedures and practices.
According to testimony given under oath this week, the head of a private DNA lab said he and the District Attorney together agreed not to release evidence that there was DNA from other men, but not from any of the defendants, in the woman’s underwear and on her person the night of the alleged incident.
Together, they decided not to release it. Imagine. One of those people is supposed to be an officer of the court and the representative of the people, not head gladiator.
How could the District Attorney keep that information to himself, or try to?
What is he out to do here?
Enough is enough.
What will it take for Mike Nifong to be replaced on this case?
It is an extreme measure for a court to replace a prosecutor on a case. But this appears, increasingly, to be an extreme case of lawlessness by the prosecutors if not the defendants.
More than any other potential candidate for president, Newt Gingrich bring conspicuous strength and glaring weaknesses to the arena. I doubt that anybody else can match him for sheer brain power or sheer ego. According to the NY Post, his strengths were on display in New Hampshire the other day:
In the matter of the six Muslim clerics who were kicked off U.S. Airways Flight 300 last month — after they were observed engaging in such suspicious activity as invoking “bin Laden,” criticizing America in Arabic, making odd requests of the flight crew and (in three cases) buying only one-way tickets—Gingrich offered two thoughts:
* “Those six people should have been arrested and prosecuted for pretending to be terrorists.
* “The crew of the U.S. Air plane should have been invited to the White House and congratulated for being correct in the protection of citizens.”
Provocative? Yes.
Unwarranted? No.
Certainly, Gingrich helped focus attention on a critical issue: America’s unwillingness, five-plus years after 9/11, to come to terms with the fact that Islamic terrorism has a face, and it looks very much like what the crew of US Air 300 encountered last month.
This isn’t to say that the imams are terrorists. Far from it.
But it is to say that — to whatever purpose — their behavior was extraordinarily provocative.
And three cheers to Newt Gingrich for saying so.
All Americans interested in serious policy matters would do well to pay close attention to what the former speaker has to say over the next couple of years.
He is both a professor and student of history: His knowledge of military and foreign-policy issues alone makes him a formidable voice in the ongoing national-security debate.
Yes, as his tenure as speaker demonstrated, he has a real talent for letting his words get him in trouble.
In that respect, however, he’s hardly alone.
Bottom line: Gingrich will improve the quality of the 2008 campaign debate.
Perhaps not since Nixon has there been a candidate so gifted and so compromised. Giuliani and McCain are the front-runners, but right now I’d say the real dark horse is neither Romney nor Huckabee but Gingrich. With a bit of luck, the 2008 race could be Clinton-Gingrich—how’s that for 90s redux?
Hubbard posted this at 9:28 PM HKT on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 as Politics
Remember, O’Reilly is a “conservative” here advocating that parents should not be allowed to raise their kids as they see fit. I wonder if he would express this kind of outrage had the child been advocating religious or conservative values of which she had no understanding.
**UPDATE**
Kbob seeks to take me to task over my comments here:
Kbob says:
Well there you go again Jamie, spouting off without really knowing what you are talking about.
I don’t remember seeing an example of a kid spouting off religious or conservative values the same way this child was spouting the parents ingrained biases. Oh well Jamie I get a kick out of your skewed view most of the time but this time your just pathetic.
Well watch this, this and this. These clips are from the documentary “Jesus Camp” which I alluded to in the comments below. After watching clips like these I find it hard to argue that there is a difference in kind between the little girl O’Reilly is so incensed over and these children at Bible Camp. The only difference is one of type. I have yet to see The Factor do a segment advocating government intervention in the way these parents raise their children. Why? Obviously because O’Reilly and Kbob approve of the content of the Bible Camp indoctrination and not that of the little girl.
Howie, Hilary, Harry and Nancy have apparently forgotten the meaning of irony.
If you don’t want to bother reading – apparently Denver might lose its bid to host he 2008 Democratic National Convention because the Dems want to force the Unions to sign a “No-Strike Pledge” and the Unions say “No dice.”
Battlestar Galactica Marathon [Jonah Goldberg]
On Sci-Fi channel today. Call…in…sick.
Seriously I cannot stress how amazing this show is. I know, I know, I’m a nerd – but in all seriousness this is the best show on TV today. The epitome of what great Sci-Fi should be – fun, interesting and it makes you think. (psst – if my parents read this blog Xmas is only 6 days away.)
One of my chief problems with Liberalism in general is the tendency for liberals and liberal scholars to conform history to their set of political beliefs. It often seems that liberals start with their set of preformed political conclusions and then attempt to revise history to fit these assumptions. More often than not they selectively quote, ignore or even fabricate history in order to “prove” their political points. “Scholars” such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (a particular hated “historian” of mine) are all darlings of the left. So its nice from time to time to see one of them handed their head on a platter. (H/T: Andrew Sullivan)
One of my pet peeves in recent years has been the revisionist history behind the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its nice to see history so eloquently defended from revisionist attacks by the rabid vapid left.
In a time of war, the Vice President Cheney stood by while his boss fired the greatest secretary of defense in U.S. history (I can’t find a direct quotation, but I also heard Cheney use exactly those words this morning on the news).
This is the one problem Apollo overlooked in his otherwise excellent post Time to Fire Some Generals: based on every past example in this administration’s six-year history, President Bush’s first act after firing all his generals would be to call Pope Benedict to ask for their fast-tracked beatification.
I’m also a fan of men in kilts. Nevertheless, this is potentially disgusting:
Great Scot! A shortage of ceremonial kilts could leave thousands of soldiers without a stitch of plaid to wear as they parade to the skirl of the bagpipes.
Military officials said that more than 5,000 Scottish soldiers are having to share their kilts because defense chiefs have not finalized a contract to buy enough of the garments to go around.
The men, who face regular tours of duty in southern Iraq and Afghanistan, have just 320 kilts, or one for every 15 soldiers.
Combat troops wore the traditional Highland garb in battle as late as World War I, but now the plaid kilts are used as a ceremonial uniform.
New kilts are needed for all Scottish soldiers as a result of the August merger of centuries-old regiments into a single Royal Regiment of Scotland.
“A planned deployment of kilts will be agreed with the Royal Regiment of Scotland on a rollout basis with … the full program being completed by January 2008,” a Ministry of Defense spokesman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with government policy.
The ministry has refused to say who has won the contract to supply the kilts; in the meantime, soldiers will have to share.
Call me reactionary, but the question “does he or doesn’t he?” should refer not to sharing kilts but to wearing underwear.
I’m not a climate change “skeptic,” per se, because I don’t know enough about it to have an informed opinion. I just presume that hippies are always wrong, which makes me skeptical of climate change.
That said, I’d gladly side with American hippies environmentalists over some Euro-aristocrat any day. So “Lord” Christopher Monkton, 3rd Viscount Monkton of Brenchley, can go frack himself. As a rule, anyone with an inherited aristocratic title should be booed and, perhaps, pantsed for sticking their titled nose into American politics.
It’s often interesting when two people with fairly similar backgrounds reach very different conclusions. A case in point is Mark Steyn and Rabbi Marc Gellman on Seattle’s Christmas Tree mess. (Note: until I read Steyn, I hadn’t seen Gellman’s article, but I became intrigued and looked it up.)
The facts are that another Rabbi, Elazar Bogomilsky, threatened to sue the Seattle-Tacoma airport for having only Christmas trees up; Rabbi Bogomilsky wanted to install a Menorah. Rather than fight a lawsuit, Sea-Tac removed the trees. Rabbi Gellman’s take:
The cowardly response of the airport officials was to order workers on the graveyard shift on Sunday night to quickly remove all eight trees. Their first articulated (and insane) reason was that the airport officials did not have time to play cultural anthropologist and evaluate whether other local religious symbols should be included. Then all hell broke loose as the conflagration burned its way through the wire services Monday and the sheer lunacy of this decision became obvious to most. The next reason the public relations geniuses at the airport came up with to justify the removal of the Christmas trees was that they did not want to authorize an outside organization to erect any display and conduct a public ceremony for its lighting. Now, the Port of Seattle commissioners who oversee the airport Christmas tree display and are promising to reconsider the tree removal at their meeting Monday night. One of the officials is reported as saying that he knows at least three of the five commissioners want the trees put back up.
So what, as they say in the Talmud, do we learn from all this? First we learn that the rabbi should never have threatened to sue the airport. (His lawyer now says he won’t no matter what happens.) Using our courts to prohibit the displays of Christmas trees is more than frivolous. It is stupid, divisive and frivolous. It generates ill will towards Jews or the ACLU or whoever brings the suit, and it unnecessarily burdens the court. People who are offended at decorated trees with no angel, no star and no crèche need to get a life, and need to reconsider what constitutes a true offense against the First Amendment.
The right solution here is obvious. Put back the trees and erect a menorah display paid for, like the trees, by the airport and not by a small Hasidic group. There is no ceremony for the lighting of the trees and so there is no need for a ceremony for the lighting of the menorah.
Where to begin? I hardly think that Sea-Tac was behaving cowardly when removing the trees; given the state of the courts, they’d almost certainly have lost a lawsuit. And it’s not obvious to me that putting a menorah in airport is a good solution: it rewards threatening lawsuits.
So the airport goes, “Oh, dear, you’re threatening a lawsuit? OK, we’ll take down the trees.” And in an instant the trees were history. Not “history” in the sense of a time-honored tradition legitimized by its very antiquity. But “history” in the sense of the contemporary American formulation of something you toss in the landfill in the interests of “diversity.”
So then the rabbi and his lawyer are reeling under a barrage of negative publicity and suddenly it’s their chestnuts being roasted on the open fire. “Whoa,” they say. “Why are we the bad guys? We love Christmas trees. What made you think we had anything against Christmas trees? Just cuz we threatened to launch a gazillion-dollar lawsuit? What could be more American than that?” In Newsweek, Rabbi Marc Gellman managed to miss the point and deplored the “cowardly response” of the airport. But what “cowardly response”? Instead of going to court and almost certainly losing, they raised the stakes, put the plaintiffs on the defensive and forced them to call off the dogs. The “holiday trees” are now back.
Everyone who knows Rabbi Bogomilsky says he’s an affable fellow, he doesn’t want to Scrooge up anybody’s Christmas, he’s an all-around swell guy. No doubt. But in the week when the president of Iran hosts an international (and well-attended) Holocaust Denial Convention (which simultaneously denies the last Holocaust while gleefully anticipating the next one), this rabbi thinks it’s in the interests of the Jewish people to take legal action against “holiday” decorations at Seattle Airport? Sorry, it’s not the airport but the plaintiff who’s out of his tree. An ability to prioritize is an indispensable quality of adulthood, and a sense of proportion is a crucial ingredient of a mature society.
Interestingly, Rabbi Gellman comes to a similar conclusion priorities, though he states it less pungently than Steyn (yes, I realize you can be VERY pungent and still be less so than Steyn):
As for those secularists who want no religious symbols anywhere in sight on public properties, I respect your objections and I understand your fears that any breach in the wall of separation is deeply troubling. I do not agree, however, that holiday displays are such a breach. They are colorful and benign and easily disregarded by those who wish to walk by them and go on to instead admire the great and sublime beauty of the fast food signs in the food court. Most of all I believe that the greatest threat to our freedom is in the careless confusion of trivial issues with issues of great importance to our freedoms and our culture. I invite you to guess where the issue of Christmas tree at the Seattle airport fit.
Odd, but interesting to compare two writers whom I generally like.
Tangential thought: lawsuits are as American as arrested development; I wonder when someone will sue over the word “holiday” since it derives from “holy day.”
It’s hard for me to read the Post editorializing about restrictions on 527s without thinking about how vested the Post is in restricting the speech of non-journalists.
Under the FEC’s analysis, a 527 group interested in affecting a federal election isn’t automatically subject to FEC rules. Instead, the commission found that the groups here had to register because they engaged in political communications that were “unmistakable, unambiguous and suggestive of only one meaning” — to advocate the election or defeat of a particular candidate — and because their “major purpose” was involvement in federal campaign activity.
Anyone who saw the relentless campaign the Post waged against George Allen this last cycle would be hard pressed not to say that the Post qualified as such an organization. But of course, they’re journalists, so they get to say what they want. If you and I want to tell a couple million targeted people what we think, we’ve got to pay for the privelege. The Post is celebrating the government’s decision to finally crack down on that freedom.
Yes of course money and speech are two different things, but those who support these convoluted restrictions on political advertising are the same types who would howl mercilessly if the Bush administration used such semantics to restrict other basic freedoms (”Yes, it says you have a right to an attorney, but since so many wealthy people are buying their way out of convictions, everyone has to have a court-appointed public defender. The right to an attorney and the right to spend millions of dollars on your defense are two different things.”). There are few things that pose a greater long-term risk to the health of the republic than allowing Congress and the executive this deep into restricting speech that influences their reelections. That the press so giddily applauds these restrictions is a great testament to how quickly they will throw away principle when it benefits them.
My first post had a quote from Chesterton, so I had to join in thisgame.
1. When did you first read a Chesterton book, story, or poem, and which was it?
I first read Orthodoxy. It was my first Easter in DC, 2003, and I had decided to read books about faith during Lent.
2. What was the most recent of GKC’s writings you read?
The Everlasting Man.
3. Which is your favorite book, poem – or quote?
My favorites are Heretics and Orthodoxy, which I think of as a unit. If I had to pick one quote—and not cite the entire book—here’s a good one from Orthodoxy:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R.J.Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
4. Which would you recommend to a beginner?
For fiction, I’d recommend The Annotated Thursday, which is The Man who was Thursday but with many of the subtleties explained. For nonfiction, Heretics and Orthodoxy.
5. What is the most unusual fact or quirky detail you know about G.K.Chesterton?
I’m afraid that I don’t know much about GKC as a person. I only know that anyone who’d challenge George Bernard Shaw to debates has enough nerve for a dozen ordinary men.
Hubbard posted this at 12:40 AM HKT on Monday, December 18th, 2006 as Belles Lettres, Faith
