Red's Rants

Monday, September 11, 2006

9-11

Once more it's September 11.

I live in Oklahoma City. I was here when the Murrah Federal Building was destroyed by a truck bomb. I remember.

Today Chesapeake Energy's president gave a lot of money (matched by employees) to build an "education center" at the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. Former Governor Frank Keating explained that children will learn that hatred because of race, religion, etc., will never be tolerated.

Unfortunately, this is another pie-in-the-sky concept that will weaken only our society. After Pearl Harbor, no one gave money to build an education center in Hawaii. There are memorials, but no one needs education to understand the hatred of Islamic Fascists. It's an ideology rooted in the rantings of the prophet Mohammed, a deluded man who lived in the 6th century A.D. All the education in the world won't change his followers. Only defeat will.

Recently my brother and I were discussing what would have happened had some individuals with boxcutters tried to hijack a Lockheed Constellation in 1956. It's a hypothetical situation, but if you're over 50, you can imagine. If not, read and learn. Probably someone on that plane would have been carrying a gun. No one cared about weapons on planes. More than likely out of 109 passengers (if it were a Super Constellation), most of whom would have been men traveling for business, more than half would have served in the military, either in WWII or Korea or both. Some of those men would have faced Japanese or German infantry and prevailed. Would those men have blinked an eye at charging three men with boxcutters? I think not. But we have created an emasculated society in which violence (even in self-defense) is seen as brutal. I'm sorry, but find a soldier who fought in the South Pacific if you want to hear about brutality. Find someone who fought at Guadalcanal (there are still some living). Find someone who remembers the relief they felt when the Japanese surrendered after the second bomb was dropped. They can tell you what it takes to defeat a brutal enemy.

That's my 9-11 thoughts.
posted by Red 10:18 PM

Saturday, May 21, 2005

"I See London, I See France ..."

Any knowledgable four-year-old knows the next line of that children's verse: "I see X's underpants." It is incredible to me that Muslim "sensibilities" are so churlish as to be offended at pictures of a man who murdered countless thousands of their coreligionists. Did we hear a hue and cry when mass graves of what were surely Iraqi Mulsims were uncovered? Certainly not. And what of torture? This story today in the London Times ought to have brought demonstrations, shouldn't it? But let British tabloids publish pictures of the butcher of Baghdad in his BVDs (actually, of course, they were "fruit of the loons" since BVD--named for Messrs. Bradley, Voohees and Day--was taken over by that company in 1976), and you would think a Koran had been dumped in a toilet.

Victor Davis Hanson on NRO has an interesting take on this whole issue and observes that the root of such responses is the shameful hypocrisy of Islamic culture that would take advantage of Western technology while hating itself for its own abysmal failure in achieving anything: "An Afghan who riots because he learns of a rumor in a Western magazine, and those like him who explode and behead in Iraq, are emblematic of this hypocrisy. Nothing they have accomplished in their lives, either materially or philosophically, would result in a free opinion magazine, much less the technology to send out the story instantaneously.

"Instead, our Afghan rioters, and the Islamist organizations that have endorsed them, live in the eighth century of rumor, sexual and religious intolerance, tribal chauvinism, and gratuitous violence--but now electrified by the veneer of the 21st-century civilization that is not their own, but sometimes fools the naïve that it is...

"The Saudi insurgents who now volunteer to blow themselves up in northern Iraq, like their spiritual kindred suicide bombers on the West Bank, are not poor villagers content to plow ancestral fields and follow the tribal and religious rhythms of a timeless Middle East.

"No, they are usually upscale and spoiled, or at least middle class, educated, and with some disposable income--the prerequisites to allow them contact with the West and almost immediately to incite their sense of envy, self-loathing, exaggerated entitlement, and ultimately nihilism at trying to destroy what they hate and lust for and cannot destroy."

The hypocrisy of the Islamist attitude is nowhere more apparent than the refusal of Al-Jazeera to broadcast the photographs of Hussein. The New York Post reported today, "Al-Jazeera, the Arab cable network that regularly broadcasts gruesome pictures of beheaded kidnap victims, refused to show the Saddam photos--because they considered them offensive.

"Al-Jazeera has aired video and photos of American soldiers killed--as well as the horrifying beheading last year of businessman Nick Berg of Pennsylvania, and a South Korean civilian.

"Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for the Qatar-based network, said al-Jazeera did not show the Saddam pictures 'for professional and moral reasons.... From the professional side, it is not news.'"

It's not news, but it is funny; so join the chorus: "I see London, I see France ..."
posted by Red 12:58 PM

Imagine an Extreme Leftist Court Nominee!

Edward Whelan on NRO suggests an exercise in contemplation of the opposite situation the Democrats face with President Bush's judicial nominees:

"Imagine, if you will, that a Democrat President nominated a judge whose constitutional and policy views were, by any measure, on the extreme left fringes of American society.

"Let's assume, for example, that this nominee had expressed strong sympathy for the position that there is a constitutional right to prostitution as well as a constitutional right to polygamy.

"Let's say, further, that he had attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles and that he had proposed abolishing Mother's Day and Father's Day and replacing them with a single androgynous Parent's Day.

"And, to get really absurd, let's add that he had called for an end to single-sex prisons on the theory that if male prisoners are going to return to a community in which men and women function as equal partners, prison is just the place for them to get prepared to deal with women.

"Let's further posit that this nominee had opined that a manifest imbalance in the racial composition of an employer's work force justified court-ordered quotas even in the absence of any intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. But then, lo and behold, to make this nominee even more of a parody of an out-of-touch leftist, let's say it was discovered that while operating his own office for over a decade in a city that was majority-black, this nominee had never had a single black person among his more than 50 hires.

"Imagine, in sum, a nominee whose record is indisputably extreme and who could be expected to use his judicial role to impose those views on mainstream America. Surely such a person would never be nominated to an appellate court. Surely no Senate Democrat would support someone with such extreme views. And surely Senate Republicans, rather than deferring to the nominating power of the Democrat President, would pull out all stops—filibuster and everything—to stop such a nominee.

"Well, not quite. The hypothetical nominee I have just described is, in every particular except his sex, Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the time she was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993.

"President Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg on June 22, 1993. A mere six weeks later, on August 3, 1993, the Senate confirmed her nomination by a 96-3 vote.

"(The source for the information in the second through fourth paragraphs is 'Report of Columbia Law School Equal Rights Advocacy Project: The Legal Status of Women under Federal Law,' co-authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Feigen Fasteau in September 1974. The information in the fifth paragraph can be found in the transcript of Ginsburg’s confirmation hearing.)"
posted by Red 10:59 AM

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Forget the Patriot Act--How about a New Alien and Sedition Acts?

In 1798, facing possible war with France and the presence of 25,000 French citizens who had fled the reign of terror following the French Revolution, Congress passed a series of laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Naturalization Act required aliens to be fourteen years of age instead of five before becoming US citizens. The Alien Act, passed a week later, authorized the President (John Adams) to deport aliens "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime. A little over two weeks later, Congress passed the Alien Enemies Act, allowing wartime imprisonment and deportation of any alien claiming allegiance to a foreign country. Eigth days later, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which declared that treasonable activity, including publication of 'any false, scandalous and malicious writing," was a high misdemeanore, punishable by fines and imprisonment. Twenty-five men, most editors of Republican (as opposed to Federalist) newspapers were arrested and their papers closed.

The political atmosphere in the country had become so poisoned by the factions Republicanism promoted against the Federalists (Washington and Adams were Federalists; Adams's Vice-President, Jefferson, was a Republican) that newspapers were filled with incredible charges against the administration. After the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson worked behind the scenes (actually writing the resolution) to get Kentucky to pass a resolution that declared the Constitution merely established a compact between the states, denying the federal government any power not specifically designated--thus vitiating any federal laws, including the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Thomas Jefferson motivated some of the slanderous attacks against John Adams--his opponent for Presidnet-- published by Benjamin Franklin Bache--the illegitimate son of Ben Franklin. When Jefferson became President after Adams was defeated (250 votes in New York would have made Adams President) pardoned those convicted and remitted fines with interest after he was elected. Bache had labeled George Washington as "the man who is the source of all the misfortune of our country." He went on to charge Washington as having "debauched" and "deceived" Americans and then left as his successor, "bald, blind, cripppled, toothless" Adams. Another Republican editor, James Callender, falsely called Adams a traitor and charged he had been "proved faithful and serviceable to the British interest."

John Adams believed that journalism should be free "within the bounds of truth." Chief Justice McKean of the Supreme Court described the atmosphere as "the envenomed scurrility that has raged in pamphlets and newspapers printed in Philadelphia [the capital, where Bache published his paper] for several years past, insomuch that libeling has become a national crime." He added: "the contest has been who could call names in the greatest variety of phrases; who could mangle the greatest number of characters, or who could excel in the magnitude of their lies; hence the honor of families has been stained, the highest posts rendered cheap and vile in the sight of the people, and the greatest services and virtue blasted."

We are rapidly approaching the same poisonous atmosphere in the United States. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff published an article based on unnamed source (Marvin Olasky calls it "Sourcery -- the use of anonymous sources") claiming that interrogators at Guantanamo had dumped a Koran into a toilet. Seventeen people died in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the story, which Newsweek has now retracted. Today NBC News was reporting several rumors (unattrtibuted) floating around Iraq of Koran's being mistreated. Public trust in journalism has fallen to abysmal lows.

Seventy percent of journalists in a recent study by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy say the media do a good or excellent job when it comes to accuracy. Forty percent of the public agree. Forty-three percent of the public say the press has too much freedom; only 3% of journalists agree. Sixty percent of the public believe the media are biased in reporting the news. Only 14% of the public can cite "freedom of the press" as a guarantee under the First Amendment. Twenty-two percent of the public say that government should be allowed to censor the press. Fifty-three percent of the public think journalists should not run stories with unnamed sources.

Given these percentages, and the poisonous odor of now permeating some of the news media, the media had better clean up their act, reestablish sound journalistic principles, remember who their readers and viewers are (who pay the bills), and report the news rather than rumors, or they will face the specter of a reincarnation of the Sedition Act. That is a day none of us desires, but unless things change, it's coming.

And now the Washington Post has a new standard for journalistic integrity, "eminently plausible." Actually, this is not a new standard, just an articulated standard. Surely this was the standard Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, and "60 Minutes" used on the Bush National Guard story. It's incredible to me that Anne Applebaum and the Post would even suggest this, but then witness their whining rejoinder: "Blaming the messenger doesn't get the administration off the hook." And they wonder why more and more people are foregoing newspapers and why circulation is falling like the rain in Spain? Give me a break.

Marvin Olasky asks even more pointed questions: "Is there a sickness at the heart of press liberalism that leads many journalists to want the Guantanamo story to be true? Given the way Islamofascists act, do these journalists have a death wish for themselves and Western civilization?"
posted by Red 8:07 PM

Monday, May 16, 2005

Balance of Power?

The checks and balances in the Constitution are checks and balances between the branches of government, not political parties. I have just finished reading an editorial opinion on Chattanooga.com, the website of the Chattanooga News. The Chairman of the county's Democratic Party, Stuart James wrote, "Our great republic is based upon the conservative principles of balance of power." While he is correct in that assertion, he misapplied it (as history evidences) by applying it to "the conservative right" as opposed to the "liberal left" (funny, you never hear that term, do you?). His point was that by changing the Senate rules to prohibit a filibuster on judicial nominees, the Republicans were taking away the balance of power. Aside from the fact that in 1995, Democrat Senate luminaries Bingaman, Boxer, Feingold, Harkin, Kennedy Kerry, Lautenberg, Lieberman, and Sarbanes all voted to end the filibuster, filibusters have never been used unilaterallly to stop a floor vote on a judicial nominee. The one exception was the elevation of Abe Fortas (one of Lyndon Johnson's favorite judges--he represented Johnson in his first Senate race when results were disputed) from Associate Justice to Chief Justice. A coalition of Democrats and Republicans refused to relinquish the floor when allegations of financial improprieties were raised about the Memphis native's dealings. Historically, Democrats have used the noble filibuster extensively—in defense of such things as segregation. Al Gore, Sr. (father of the inventor of the internet), when he was Senator from Tennessee, participated in a seventy-four day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he voted against.

The Democrats in the Senate are practicing the worst of factions, something the framers of the Constitution abhorred. Simply read these words from George Washington's Farewell Address and you will see the Democratic Party in the mirror:

"They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

And you wonder why government's out of control.
posted by Red 10:47 PM

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Clintonsista CYA

Former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, blamed the current administration for North Korea's nuclear weapons tonight on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes." "If I were Kim Jong Il, I would read the message of the invasion of Iraq." She said the message was, "'If I don't have nuclear weapons, I get invaded. If I do, I don't get invaded'--because we didn't invade the Soviet Union or China." Duh.

Aside from the fact that the Clinton administration's Agreement of Understanding allowed North Korea to continue their nuclear power program in exchange for food, the logic is flawed. Madam Albright has substituted acknowledged "world powers"--China and Russia [Hint Ms. Albright: there is no Soviet Union any longer--and if the President had said that, they'd say he was "stoopid"]--for what was at best a third-rate power, Iraq. Wd didn't attack India or Pakistan either, though both have nuclear capabilty. Neither did we attack France or Great Britain.

We should expect and demand better from a former Secretary of State than this "hide the pea" logically bait-and-switch. Ms. Albright's syllogism was simplistic and her premises flawed.

Premise 1: The United States invades all countries that don't have nuclear weapons. (Patently False)
Premise 2: The United States does not invade countries with nuclear weapons. (This remains uncertain. While Iraq demonstrably had nuclear-tipped artillery ordnance, the whole truth is yet to be seen as to how far along they were to developing a nuclear device.)

Shame on you, Madam Secretary. Time to CYA (cover your Albright)!
posted by Red 8:09 PM

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Ten Years

Ten years ago this morning, I was working in my office at my desk when everything shook. I rushed to the outer office and asked my secretary, "What was that?!" I thought the hot water heater in the building, located in a mechanical room over my office, had exploded. I went outside to the gym. People were outside, looking around, wondering. The walls of the steel building shook, they said, when they heard the noise. I thought it might be a plane crash or an earthquake. It reminded me of an earthquake we'd had in Ohio five or six years before. Soon phone calls came flooding into the office asking whether certain people worked in the Federal Building downtown. We knew then that something terrible had happened, and most of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was gone. I knew some people who lived opposite the building and down the street. I wondered about them. The former son-in-law of a friend was a Secret Service agent in the building.

So much has changed in that decade. My son was twelve, a middle-schooler. Now he's getting ready to graduate from college. So many friends who were alive then are no longer around. September 11 happened. The world changed on April 19, 1995. It changed even more on September 11, 2001. Since then we've seen Afghanistan's liberation and the liberation of Iraq, and over a thousand more--men Laurence Binyon, the World War I poet wrote of--have lost their lives in the battles for freedom.

"With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is a music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncountered:
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables at home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end they remain."

("For the Fallen," September 21, 1914)
posted by Red 6:29 PM

Friday, April 01, 2005

Time to Sue the Indians, er Native Americans

Yahoo News is reporting that the Squaxin tribe, south of Seattle, is branding and selling its own cigarettes, "Complete," made by their "Skookum Creek Tobacco Company." The cigarettes sell for about $16/cartoon, well below the normal $35-$70 price for cigarettes nationally. One reason the tribe can sell its smokes (why don't they call them "Smoke Signals"?) so cheap is the only tax is state tax, though even that is not collected by the state but paid into tribal coffers under the state's agreement with the tribe.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms issued a permit to the tribe allowing manufacture of cigarettes. The Washington tribe is not unique. In Oklahoma the Seneca-Cayuga tribe (there are 32 different tribes in Oklahoma) has sold "Skydancer" cigarettes since 2000.

Is there something wrong with this picture? (Er, if the government had a tobacco settlement with "big tobacco" because tobacco causes a myriad of health problems, why in the world is the BATF issuing a permit for another manufacturer, and that to a manufacturer whose primary consumers are a downtrodden minority subject to addiction disorders?!) How about a caveat on the packages: Users must go to Native American health clinics for treatment of any tobacco-related illnesses, including emphysema, other nonspecific respiratory difficulties, cardiovascular problems, impotence, and gross stupidity.

I think it's time to go out and buy some Indian smokes and cash in on some of that Indian casino money. They've got a huge cash cow there. How long will it take the class-action legal vultures to discover this new revenue stream? The tribes want to practice capitalism (minus the restraints of government), let them discover the hidden costs of being tobacco enterpeneurs. Can you imagine the plaintiff in the case? "I didn't know natural Native-American-grown tobacco would cause the same diseases as that grown by the bad tobacco companies." Duh.
posted by Red 10:52 PM