by J.C. Phillips 

Most Americans favor diversity. However, very few among us would endorse a policy wherein the local government determined where a citizen could live based on their race – even if such a policy was instituted for the intent of ensuring diversity. “Sorry Mr. Smith we have reached our limit of white families in this particular neighborhood.” “Too bad Mr. Jones. I realize your wife has her heart set on this house, but there are too many Black families in the precinct already.” Yet that was exactly the policy of the Seattle School District, at least according to the plaintiffs in Community Schools v Seattle School District Number 1.

In an effort to address a history of de facto school segregation due to residential patterns, the Seattle School system scrapped its neighborhood schools program and moved to a system of choice. Students are now allowed to attend any school in the district; however, when there are too many applicants for the available desks at a particular school, the district has resorted to using race as one criterion in deciding admission. 

The Supreme Court recently decided correctly that the rights of individuals do not disappear because they make decisions that conflict with the social goals of government. The decision in Community Schools, as well as in Meredith v Jefferson County School District, gives us an opportunity to question why we wish to continue the use of race ratios, which actually reinforce the very stereotypes that prevent real diversity.

In support of the respondents in the Seattle case, The NAACP touted social science that purports to demonstrate that Black children perform better in integrated schools. One of the underpinnings of pluralism is that differences in race or ethnicity do not confer worth. This, however, seems to scream Black intellectual inferiority. Are we seriously staking out the position that the less Black kids are around other Black kids the better they do in school? Why then would anyone want to go to school with Black children? The truth is that many don’t, and I suspect that is what the school district is truly fearful of.

(Lest we fool ourselves into believing that objections to the use of race in admissions only rest with a handful of WWP’s (whiney white people) it is worth noting that one third of the plaintiffs in Community Schools were Black parents. In 1966 Black parents were prevented from sending their children to certain schools due to discrimination. Forty years later Black parents are prevented from sending their children to certain schools because of diversity. I am not sure this qualifies as progress. But I digress.)

It is likely that the schools are not nearly as concerned with diversity as they are fearful of “tipping” and their worry is not that some schools will become too white, but that some will become too black. That is not to say that the district is not operating in good faith. The school district is aware that too often perception can become reality and the perception — buttressed by arguments like those of the NAACP and the fact that there are so many terrible inner city schools — is that all-Black means all bad. In no time at all a school that tips will be a hotbed of low test scores, high drop out rates, decaying infrastructure and violence. 

To be sure, there are predominately Black schools that do not become models of dysfunction. Unfortunately, race ratios never give us the answer as to why they are the exception and not the rule, why the school that tips Black will not compete academically with the white school from across town; why it will not excel in debate as well as basketball and why it will not routinely graduate students that will go on to the top universities in the nation. 

The answers haven’t a thing to do with an imbalance of race ratios.

No doubt this decision by the Court will elicit much hand wringing and predictions of doom, but which is the greater danger? That through freedom of choice it is likely we will end up with a predominately Black school on the North side of town? Or that by limiting freedoms in order to achieve a noble end we end up reinforcing notions of Black inferiority thus undermining the very foundations of a truly pluralistic society?

Strategypage:

U.S. troops have been mystified at how differently the war they fight in Iraq is portrayed by the U.S. media back home. Most just shrug it off as “politics,” and yet another reason to not trust what the mass media presents as reliable reporting. But recently, the troops have been passing around an interesting discovery. Namely, that the Japanese psychological warfare effort during World War II included radio broadcasts that could be picked up by American troops. Popular music was played, but the commentary (by one of several English speaking Japanese women) always hammered away on the same

1 Your President (Franklin D Roosevelt) is lying to you.

2 This war is illegal.

3 You cannot win the war.

The troops are perplexed and somewhat amused that their own media is now sending out this message. Fighting the enemy in Iraq is simple, compared to figuring out what news editors are thinking back home. A few times, the mass media has been bold, or foolish, enough to confront the troops about this divergence of perceptions. The result is usually a surreal exchange, with the troops giving the journalist a “what planet are YOU from” look. Naturally, this sort of thing doesn’t get much exposure. When pressed, a journalist or editor will dismiss the opinions of the troops (of all ranks), because they are “too close” to see “the big picture.”

Now they tell us: 

A noted climate scientist who is part of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, now says computer models cannot predict future climate — and he says the IPCC is not in the climate prediction business.

Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote on a nature magazine blog that the U.N.’s dire forecasts about the dangers of global warming are not climate predictions.

He says they are “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. And he admits the computer models don’t even consider things such as the recovery of the ozone layer.

He writes — “The current projection method…can not work for many aspects of climate, especially those related to the water cycle…The science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate.”

Shrinkwrapped:

The defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration bill is the single most important advance for democracy in recent memory.  While most commentators point to opposition tot he amnesty provisions in the bill as the impetus for opposition, in reality, amnesty was a minor part of the problem with the bill. 

When the bill was first announced I wrote that I was provisionally in favor of a comprehensive bill but offered the caution that “the devil is in the details.”  At the same time I was fully aware that there was no way I was going to spend the time and energy to actually read the bill.  Legalese is a foreign language that I have no desire to learn.  It has always struck me as being unnecessarily arcane; of course, the same can be said of medicalese, so I should be measured in my criticism.  In any event, I lack the interest and energy to learn how “sausages and laws” are made. 

Two important developments occurred in the debate over the Immigration bill which will forever change the way Laws are made. 

First, and most important, primarily because of the internet, people who had the interest were able to actually take the time and spend the energy required to read and understand the bill. They were then able to leverage their understanding via the Blogosphere to allow a multitude of engaged individuals to piggy back on their expertise.

Hugh Hewitt performed such yeoman work and when he pointed out that the fantasy of a comprehensive reform was not matched by the reality in the bill, I withdrew my provisional support for the bill.  Nothing that followed caused me to change my mind a second time.

As the Immigration debate continued, with the powerful forces in favor of the bill using all their legislative legerdemain to escape scrutiny, they found themselves being watched and caught every step of the way.

The second key point was the not surprising revelation that not only had no Senator even read the bill but that most of them had no real idea what was in it.  Once their ignorance was documented, the bill was finished.  It is one thing to know intellectually that most bills are passed with little in the way of real debate or understanding by those poseurs who reside in Congress, but to actually be able to see, hear, and savor their ignorance, all the while they were protesting how much smarter and wiser they are than the hoi polloi, has been truly enlightening.  The fact is that the American people, via their unelected representatives int he Blogosphere, understood the bill better than its proponents in the Senate. 

The Comprehensive Immigration Bill did not fail because people did not support its aims but because once people examined the bill, they noticed that it was not designed to do what it said it would do and in fact was a disastrous melange of mismatched pieces that would have exacerbated every problem we currently face with illegal immigration. 

The 1.5-mile barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border was designed to keep cars from illegally crossing into the United States. There’s just one problem: It was accidentally built on Mexican soil. Now embarrassed border officials say the mistake could cost the federal government more than $3 million to fix.

Sometimes cultural markers appear in odd places. Here’s the online (the cable guide) description of a movie appearing on HBO called The Hamburg Cell.

While it’s bound to touch a nerve, this painstakingly researched docudrama strives to present an objective look at the lives of some of the men who were recruited, trained and paid to carry out the attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001.

Touch a nerve? Whose? Muslims?

Remember the people leaping to their deaths from the burning towers? The sound they made on impact? The children left fatherless and motherless by these Islamic murderers?

Who cares if nerves are touched?

Some ex-presidents just can’t keep their mouths shut.

Former President Bill Clinton on Friday cast doubt on the effectiveness of a planned U.S. missile shield, deriding it as a “colossal waste of money”.

Clinton said the defense system, parts of which are to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic, had created unnecessary difficulties with Russia, which denounces the plan as an attempt to undermine its defense capabilities.

“My facts may be wrong, but my impression is that we are creating a crisis here when none is necessary,” Clinton told a conference in the Ukrainian resort of Yalta on the ex-Soviet state’s relationship with Europe.

“Because I don’t think the missile defense system is reliable enough to create an impact.”

Maybe he’s right. But there’s an advantage to having your enemies, say Kim Il Jong, think that any missile strike will fail and will result in massive counterattack.

Thanks a lot, Bill. You’ve done so much to protect America and innocent life.

It’s a battle of pop culture titans as two empires — one high-tech, one high-rise — clash in explosive PR fury. Since these two heavyweight memes have climbed into the competitive media ring of their own volition, we thought we’d size them up for you. As Stephen Colbert would say: “Pick a side — we’re at war!”

iPhone: Simple to use.
Paris Hilton: Simple.

iPhone: Well-protected against viruses.
Paris Hilton: Has herpes.

iPhone: Critics complained battery life too short.
Paris Hilton: Critics complained prison life too short.

iPhone: Provides driving directions.
Paris Hilton: Knows how to drive. (Sort of.)

iPhone: Responds to touch from multiple fingers at once.
Paris Hilton: Responds to touch from multiple fingers at once.

Andrew Sullivan:

…the pharmaceutical companies in Europe have been in difficulties for quite a while now, under the burden of the socialism he favors for the U.S. healthcare industry. According to the industry’s own website, as long ago as 1994, the European Commission Report on Europe’s ailing drug industry said the following:

“Europe as a whole is lagging behind in its ability to generate, organise, and sustain innovation processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex”. The report underlines that the pharmaceutical market in Europe has been negatively affected by significant, excessive and uncoordinated government intervention that stifles competition and discourages innovation. This also creates significant inequity among European patients’ rights to access of medicines.

Socialism fails. Always has. Always will. And the toll in Europe in so many areas is clear. Here’s what socialized medical systems have done to European pharmaceutical research:

# For over 100 years, Europe has been a powerhouse of pharmaceutical progress and innovation. Over the last decade, however, Europe has gradually lost its leadership in the pharmaceutical sector, with a steady transfer of its R&D to the US – where policies and market conditions are more favourable to pharmaceutical innovation.
# Key benchmarking indicators show that between 1990 and 2002, R&D investment in United States rose more than fivefold, while in Europe it only grew 2.5 times.
# In 1990, major European research-based companies spent 73% of their worldwide R&D expenditure on the EU territory. In 1999, they spent only 59% on the EU territory. The USA was the main beneficiary of this transfer of R&D activity.

America is the last refuge for pharmaceutical innovation. And the left wants to kill that off. There’s more evidence of what socialism does to healthcare R&D in Europe:

At last night’s Democrat debate, the candidates bloviated over the Supreme Court decision to limit the use of race in public schools. To hear them, you’d think they’d overturned a law against lynching.

Of course, making black voters feel aggrieved and powerless is essential for Democrats to win elections.

But Juan Williams, who is both black and liberal, disagrees:

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

Williams recalls a meeting he had with Thurgood Marshall in 1990 in which he asked:

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

Chicago Tribute columnist Dennis Byrne writes that the court’s decision simply restores the intent of the 14th Amendment, which:

… in its historical context was directed at protecting the rights of African-Americans as they were emerging from slavery. No thought, it seems then, was given to the idea that more than a century later the rights of the majority also needed protecting.

Despite the Amendment’s historical context, its words can only mean that they have universal application: no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” [Emphasis added] How can that be read as anything other than a protection for every person? How can the words possibly be twisted to mean that some people are protected against racial discrimination while others are not?

If anything is jeopardized by Thursday’s high court decision, it is a number of nutty decisions following Brown, such as Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which found nothing wrong with busing children miles away from their neighborhood schools to achieve a bureaucratic will-of-the-wisp of complete racial integration. One faulty federal court decision followed another, turning federal judges into local school administrators, a job surely never foreseen by the Founding Fathers.

A quick guide to common Latin phrases.

Ad hoc: Literally meaning “for this,” it’s generally used to mean improvised.

Ad infinitum (not to be confused with et cetera): “To infinity, without end.”

Caveat emptor: “Let the buyer beware.”

Citius altius fortius: “Faster, higher, stronger” – the motto of the modern Olympics.

Columbarium: A collective tomb in ancient Rome that was also used as a house for pigeons and doves.

Et cetera.

In a breakthrough that could potentially lead to a cure for HIV infection, scientists have discovered a way to remove the virus from infected cells, a study released Thursday said.

The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine.

The enzyme is still far from being ready to use as a treatment, the authors warned, but it offers a glimmer of hope for the more than 40 million people infected worldwide.

“A customized enzyme that effectively excises integrated HIV-1 from infected cells in vitro might one day help to eradicate (the) virus from AIDS patients,” Alan Engelman, of Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, wrote in an article accompanying the study.

Hillary Clinton:

“Let me just put this in perspective: If HIV-AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34 there would be an outraged, outcry in this country.”

If indeed AIDS is the leading cause of death for young black women, what does that say about young black women?

AIDS is easy to understand and easy to avoid.

For the past two decades, we’ve been inundated with “AIDS awareness” campaigns. Anyone who contracts the disease today, unless it’s through tainted blood or some freakish accident, has a self-inflicted wound.

For Hillary to suggest that AIDS infections are the fault of some racist American society demonstrates the crass race baiting so common to the Democrat party.

by Burt Prelutsky

Not too long ago, I observed that self-esteem, at least so far as our young people are concerned, has been turned on its head. In days gone by, whether a kid brought home a terrific report card, performed his chores responsibly, fed and cared for the family pet or exhibited good sportsmanship on the athletic field, the child had to actually do something to earn the respect of his parents.

These days, self-esteem has come to be a birthright. If you’re a teenager and you’re breathing, polls indicate that you have a doggone high opinion of yourself.

This isn’t to suggest that there are no adolescents who deserve to feel good about themselves. But, let’s face it, by and large, most teenagers should be kept in barns with the rest of the livestock.

Fortunately, most of them manage to get past the stage when all they want to do is listen to really loud, really lousy music; raise rudeness to the level of an art form; and show off for their equally obnoxious friends. The only upside to their abominable behavior is that 25 or 30 years down the road they invariably get their comeuppance when they’re saddled with their own adolescent offspring.

So far as this misplaced self-esteem is concerned, I’m quite prepared to blame the parents. It’s one thing, after all, for doting parents to think that their babies are the most beautiful, that their infants are the cutest, and that their toddlers are the smartest. But, golly, folks, by the time that little Tyler and little Tonya announce they’ve reached puberty by developing a ton of attitude and an aversion to hygiene, it’s way too late to let them know their rightful place on the food chain.

But, unfortunately, when it comes to feelings of entitlement — totally unjustified entitlements, you understand — there are plenty of adults in this country who could give the young nippers a run for their money.

One such entitlement is what liberal politicians and other assorted race hustlers refer to as a level playing field. In theory, that field is the American ideal. It means that every child, whatever his race or religion, has the opportunity to go just as far as his natural gifts, his determination and his intelligence, will take him. It certainly sounds like a nifty idea. In fact, for a lot of us, it’s what our flag symbolizes. But like so many things that the left espouses, the reality doesn’t square with the rhetoric.

A level playing field isn’t enough for them. They — they being members of one of the anointed minority groups courted by liberals, which includes illegal aliens — must be guaranteed, if not an outright victory, at least a tie.

There’s nothing the least bit level about such a field. When the results, and not merely the opportunities, are preordained, it’s nothing better or any nobler than a fixed prize fight.

Well, most Americans are not about to take a dive merely to satisfy left-wing politicians. And the reason we won’t? Because it’s really bad for our self-esteem.

It’s made from soda cans. Click image for full size.

TCS Daily:

As the debate over illegal immigration from Mexico rages in Washington and across the country, and as the administration’s reform bill hangs by a thread, few Americans are aware that this problem will automatically decline and eventually become a vague memory.

There has been a stunning decline in the fertility rate in Mexico, which means that, in a few years there will not be many teenagers in Mexico looking for work in the United States or anywhere else. If this trend in the fertility rate continues, Mexico will resemble Japan and Italy – rapidly aging populations with too few young workers to support the economy.

According to the World Bank’s 2007 Annual Development Indicators, in 1990 Mexico had a fertility rate of 3.3 children per female, but by 2005, that number had fallen by 36 percent to 2.1, which is the Zero Population Growth rate. That is an enormous decline in the number of Mexican infants per female. The large number of women currently in their reproductive years means that there are still quite a few babies, but as this group ages, the number of infants will decline sharply. If this trend toward fewer children per female continues, there being no apparent reason for it to cease, the number of young people in the Mexican population will decline significantly just when the number of elderly is rising. As labor markets in Mexico tighten and wage rates rise, far fewer Mexican youngsters will be interested in coming to the United States. Since our baby boomers will be retiring at the same time, we could face a severe labor shortage.

HT: Instapundit

 Omar at Iraq the Model:

It’s almost July now, and General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will present their report about the situation in Iraq, military and political, at some point in September.

…what matters more than the way of presentation would be how the data in the report is going to be read and afterwards interpreted into attitudes and actions.
One thing I hope the decision-makers and the media do when they read the report is to not isolate the war in Iraq from the war on terror and al-Qaeda as a whole, and at the same time put in mind the difference between war and nation-building. The latter takes much more time than winning a military conflict but requires different tools.

The results so far have been astounding, and please allow me to say that I’m proud of the change in attitude many of my fellow Iraqis are showing. Even if numbers don’t suggest so because the change is happening but it will take time-perhaps beyond September-before this change will show in numbers.

A nation is not a corporation and when we deal with a nation we are dealing with a society; a mass of people with ever changing hearts and minds and that’s why numbers alone can’t be enough to assess the situation—thoughtful insight and looking at the bigger image are also required.

For over a year the media and many officials were spooking us with the exaggerated ghost of civil war. I wonder what they have to say now! I think their silence is more telling than anything they would’ve said.

Iraqis are awakening, one very telling example can be seen in the ongoing operation in Diyala; members of the 1920 revolution brigades, once bitter enemies of the US military and Iraqi government are now assisting US and Iraqi military in fighting al-Qaeda even though the majority of the Iraqi soldiers and officers are Shia.
If the change in exclusively Sunni Anbar is good then the change in Diyala is good beyond words.

Another great example that I have personally been in touch with is taking place in a place outside Baghdad. Maybe you remember the story I told you about the area where members of our tribe live. For months unfortunate bloodletting was going on between the tribes, militias and al-Qaeda terrorists in which most of the victims were no more than innocent farmers.

Last week I learned from relatives that two groups of tribes have separately formed two “battalions” of several hundred young tribesmen each; not to fight the other sect or the US or Iraqi forces but to fight al-Qaeda. Even better this step has been taken in cooperation with the authorities in the region and the arrangement will ultimately lead to turning many of those tribal fighters into legitimate law enforcement personnel.

Don Surber:

The court ruled the senator is not above criticism before an election, no matter what law Feingold may author.

And three justices even reminded him that Wisconsin is not Morocco.

Feingold lent his name to the McCain-Feingold law, which proponents called “campaign reform” but which was in fact yet another congressional attempt to silence critics. That President Bush signed this monstrosity into law shows that maybe his critics have a point when they belittle his intelligence.

A key provision of this “reform” is a restriction on political ads just before an election.

Oh, not on the ads of the politicians. Senators can run all the TV ads their fat-cat supporters are willing to buy.

No, the politicians restricted what ads the citizenry may run on TV before an election.

This “campaign reform” is like a drunk “curing” his alcoholism by telling his wife she cannot imbibe.

BusinessPundit:

…it’s not what you think, it’s not how good you are, it’s ultimately who you know.

I first began to realize that in 1995 when I was an electrical engineering student at the University of Kentucky. I applied for a co-op position at Lexmark, and never heard anything back.

I applied every semester for two years. Still nothing. Then one day an accounting professor or mine gave the class an assignment – go interview someone in your industry.

I found someone at Lexmark to interview about engineering, and we kept in touch after the interview. At the end of the semester he sent me a note saying that their co-op was leaving, and asking if I wanted to co-op in his department. Two years of following the rules got me nowhere. One hour of meeting with a real engineer got me what I wanted. He never asked for my resume. Never asked about GPA. Never asked anything except whether or not I wanted the position. It was my first taste of a major life lesson – it’s who you know, not what you know.

Newsbusters:

One of the pet peeves of anthropogenic global warming skeptics is how the media and climate change alarmists like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore only address events supporting that which they conflate and abuse data to prove.

A perfect example is the discussion concerning receding glaciers, as these folks will either ignore when such recession began, or the other possible environmental issues that many scientists believe to be responsible.

Maybe even worse, the media alarmists will always ignore information that might throw a monkey wrench into the position they’re trying to advance.

With that in mind, it seems a metaphysical certitude American press outlets will ignore reports of glacial expansion around the globe, most hypocritically as one such growing ice mass is actually right here in the U.S. as reported by Washington’s News Tribune (h/t NB member dscott, emphasis added throughout):

Crater Glacier is like no other glacier in the world. It’s the only glacier with lava extruding through it and forming a dome. And while most glaciers are receding, Crater Glacier is advancing three feet per day and forming a collar around the growing dome.

A glacier that’s growing? How can that be? According to Al Gore and the supposed consensus of scientists claiming the global warming debate to be over, glaciers everywhere are receding.

Vanderleun notes the not-so-earth-shaking nature of the news alerts he’s been getting of late.

I make that two tawdry crimes and one skeevy bimbo ranking up at the top of the “Breaking News” moments of today. That’s it. That’s the way it is. That’s 30. Th-th-th-that’s all folks!

I hope you won’t take it amiss that, as one of my close friends notes, I think that sort of “Breaking News!” is very good news indeed. It gives me a great deal of reassurance to see such stories dominating the half-baked brains of those in NewzBiz. Stories like that mean, in short, that nothing terribly bad is happening in the world at this moment. No airplanes crashing into skyscrapers. Nothing other than a low-grade grind coming out of Iraq. No tsunami sweeping across the globe. No nation poised (right now) on the brink of eradicating another nation.

Nothing breaking except the ordinary evil of ordinary individuals losing it in ordinary ways. When you’ve got 300 million people bouncing around this country, you’re always going to have this kind of mundane stuff popping up. Tragic to those touched, but utterly without import to everyone else. If you are a NewzBiz bozo you put it on the air because… well, hey, you gotta have something, right? Right. You just can’t send out an email saying, “We wanted to bring you some “breaking news” but right now there just isn’t any. Have a nice day.”

Here in SoCal, we have some 16 million souls to generate crime stories with the same number of news outlets to carry them, as say, Denver with approximately 2 million souls. That can make SoCal seem awfully dangerous.

My mother, who watches TV news religiously and knows the TV weathermen by name (although she rarely steps outside to experience any weather), thinks danger lurks everywhere. Especially the freeways. Whenever I go somewhere on the freeways, she frets as if it’s a tour in Iraq.

Iowahawk’s running his Hoosegow Honey of the year contest. Please, base your vote entirely on how much you dig the chick’s booking photo.

IBD:

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, Hillary told an American Bar Association luncheon: “If you vote for my husband, you get me. It’s a two-for-one, blue plate special.” So presumably, if she’s the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, the opposite will be true: If you vote for Hillary, you get Bill.

One of Hillary’s campaign themes, in addition to the general conduct of the war on terror, will no doubt be a variation of the “Bush lied us into war” theme pushed by her party’s hard-left base and the likes of George Soros and the good folks at MoveOn.org.

First, she’ll have to explain why she was for the war in Iraq before she was against it. She’ll also have to explain what her co-president spouse meant in 1998 when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act. The legislation made the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein the official policy of the United States. Bush just carried it out.

Former New York Mayor Giuliani has made it clear that if he is her opponent in 2008, she’ll also have to explain her husband’s muted — no, nonexistent — response to repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. targets here and abroad, starting with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Speaking to about 650 business, corporate and political leaders at Regent University on Tuesday, Giuliani said: “Islamic terrorists killed more than 500 Americans before Sept. 11. Many people think the first attack on America was on Sept. 11, 2001. It was not. It was in 1993.” He went on to say that “bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it.”

Regardless of your position on the Senate immigration bill, we should all insist that our senators read the thing before voting.

But the bill is 350 pages long, and that’s not counting another 320 pages of amendments. Orin Hatch was just on the Sean Hannity show. He’s against the bill and he suggested that very few senators have read the full bill.

Hatch also noted the sense, among some, that something needs to be done and this bill is better than no bill. What?

Apparently they’ve forgotten California’s awful energy deregulation law, which passed unanimously in 1996 and was more or less unread by all who passed it.

Live and don’t learn, it seems.

LA Mayor Antonio recently gushed, “Healthcare is a basic human need, and it ought to be a basic human right.”

If healthcare is a right, then:

• Food must be a right, too. After all, you cannot be healthy if you don’t eat.
• Clothing is a right because you cannot be healthy and naked (in most parts of the world.)
• Shelter is a right because you cannot be healthy living on the streets.
• Thus, the government owes everyone a living.
• Some people can live off the toil of others, who fund the government which in turn funds their “rights.”
• Since “undocumented” Mexicans in the United States have a “right” to be here, then they too are owed a living by American taxpayers.
• If Mexicans have a right to be in America illegally, so must everyone. Surely an accident of geography cannot determine human rights.
• Thus American taxpayers owe everyone on planet earth a living.

Get to work!

Michael Moore was in Tinsel Town plugging his polemic for government monopolized health care, and sure enough, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was there for the photo-op.

The story in the LA Daily News is a gem, but unfortunately there is no web version to link to. A few highlights:

LA’s biggest hospital scandal is the government run Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor hospital. This joint is so awful, its on the verge of being shut down. Just a month ago, it allowed a patient coughing up blood to die on the floor of its ER waiting room.

(Moore thinks the place just needs to be “properly funded and staffed.” Remind you of the public schools?)

Anyway, one of Moore’s supposedly condemning anecdotes about our private health care system – y’know, the one where we get to choose our health care provider – centers on one Dawnelle Keys.

Keys has her healthcare covered by Kaiser Permanente. But instead of taking her sick 18-month old daughter to the Kaiser hospital, Keys took her to King-Harbor. They refused treatment and sent her to the right hospital, where she soon died.

To review:

• the mother was ignorant and took her kid to the wrong hospital
• the public hospital (which they’ll all be under Moore’s schema) rightly sent her to the correct place, untreated
• Keys already had all-expenses-paid managed care
• if there’s a villain in this story, which there isn’t, it’s the government hospital

From this, Moore find a case for government healthcare. How can one hope to argue against such nitwitted illogic?

 One final gem from the big event.

Art Pulaski, head of the California Labor Federation, said “Insurance companies have become the Enrons of the 21st century.”

Is that all? Why not say they’re the Katrinas, too. And that they’ve got cooties. Moore agreed, addding “…private insurance has got to go.”

Given that labor unions rule California’s disastrous public school system with an iron hand, I’d say that unions are the Maos of California’s 21st century.

The LA Times Column One tells about teaching Marxism in China:

IT was like watching a man try to swim up a waterfall.

Professor Tao Xiuao cracked jokes, told stories, projected a Power Point presentation on a large video screen. But his students at Beijing Foreign Studies University didn’t even try to hide their boredom.

Young men spread newspapers out on their desks and pored over the sports news. A couple of students listened to iPods; others sent text messages on their cellphones. One young woman with chic red-framed glasses spent the entire two hours engrossed in “Jane Eyre,” in the original English. Some drifted out of class, ate lunch and returned. Some just lay their heads on their desktops and went to sleep.

It isn’t easy teaching Marxism in China these days.

“It’s a big challenge,” acknowledged Tao, a likable man who demonstrates remarkable patience in the face of students more interested in capitalism than “Das Kapital.” The students say he isn’t the problem.

They should come to American or European universities, the last bastion of Marxist true believers.

But today’s China is, in some respects, less socialistic than much of Western Europe, with a moth-eaten social safety net and a wild free-market economy. Students in almost any urban Chinese school can look out their classroom windows and see just about everything but socialism being constructed: high-rise office buildings, shopping malls, movie theaters, luxury apartment buildings, fast-food restaurants, hotels, factories — the whole capitalist panorama.

IT seems an understatement to say that there’s a disconnect between reality and what the students are learning about Marx and Mao, who held that capitalism would inevitably and naturally give way to communism.

Looks like Mao was wrong.

Professor Tao’s lecture on this day was devoted to the arcane study of epistemology, ranging over the beliefs of Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin and Marx, and building up to Mao’s famous admonition to “seek truth from facts” — hardly a disagreeable notion, but one that kindled no apparent flicker of interest in the students.

Truth from facts would show that communism does not work, and that Mao killed somewhere between 40 and 77 million people trying to refute human nature. I doubt that’s in the curriculum.

Today’s China resembles, in some ways, the US in its post-Civil War, bare-knuckled capitalist era. Vast fortunes were being made, technology was improving the lives of millions and yet millions of common folk still worked 12-hour days and suffered hardship.

Much is made about the huge gap between rich and poor in China. One thing to remember: a very short time ago everyone in China was poor. But I’m sure Mao wouldn’t like them facts.

USA Today:

“It tells you something about American culture that is unlike any other country,” said Claire Gaudiani, a professor at NYU’s Heyman Center for Philanthropy and author of The Greater Good: How Philanthropy Drives the American Economy and Can Save Capitalism. Gaudiani said the willingness of Americans to give cuts across income levels, and their investments go to developing ideas, inventions and people to the benefit of the overall economy.

Gaudiani said Americans give twice as much as the next most charitable country, according to a November 2006 comparison done by the Charities Aid Foundation. In philanthropic giving as a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. ranked first at 1.7%. No. 2 Britain gave 0.73%, while France, with a 0.14% rate, trailed such countries as South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany.

Photography with an attitude. Great stuff even if you abhor the sermon.

The First Amendment has been used to defend the rights of American Nazis to parade through predominantly Jewish Skokie, Illinois and the rights of pornographer Larry Flynt to purvey his crass commercial vulgarities. Perhaps both are correct readings of the law.

But one area that should be beyond question is political speech. There’s no doubt that the founders meant there to be no restriction on political speech. None.

Thomas Jefferson referred to the “marketplace of ideas” as the arbiter of political speech. True, Jefferson never anticipated radio, television and mass marketing. But it’s also true that Jefferson sneakily funded newspapers that savaged the administration of George Washington while Jefferson was a member of that administration.

Which brings us to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision striking down the McCain-Feingold ban on corporate and union political advertising 30 days prior to an election. In his dissent, Justice Souter bemoaned,

             “their corrosive spending when they enter the political arena”

The First Amendment says no one gets to decide what is corrosive and what is not. Not even the Supremes. Souter should be reminded he’s there to enforce the Constitution, not his taste in political speech.

George H.W. Bush must wince when he reads such words from one of his appointees. And George W. Bush should wince when reminded he signed McCain-Feingold, the one genuine threat to free speech in our nation.