Gerry Adams: We Will Stop Murdering Folks Now

Terrorism is now passé among the IRA. No longer will Gerry Adams' colleagues engage in murder, bombing, terrorism, kneecapping, and their other traditional forms of mayhem. Having recently lost their position as Britain’s #1 terrorist organ, the IRA folks have finally thrown in the towel and will strive to become legitimate businessmen and politicians. To test this hypothesis, Globe reporter Kevin Cullen describes Adams’ followers quite frankly:

In an order effective at 11 a.m. EST yesterday, the IRA said its cadre of former assassins, bombers, and kneecappers must devote all their energies in trying to unite Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to the south through peaceful, political means.

For Cullen’s sake, his story today best prove true. No word on how the IRA will maintain their core competence in the robbery and extortion businesses without maintaining the skills that are usually required in these professions when facing extreme client relationships.    

Center bull

In the Australian Mark Steyn's column today is entitled "Mugged by reality?"

"That's the great thing about multiculturalism: it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - like, say, the capital of Bhutan or the principal exports of Malaysia, the sort of stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. Instead, it just involves feeling warm and fluffy, making bliss out of ignorance. "

Read the whole thing, please.

Like Ted Kennedy, only less white

Once again Joan Vennochi finds GOP subterfuge where there is none:

Added [Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval] Patrick, who is African-American: ''In some ways, the Southern Strategy of yesterday is the suburban strategy of today, to follow that old temptation, what divides us, instead of what unites us."

In other words, racial division may no longer be key to electoral success. But that is not the end of the GOP's divide and conquer strategy. In last year's presidential campaign, the party used issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and patriotism to divide voters.

"Divide and conquer” indeed, but purest politics! This “divide and conquer” strategy is nothing more than expanding the Republican party to include some who though more comfortable with the Republican platform, are accustomed to voting Democratic. As the poet said about dividing:

Nature within her inmost self divides
To trouble men with having to take sides.

We measure our division periodically by a civic ritual we call an election.

Advertisers Sure Are Relentless

Type 3 Ls, and I'm seeing red instead of blue

The T-Word

On Thursday morning as the bombs were exploding while I listened to the BBC, their reticence to use the T-Word might be understandable. However, it seems that they are scrubbing it from their website according to Harry's Place (no relation). Amazing.

Krauthammer/columnists = Clapton/guitarists

Krauthammer is simply superb:

Unlike a principled conservative such as Antonin Scalia, or a principled liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, O'Connor had no stable ideas about constitutional interpretation. Her idea of jurisprudence was to decide whether legislation produced social "systems" that either worked or did not.

But that, of course, is the job of the elected branches of government. Legislatures negotiate social arrangements. Judges are supposed to look at their handiwork and decide one thing and one thing only: whether the "system" the politicians produced comports with the Constitution. On what other grounds do judges have the authority to throw out legislation? Do they have superior wisdom about what works, superior capacity to decide which social boundaries require negotiation and which do not?

Read the whole thing, please (registration required).

"Power Surge"

This morning as usual I listened to the BBC World Update program at 5AM. But it was not a usual morning in London. At that very moment they were attacked. As the hour progressed it became clearer and clearer that London’s transit system had not experienced a failure caused by a “power surge” but rather had been deliberately attacked. Yet I believe the announcer (Dan Damon) went through the entire hour without mentioning the T-word.

My sympathies to all the Londoners killed or injured in this “incident”.

I would link to BBC website for the program, but they are swamped.

Glad that I'm not all alone in this

It's nice to get outside help, especially from very top levels of the Blogosphere. Today John Hinderaker of Power Line blog does a superb job of deconstructing Robert Kuttner's column in today's Boston Globe, then concludes:

...one can only wonder what standards of evidence, logic and common sense the Boston Globe applies to its columnists.

Not any that I have ever seen...but they do have an OpEd masthead that exhibits racial, ethnic, and gender diversity!

And BTW James Carroll's latest whine about war being hell but never of any value picked up a number of blog reactions, among them a very good one from Paul Geary at The New Editor.

Parsing Derrick Jackson

You can tell that the level of BS is getting high when Good Ol’ Derrick Jackson starts talking about George W Bush’s “legacy”. I’m sure that concern over the Bush legacy gives Derrick insomnia. His poll-laden excretion in today’s Boston Globe reads:

If Bush listens to the people, he will have a chance to soften his legacy. If he does not, he will cement his legacy as the divider, not a unifier.

That inelegant and frothy rhetoric sounds like Ted Kennedy’s office has been ghost writing for Derrick again. Earlier he says:

…there is more pressure on Bush than there was three years ago to pick someone who will not conduct the feared Sherman's march through abortion rights, affirmative action, and federal protections for ordinary citizens.

Let’s parse that statement a little bit, shall we?

For example a “Sherman’s march through abortion rights” means passing laws against late-term procedures like this. Such laws would be entirely in accordance with the Roe v. Wade decision, which allowed unrestricted access to abortion only during the 1st trimester. But such laws are militantly opposed by the extreme feminist left, which steadfastly opposes any legislation that restricts abortion in any way. Legacy? This is a 30-year legacy that results from judicial over-reaching in 1973.

A “Sherman’s march through affirmative action” means reversing the vast obsession with racial, ethnic, and gender preferences. This behavior is most especially seen in academia and epitomized by Harvard’s reaction to the terrible “mistake” made by its president when he publicly considered the possibility that gender could be a relevant factor in the choice of academic fields, and thus in the gender content of the applicant pool for Harvard’s faculty in the natural sciences. Might less obsession with racial and gender quotas also result in better writing on the Boston Globe OpEd page, Derrick?

A “Sherman’s march through federal protections for ordinary citizens” is an excellent description of the recent Kelo v. New London Supreme Court decision, which will evict working people from their domiciles of 60-80 years to create a privately owned waterfront plaza which pleases New London’s political class and satisfies its agreement with Pfizer. But this legal travesty was supported by all the SC justices Derrick likes, and loudly opposed by the ones he most loathes, Scalia and Thomas.

Sherman’s march indeed. Sherman can’t get here soon enough for me.

A more accurate picture of the left’s reaction to the Court vacancy is provided by a local pastor in the Boston Globe letters column today:

July 6, 2005

IN "SENATORS won't rule out filibuster", Susan Milligan makes several interesting choices of words. Conservatives are said to be ''clamoring [not asking, not requesting; do liberals also clamor?] for a justice that represents their values." Some of those are enumerated as being ''antiabortion, opposed to gay marriage, and in favor of religious expression in public places." But in the parallel spot in the next sentence, those nominees who may think that way are described as ''ultraright." Is that the same as archconservative? Will we be seeing Senator Kennedy et alia described as ultraleft or archliberal?

Let's see: The nominations of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer passed by votes of 95-3 and 87-9, respectively, with many conservatives voting to confirm. Even though some senators may have found their judicial philosophies repugnant, they were otherwise well qualified, and the tradition has been to vote for the president's nominees unless they were professionally unqualified. Will the liberals extend the same courtesy? It doesn't sound like it. Ah, yes, the ''party of fairness."

The Rev. JOSEPH M. HENNESSEY
Pastor
St. Joseph Parish
Kingston

Well put, Father Hennessey.

Back to Unreality

In today’s Boston Globe tiresome James Carroll rants against World War II to make a point in his whine against our ongoing war.

As much as the defeat of militarized Japanese fascism was a victory, the war was also a tragedy, and the Iwo Jima image of desperate men around the flag acknowledges that, too.

As much a tragedy as a victory? Sure, James. Maybe FDR should have called the whole thing off. He didn’t though, because he believed in the civilization of which he was a part and a product. On the other hand you are, in this sense, apostate. It seems that you believe in pacifism as a foreign policy, but won’t acknowledge it openly.

Also in today’s Globe Oliphant explores Alan Greenspan’s worry about not being able to nudge up long term interest rates and pop the housing bubble. It is amusing to juxtapose Ollie’s past and present characterization of the Bush Administration’s economic policies:

August 2004:
The 2001 recession was very brief, caused by a sharp drop in business investment as the tech bubble burst. Since then, despite three preposterous tax cuts that barely touched ordinary Americans while proving a gusher for the wealthy, the recovery has been both jobs-light and income-stingy.

Today no mention of those preposterous tax cuts, but…

This unprecedented amount of monetary and fiscal stimulus was enough to keep the economy from experiencing more than a very brief dip after the 9/11 attacks. However, the growth that followed has been historically anemic, with unusually spotty and limited job growth and enormous pressures on households with modest incomes. The employment gains have not been enough to keep pace with Americans coming of working age, and the squeeze on families of average income and below has been brutal, in contrast to life at the tax-reduced top.

Unemployment is down, job creation is showing positive, albeit with a high variance. And long term rates are rapidly heading higher, based on the last 5 days(below on the 10-year Treasury), it looks like Greenspan’s conundrum may be over. If Ollie, with his record of prophecy is mentioning it, probably so.

10-year Treasury yield over the past 5 days

Henninger has choice words for July 4th

Dan Henninger in the Journal:

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.