The Al Qaeda Torture Manual

By Dean Barnett
Friday, May 25, 2007

Hugh makes an excellent point regarding the Al Qaeda torture manual that the mainstream media has so determinedly ignored. The image above is from an Al Qaeda manual that instructs its minions on how to treat its captives. If you follow the link, you will see many more images that are even more disturbing. Please note - there are no instructions about giving detainees Bibles or legal counsel. From the Smoking Gun:

MAY 24--In a recent raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Iraq, U.S. military officials recovered an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like "blowtorch to the skin" and "eye removal." Along with the images, which you'll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters. Photos of those items can be seen here. The images, which were just declassified by the Department of Defense, also include a picture of a ramshackle Baghdad safe house described as an "al-Qaeda torture chamber." It was there, during an April 24 raid, that soldiers found a man suspended from the ceiling by a chain. According to the military, he had been abducted from his job and was being beaten daily by his captors. In a raid earlier this week, Coalition Forces freed five Iraqis who were found in a padlocked room in Karmah. The group, which included a boy, were reportedly beaten with chains, cables, and hoses. Photos showing injuries sustained by those captives can be found
here.

By all means, read the whole thing. And then ask yourself why there are so many people who can’t distinguish between this stuff, which is real torture, and the attention grab and other enhanced interrogation techniques. Are they willfully obstuse, scoring political points, or just hopelessly morally muddled?

Dr. Moore’s Bogus Prescription

By Rich Tucker
Saturday, May 26, 2007

Few Americans look forward to going to the doctor or dentist. We usually have to wait an hour or so, thumbing through outdated magazines, for the privilege of being poked and prodded. What could be worse? Well, try not being able to see a doctor or dentist for months.

Americans are about to spend a hot summer listening to complaints about how bad our health-care system is. “Documentarian” Michael Moore is back with “Sicko,” a film that purports to explain the evils of the American health system.

He claims other countries provide citizens better health care. Of course, it’s all free, provided by a benevolent government, “just like we have our government provide police and fire and libraries and schools,” Moore says. But here’s the dirty little secret Moore won’t be put on the big screen: We get what we pay for.

Americans may spend more on health care (15.3 percent of GDP in 2004) than people in other countries, but we get more care. American doctors perform more life-saving open-heart surgery than doctors in other countries. We boast more MRI machines than any nation except Japan. We focus on preventative care. And so on.

Canadians have the sort of socialist, government-provided care Moore wants. Yet a Canadian government report recently noted, “American women aged 50–69 were more likely than Canadian women of the same age to have had a recent mammogram.” In fact, “82 percent of American women aged 50–69 had a mammogram in the last two years, compared to 74 percent of Canadian women in the same age group.” That’s the sort of care that catches problems early, while there’s still time to take action and save lives.

Our health-care system has flaws, but it works. Compare that with the socialized care our cousins in Britain “enjoy.” In his book “After the Victorians,” A.N. Wilson attempted to laud the formation of Britain’s National Health Service, calling it “one of the most stupendous British inventions.” Yet, he admits, “as soon as it was started, it was in a state of ‘crisis,’ and it has been in a state of crisis ever since.”

So why does Wilson think the NHS was a good creation? Apparently because it was started with the best of intentions.

But good intentions won’t cure diseases -- good doctors will. And it’s difficult to see a doctor under the British system. In June 2004 The Times of London reported that Tony Blair’s Labour government had made a campaign pledge “to cut the time that people wait between seeing their GP and receiving hospital treatment from 13 months to 18 weeks by 2008.” Since Blair’s party cruised to reelection, that pledge was presumably popular with voters. But even if the government succeeds in its reform, Brits will still have to wait 18 weeks for hospital treatment. Impatient Americans would never accept a wait that long, nor should we. Long waiting times mean people die while in line for care.

It isn’t merely our health-care system that Moore dislikes. He also brags that, in France, the government sends nannies to help new mothers. Maybe he’s been watching PBS (your tax dollars at work). On Mother’s Day, many public broadcasting stations aired another ridiculous “documentary,” the “Motherhood Manifesto.”

Like Moore, the group behind this production, “Moms Rising,” wants to see more government involvement in our lives. For example, on its Web site it claims, “Businesses that create flexible work environments find that productivity goes up, they attract more talent, turnover is reduced and their bottom line is improved.” Therefore the group wants Washington to mandate all those things.

But if these benefits are real, there’s no need for government involvement. After all, businesses always act in their own self-interest. Any business would want “more talent,” more “productivity,” and a better bottom line. The Motherhood Manifesto also claims it “shows dramatically just how far behind all other industrial countries the United States lags in its support for families.” Hum.

That must be why we’re the only Western society with a birth rate at replacement level, 2.1 children per couple. France, Britain, Germany, even Canada are all below replacement rate. Parents there might enjoy great nannies, but they’re not having many children.

The Motherhood Manifesto tries to tell Americans how bad things are here, but if that’s true, why are we having a big fight over illegal immigration? At least 12 million people have voted with their feet. They’re so eager to live here they’re breaking our laws to do it.

These documentaries aim to frighten us, when there’s really nothing to fear. If we want to reform health care, we should harness the free market, not lash everyone into a government-run system. The government should be providing police and fire departments, but it shouldn’t be making medical decisions.

Simply put, Moore’s proposals, like his movies in general, are a prescription for disaster.

What War is Good For

By Ed Feulner
Friday, May 25, 2007

Americans are famously impatient -- and with good reason. Throughout our country’s existence, we’ve enjoyed steady progress. Indeed, we consider progress to be our birthright. Consequently, we’re almost always in a hurry to move forward.

Perhaps that’s why geopolitics often frustrates us.

When it comes to international relations -- whether at the United Nations or on the battlefield -- it’s often impossible to move ahead quickly, or even steadily. A small strategic gain is often followed by a long period with no progress. Sometimes we even need to look backward to see the way forward.

And that’s not the only contradiction geopolitics can generate. Sometimes we find ourselves, as in Iraq, “Making War to Keep Peace.” That’s the title of a new book the late Jeane Kirkpatrick finished shortly before her death last year.

Kirkpatrick was a master of the geopolitical scene, an art she’d honed during years as a professor before she became Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. She takes an in-depth look at the U.S.’s foreign interventions since 1991. She explains, for example, why the first Gulf War was a success while our involvement in Haiti wasn’t.

She admits that, while she supported President Bush’s post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan, she didn’t think the United States should invade Iraq in 2003. Yet, even though she wasn’t sold on the invasion, she strongly supported our right, under international law, to go into Iraq.

In fact, Kirkpatrick successfully argued just that before the United Nations Human Rights Commission. “The 2003 act of force on Iraq was not going to war,” she told delegates in Geneva. “It was, rather, the continuation of the 1991 Gulf War, and thus wholly permissible under the rule of law.”

She carried the day with that argument, because it’s correct. Iraq had spent some 12 years ignoring or violating U.N. Security Council resolutions. Meanwhile, the U.S. and our allies were fighting to enforce those resolutions. Our intervention in 2003 wasn’t an invasion as much as it was a change of tactics. Instead of “keeping Saddam Hussein in his box,” we finally decided to remove him.

And direct intervention was the only way to get rid of him. Kirkpatrick also writes that Saddam “was a ruthless ruler with a boundless appetite for power and an unlimited capacity for violence, a man who needed war like fire needs oxygen.”

By removing him, we’ve created the opportunity for change in Iraq. That country has now had three open elections and is operating under a constitution written by Iraqis. Its experiment with democracy may indeed fail, as Kirkpatrick feared. But it also may very well succeed.

Many want to set a firm timetable for Iraq. Both houses of Congress have tried to impose deadlines for our troops to come home, and even President Bush has admitted our country doesn’t have infinite patience.

But the war in Iraq won’t end as quickly as we’d like it to. It is, after all, part of the long war against radical Islamic fundamentalism, which Kirkpatrick correctly defines as “an ideology of expansionist tyranny, propelled by an unrelenting will to dominate other nations, cultures, and religions.”

It’s understandable that Americans want to exit Iraq swiftly. But we should realize we won’t be able to make much progress elsewhere if we don’t win in Iraq, where our troops continue the difficult task of making war to keep peace.

How to End 'Islamophobia'

The latest survey of American Muslims won't reassure their fellow citizens.

By Tawfik Hamid
Friday, May 25, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Islamic organizations regularly accuse non-Muslims of "Islamophobia," a fear and disdain for everything Islamic. On May 17, this accusation bubbled up again as foreign ministers from the Organization of the Islamic Conference called Islamophobia "the worst form of terrorism." These ministers also warned, according to the Arab News, that this form of discrimination would cause millions of Muslims in Western countries, "many of whom were already underprivileged," to be "further alienated."

In America, perhaps the most conspicuous organization to persistently accuse opponents of Islamophobia is the Council of American Islamic Relations. CAIR has taken up the legal case of the "Flying Imams," the six individuals who were pulled from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis this past November after engaging in suspicious behavior before takeoff. Not long ago, CAIR filed a "John Doe" lawsuit that would have made passengers liable for "malicious" complaints about suspicious Muslim passengers.

In an interview at the time, CAIR spokesman Nihad Awad accused Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) of being an "extremist" who "encourages Islamophobia" for pointing out what most people would think is obvious, that such a lawsuit would have a chilling effect on passengers who witnessed alarming activity and wished to report it. We can only assume that Mr. Awad believes flyers should passively remain in a state of fear as they travel and submissively risk their lives. In this case, Congress is acting appropriately and considering passing a law sponsored by Mr. King that would grant passengers immunity from such lawsuits.

It may seem bizarre, but Islamic reformers are not immune to the charge of "Islamophobia" either. For 20 years, I have preached a reformed interpretation of Islam that teaches peace and respects human rights. I have consistently spoken out--with dozens of other Muslim and Arab reformers--against the mistreatment of women, gays and religious minorities in the Islamic world. We have pointed out the violent teachings of Salafism and the imperative of Westerners to protect themselves against it.

Yet according to CAIR's Michigan spokeswoman, Zeinab Chami, I am "the latest weapon in the Islamophobe arsenal." If standing against the violent edicts of Shariah law is "Islamophobic," then I will treat her accusation as a badge of honor.


Muslims must ask what prompts this "phobia" in the first place. When we in the West examine the worldwide atrocities perpetrated daily in the name of Islam, it is vital to question if we--Muslims--should lay the blame on others for Islamophobia or if we should first look hard at ourselves.

According to a recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, "younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified." About one out of every four American Muslims under 30 think suicide bombing in defense of Islam is justified in at least some circumstances. Twenty-eight percent believe that Muslims did not carry out the 9/11 attacks and 32% declined to answer that question.

While the survey has been represented in the media as proof of moderation among American Muslims, the actual results should yield the opposite conclusion. If, as the Pew study estimates, there are 2.35 million Muslims in America, that means there are a substantial number of people in the U.S. who think suicide bombing is sometimes justified. Similarly, if 5% of American Muslims support al Qaeda, that's more than 100,000 people.

To bring an end to Islamophobia, we must employ a holistic approach that treats the core of the disease. It will not suffice to merely suppress the symptoms. It is imperative to adopt new Islamic teachings that do not allow killing apostates (Redda Law). Islamic authorities must provide mainstream Islamic books that forbid polygamy and beating women. Accepted Islamic doctrine should take a strong stand against slavery and the raping of female war prisoners, as happens in Darfur under the explicit canons of Shariah ("Ma Malakat Aimanikum"). Muslims should teach, everywhere and universally, that a woman's testimony in court counts as much as a man's, that women should not be punished if they marry whom they please or dress as they wish.


We Muslims should publicly show our strong disapproval for the growing number of attacks by Muslims against other faiths and against other Muslims. Let us not even dwell on 9/11, Madrid, London, Bali and countless other scenes of carnage. It has been estimated that of the two million refugees fleeing Islamic terror in Iraq, 40% are Christian, and many of them seek a haven in Lebanon, where the Christian population itself has declined by 60%. Even in Turkey, Islamists recently found it necessary to slit the throats of three Christians for publishing Bibles.

Of course, Islamist attacks are not limited to Christians and Jews. Why do we hear no Muslim condemnation of the ongoing slaughter of Buddhists in Thailand by Islamic groups? Why was there silence over the Mumbai train bombings which took the lives of over 200 Hindus in 2006? We must not forget that innocent Muslims, too, are suffering. Indeed, the most common murderers of Muslims are, and have always been, other Muslims. Where is the Muslim outcry over the Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq?

Islamophobia could end when masses of Muslims demonstrate in the streets against videos displaying innocent people being beheaded with the same vigor we employ against airlines, Israel and cartoons of Muhammad. It might cease when Muslims unambiguously and publicly insist that Shariah law should have no binding legal status in free, democratic societies.

It is well past time that Muslims cease using the charge of "Islamophobia" as a tool to intimidate and blackmail those who speak up against suspicious passengers and against those who rightly criticize current Islamic practices and preachings. Instead, Muslims must engage in honest and humble introspection. Muslims should--must--develop strategies to rescue our religion by combating the tyranny of Salafi Islam and its dreadful consequences. Among more important outcomes, this will also put an end to so-called Islamophobia.

Republicans should follow Elisabeth Hasselbeck's example

By Lorie Byrd
Friday, May 25, 2007

Earlier this week on the The View, token conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck spoke up so forcefully that Rosie O’Donnell resorted to playing the “big, fat lesbian” victim card. There are more than a few Republicans who should take a lesson from Hasselbeck.

I have been critical of Elisabeth Hasselbeck in the past for not making a strong enough case for conservatives on the daytime chat show. She signed onto a show that was not overly political in nature and it is understandable that she resisted for some time fully stepping into the role of speaking for conservatives. Well, that is certainly no longer the case. Hasselbeck has recently emerged as a strong conservative voice with not only what appears to be newfound passion, but she now appears to have spent some time educating herself about the issues, using that information to rebut some of the ridiculous claims made by O’Donnell. It wouldn’t kill Republicans to emulate her behavior.

On the Wednesday episode of The View the gloves finally came off and Hasselbeck stood up to O’Donnell for the following statement she made in the form of a rhetorical question on the show last week (transcript by Newsbusters.org):

O’DONNELL: I haven't -- I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?

HASSELBECK: Who are the terrorists?

O’DONNELL: 655,000 Iraqis -- I'm saying you have to look, we invaded --

HASSELBECK: Wait, who are you calling terrorists now? Americans?

O’DONNELL: I'm saying if you were in Iraq, and the other country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

This week the topic of O’Donnell’s insinuation that Americans are the terrorists came up again, but turned personal with O’Donnell stating her words had been twisted by those in the media. "Here's how it gets spun in the media. Rosie, big, fat lesbian, loud Rosie attacks innocent, pure Christian Elisabeth. And I'm not going to do it." She did continue the discussion with Hasselbeck, though, trying to change the subject to the personal. Hasselbeck did not let up in pressing O’Donnell to clarify what she meant by the original statement. The exchange became quite heated, continued through what should have been a commercial break, and the video of the exchange was replayed all over television and the internet for the following 24 hours.

It is a shame that it took Hasselbeck to ask O’Donnell to clarify the comment. I have previously written about how ABC has acted irresponsibly in letting O’Donnell spout ridiculous 9/11 conspiracy theories and other misleading and incorrect information to viewers of The View for quite a while now. Unfortunately, many in the media will not point out when untrue statements are made about Republicans. In fact, earlier in the same segment in which the now infamous showdown took place, co-host Joy Behar read a list of reasons President Bush should be impeached, including claiming that he “stole the election in 2000,” “killed the surplus with tax cuts” and “lied to us to get us into war.” It is up to conservatives to set the record straight any opportunity they get and regrettably most of them have been too silent for too long.

Myths are born when an untrue statement is repeated frequently enough, and loudly enough, that many come to believe the statement must be true because they have heard it said over and over again, usually with no refutation. For too long conservatives have allowed statements like Bush “stole the election” and “lied us into war” to be repeated with little if any opposition. When outrageous statements are first made it often seems unnecessary to bother refuting claims that are demonstrably untrue. That was the case with the kooky 9/11 “truther” claims that floated around the internet. The claims that the US government played a role in the 9/11 attacks were treated by most as something only tinfoil hat-wearing Bush haters could possibly believe and most (including me) chose not to dignify them by bothering to respond. Popular Mechanics debunked the various 9/11 conspiracy theories in book form, after all, and to most (again including me) it seemed unnecessary to bother pointing out something so obvious.

The truthers did not stop though. They continued to spread the 9/11 conspiracy theories and even enlisted the support of celebrities like Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell. What has been the result? Recent polls show that “Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure." The lesson we should learn from this is that any inaccurate claim that is made, regardless of how outrageous or seemingly unbelievable, must be vigorously refuted as loudly and frequently as possible, getting all available facts into the public arena so that such unfounded theories are not allowed to take hold in the first place. Conservatives cannot depend on those in the media to do this. Too often reporters simply give public figures a microphone to say anything they please, not offering any fact-checking whatsoever.

Rudy Giuliani gained headlines in the most recent GOP presidential debate for pouncing on and refuting Ron Paul’s claim that America invited the 9/11 attacks by “bombing Iraq for ten years.” These kinds of assertions should be vigorously debated, and when appropriate, discredited lest they gain unmerited credence. In the foreword to the Popular Mechanics book, Debunking 9/11 Myths – Why conspiracy theories can’t stand up to the facts, John McCain wrote: “We cannot let these tales go unanswered. The 9/11 conspiracy movement exploits the public’s anger and sadness. It shakes Americans’ faith in their government at a time when that faith is already at an all-time low. It traffics in ugly, unfounded accusations of extraordinary evil against fellow Americans...it is imperative to confront them with the facts.”

His words are applicable not only to the 9/11 conspiracies, but to other issues. Many in the anti-war movement are now trying to exploit the public’s anger and sadness over the war by spreading distortions and outright lies. Similar tactics have been successful in the past in exploiting the public’s discontent over the economy and other issues. Enough. It is time Republicans spoke out more forcefully and followed the recent example of Elisabeth Hasselbeck who decided enough was enough.

Dems Want You to Take a Hike

The hottest domestic issue of the next two years: taxes.

By Pete Du Pont
Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:01 a.m.

The hottest domestic political issue of the coming two years will be federal income taxes.

The Democratic Party is for a big tax increase, via repeal of the Bush tax cuts. Its three major presidential candidates are for it (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards voted against the 2003 Bush tax cuts and Barack Obama against their extension). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are for it. Bill Clinton is for it because he believes the 2003 Bush tax cuts were "way too big to avoid serious harm." And the party's newspaper, the New York Times, is for it, stating that the 2003 tax cuts were "economically unsound" and would "increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars."

Republicans, arguing that the 2003 tax cuts have helped the economy grow, created jobs, increased federal tax revenues, and thus reduced federal deficits, are mostly against raising tax rates.


So what are the facts? Did the tax rate reductions of the Bush administration spur or diminish economic growth? Grow or diminish federal tax revenues? Were they good or bad economic policy?

Economic indicators show that since the 2003 tax cuts the GDP has grown an inflation-adjusted average of 3.3% a year, and eight million new jobs have been created over 44 consecutive months of job growth. Unemployment has fallen 25%, from 6.1% to 4.5%, with strong declines across all ethnic groups. Productivity growth has expanded 2.8% a year since 2001, outstripping the past three decades' average. So according to all these economic indices, the 2003 tax cuts have strengthened the American economy.

The tax cuts have also produced substantial tax revenue increases--14.5% growth in 2005 and 11.7% in 2006. For the first seven months of the current fiscal year, total revenues were up 11.3% over last year, and individual income tax receipts were up by 17.5%. Total tax receipts in April were $70 billion higher than in April 2006.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Joint Tax Commission estimated that a reduction in the capital gains rate to 15% from 20%, which was passed in 2003, would cost the U.S. Treasury some $5.4 billion over three years. But actual revenues exceeded expectations by $133 billion, so the government profited substantially from our strong economy and the tax rate reduction. In fact, the tax cuts have actually expanded revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product. Over the past 40 years, federal tax receipts have accounted for 18.3% of GDP. That figure was 18.4% in 2006, and the CBO projects it at 18.6% in the current fiscal year.

These revenue increases have also had a positive impact on the federal deficit. Since the 2003 tax cuts the deficit has declined from $413 billion (3.5% of GDP) in fiscal 2004, to $318 billion in 2005, then $248 billion in 2006, and an estimated $150 billion to $200 billion (1.1% to 1.5% of GDP) in the current fiscal year.

Lower tax rates have also produced another important economic change: fewer and shorter recessions. As economist Brian Westbury noted in the Wall Street Journal last month, in "the high-tax, highly regulated years between 1969 and 1982 the economy was in recession 32% of the time. Since then, following Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, and deregulation . . . the U.S. economy has only been in recession 5% of the time."

So Bill Clinton and the New York Times have it backwards; there was serious economic improvement, rather than harm, produced by the tax cuts, and the deficit decreased rather than increased. The truth is that tax rate reductions have been good for the American economy and the American people.


With these facts in front of it, what does the new Democratic Congressional majority plan to do? Why, of course, raise income tax rates so that they can expand the size, scope, and reach of government, never mind that tax increases will slow the economy and reduce job growth. The Pelosi-Reid majority plans to do it now, and it will surely be done again if there is a liberal Democrat in the White House two years from now.

If House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel has his way, the Congress will increase taxes on the wealthy and enact tax reductions for the middle class by raising the threshold for taxpayers subject to the alternative minimum tax.

The AMT was enacted in 1969 to raise taxes on the wealthiest people, but since it was not indexed to inflation it impacts a large group of middle class families. While only 100 or so wealthy people were affeced in its first year, three million people were within the scope of the AMT in 2006, and unless Congress does something, 25 million may be liable this year. Mr. Rangel's plan would exempt families making less than $250,000 per year (98% of taxpayers) from the AMT

But that would be expensive--reducing revenues by around $50 billion a year, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. Under the House "pay as you go" rule, tax cuts must be "paid for" by other tax increases or spending cuts, so if the Congress were running $50 billion annual shortfalls as a result of the Rangel tax cuts, where would the money to balance the budget come from? From the top 2% of taxpayers. Mr. Rangel proposes to raise the top AMT rate for those making more than $500,000 to 31.5% from 28%, and the capital gains and dividend rates for people subject to the AMT to 31.5% from 15%.

Mr. Rangel has economic policy backward. instead of looking for higher tax rates to raise the money to pay for some AMT elimination and add and expand government programs, it would be better to reduce spending to cover the necessary $50 billion per year-- less than 2% of the federal government's nearly $3 trillion in annual spending.

Imposing punishing tax rates to fund increased spending would suffocate investment and ultimately slow the cash machine that provides the needed federal revenues. With such a tax policy American people of every economic strata will no longer enjoy the benefits of an expanding economy, because that economy will be slowly spiraling into decline.

The Amnesty Fraud: Part III

By Thomas Sowell
Thursday, May 24, 2007

Whose problem is the immigration bill in Congress supposed to solve? The country's problem with dangerously porous borders? The illegal immigrants' problem? Or politicians' problems?

It has been painfully clear for years that the country's problem with insecure borders and floods of foreigners who remain a foreign -- and growing -- part of the American population has the lowest priority of the three.

Virtually every step -- even token steps -- that Congress and the administration have taken toward securing the border has been backed into under pressure from the voters.

The National Guardsmen who were sent to the border but not assigned to guard the border, the 700-mile fence on paper that has become the two-mile fence in practice, and the existing "tough" penalties for the crime of crossing the border illegally that in practice mean turning the illegal border crossers loose so that they can try, try again -- such actions speak louder than words.

The new immigration bill that supposedly secures the borders first, before starting the process of legalizing the illegal immigrants, in fact does nothing of the sort.

It sets up various programs and procedures -- but does not wait to see if they in fact reduce the flow of illegal immigrants before taking the irrevocable step of making American citizenship available to 12 million people who came here illegally.

This solves the problem of those illegal immigrants who want to get citizenship. The steps that they have to go through allow politicians to say that this is not amnesty because these are "tough" requirements.

But, whether these requirements are "tough" or not, and regardless of how they are enforced or not, there is nothing to say that the 12 million people here illegally have to start the process of becoming citizens.

Those who do not choose to become citizens -- which may well be the majority of illegal immigrants -- face no more prospect of being punished for the crime of entering the country illegally than they do now.

With the focus now shifted to the process of getting citizenship, those illegal immigrants who just want to stay and make some money without being bothered to become part of American society can be forgotten, along with their crime.

This bill gets the issue off the table and out of the political spotlight. That solves the problem of politicians who want to mollify American voters in general without risking the loss of the Hispanic vote.

The Hispanic vote can be expected to become larger and larger as the new de facto amnesty can be expected to increase the number of illegal border crossers, just as the previous -- and honestly labeled -- amnesty bill of 1986 led to a quadrupling of the number of illegals.

The larger the Hispanic vote becomes, the less seriously are the restrictive features of the immigration bill likely to be enforced.

The growth of the illegal population is irreversible but the means of controlling the growth of illegals are quite reversible, both de facto through the watering down of the enforcement of "tough" requirements and de jure through later repeals of requirements deemed too "tough."

One of the remarkable aspects of the proposed immigration "reform" is its provisions for cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Employers are to be punished for not detecting and excluding illegal immigrants, when the government itself is derelict in doing so.

Employers not only lack expertise in law enforcement, they can be sued for "discrimination" by any of the armies of lawyers who make such lawsuits their lucrative specialty.

But no penalties are likely to be enforced against state and local politicians who openly declare "sanctuary" for illegal immigrants. Officials sworn to uphold the law instead forbid the police to report the illegal status of immigrants to federal officials when these illegals are arrested for other crimes.

This is perfectly consistent for a bill that seeks above all to solve politicians' problems, not the country's.

Is Sky Falling on America?

By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 24, 2007

The suicide-murders and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan sicken Americans. Soon-to-be nuclear Iran seems loonier than nuclear North Korea. American debt keeps piling up in China and Japan. And we think of angry Venezuela, the Middle East and Russia every time we fill up - if we can afford to fill up.

Then listen to Al Gore on global warming. Or hear Jimmy Carter on the current president. The common denominator is American "decline."

Books by liberals assure us that our "empire" is kaput. Brace for the inevitable fate of Rome. Conservatives are just as glum. For them, we are also Romans - but the more decadent variety, eaten away from the inside.

In response, many bored Americans turn instead to the la-la land of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Yet American Cassandras are old stuff. Grim Charles Lindberg in the late 1930s lectured a Depression-era America that Hitler's new order in Germany could only be appeased, never opposed.

After World War II, it wasn't long before the Soviet Union ended our short-lived status as sole nuclear superpower. And when Eastern Europe and China were lost to communism, it was proof, for many, that democratic capitalism was passé. "We will bury you," Nikita Khrushchev promised us.

After the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, America proclaimed itself at the "end of history" - meaning that the spread of our style of democratic capitalism was now inevitable. Now a mere 16 years later, some are just as sure we approach our own end.

But our rivals are weaker and America is far stronger than many think.

Take oil. With oil prices at nearly $70 a barrel, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez seem invincible as they rally anti-American feeling.

But if we find alternate energy sources, or reduce slightly our oil hunger, we can defang all three rather quickly. None of their countries have a middle class or a culture of entrepreneurship to discover and disseminate new knowledge.

Russia and Europe are shrinking. China is an aging nation of only children. The only thing the hard-working Chinese fear more than their bankrupt communist dictatorship is getting rid of it.

True, the economies of China and India have made amazing progress. But both have rocky rendezvous ahead with all the social and cultural problems that we long ago addressed in the 20th century.

And European elites can't blame their problems - a bullying Russia, Islamic terrorists, unassimilated minorities and high unemployment - all on George Bush's swagger and accent. The recent elections of Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France suggest that Europe's cheap anti-Americanism may be ending, and that our practices of more open markets, lower taxes and less state control are preferrable to the European status quo.

In truth, a never-stronger America is being tested as never before. The world is watching whether we win or lose in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Middle East is either going to reform or remain an oil-rich tribal mess that endangers the entire world.

A better way to assess our chances at maintaining our preeminence is simply to ask the same questions that are the historical barometers of our nation's success or failure: Does any nation have a constitution comparable to ours? Does merit - or religion, tribe or class - mostly gauge success or failure in America? What nation is as free, stable and transparent as the U.S.?

Try becoming a fully accepted citizen of China or Japan if you were not born Chinese or Japanese. Try running for national office in India from the lower caste. Try writing a critical op-ed in Russia or hiring a brilliant female to run a mosque, university or hospital in most of the Middle East. Ask where MRI scans, Wal-Mart, iPods, the Internet or F-18s came from.

In the last 60 years, we have been warned in succession that new paradigms in racially pure Germany, the Soviet workers' paradise, Japan Inc. and now 24/7 China all were about to displace the United States. None did. All have had relative moments of amazing success - but in the end none proved as resilient, flexible and adaptable as America.

That brings us to the United States' greatest strength: radical self-critique. We Americans are worrywarts, always believing we're on the verge of extinction. And so, to "renew," "reinvent" or "save" America, we whip ourselves up about "wars" on poverty, drugs and cancer; space "races;" missile "gaps;" literacy "crusades;" and "campaigns" against litter, waste and smoking.

In other words, we nail-biters have always been paranoid that we must change and improve in order to survive. And thus we usually do - just in time.

'I Love Those Guys'

Embedded journalists in Iraq are having their minds changed left and right by U.S. soldiers.

By Jeff Emanuel
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Operation Iraqi Freedom saw the advent of a practice that revolutionized modern war reporting: the embedding of journalists with frontline combat units in war. This practice gave the media, the American public and the world unprecedented access to the soldiers on the front lines, as well as to the war itself, through the filing of stories, photographs and video from the battlefront in real time, by reporters who were right there with the soldiers doing the fighting. "We were offered an irresistible opportunity: free transportation to the front line of the war, dramatic pictures, dramatic sounds, great quotes," said Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio. "Who can pass that up?"

While the military also benefited from having an eager outlet for its stories and successes, the biggest result of the embedding process was the shift it caused in the relationship between the military and the media, which laid the groundwork for a fundamental change in the dynamics of war reporting. As Maj. Gen. Buford Blount of the Army's Third Infantry Division explained, "A level of trust developed between the soldier and the media that offered nearly unlimited access."

Despite the obvious benefits of embedded reportage, though, the practice has met with its share of (expected) criticism from members of the Fourth Estate. Beginning even before Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off, media spokesmen and others--such as University of Texas professor Robert Jensen--expressed concern that "embedded reporters would inevitably become too sympathetic to the troops with whom they were traveling." Theories were put forth that this was a "primary motivation on the part of military planners in designing the embedded system in the first place," and that the U.S. government was simply taking the approach of "feed the media beast enough stories that cast U.S. troops in the best possible light and the job of managing the media message is all but taken care of."

The latter is, of course, an absurdly simplistic notion. Rather than simply sitting back and receiving dispatches and releases carefully crafted to "cast U.S. troops in the best possible light," embedded reporters, by the very nature of their task, see the troops with whom they are living, working, and experiencing danger at all times--the good, the bad, the heroic, the angry, the emotional and the rest of the entire human spectrum. The former, though, does ring true to a degree; the debate on that count, then, is whether or not that is actually a bad thing.


While I was at the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad on my recent trip to Iraq, a pair of Spanish journalists--a newspaper reporter and a photojournalist--walked in, fresh from their embed with the 1-4 Cavalry of the First Infantry Division (the unit with which I embedded only days later). They had spent two weeks amongst the troops there, living and going on missions with them, including house-to-house searches and seizures, and their impressions of these soldiers were extremely clear.

"Absolutely amazing," said David Beriain, the reporter (and the one who spoke English), said of the young Cavalry troops. "In Spain, it is embarrassing--our soldiers are ashamed to be in the army. These young men--and they seem so young!--are so proud of what they do, and do it so well, even though it is dangerous and they could very easily be killed." Mr. Beriain explained that the company he had been embedded with had lost three men in the span of six days while he was there--one to a sniper and two to improvised explosive devices, both of which had blown armored Humvees into the air and flipped them onto their roofs. Despite this, he said, and despite some of the things they might have said in the heat of the moment after seeing another comrade die, the soldiers' resolve and morale was unshaken in the long term, and they remained committed to carrying out their mission to the best of their ability for the duration of their tours in Iraq.

It was in the process of performing that mission, of coping with the loss of loved ones, and of just being themselves as American soldiers that these young men were able to win over the admiration and affection of more than one journalist who had arrived in their midst harboring a less-than-positive opinion of the Iraq war, and of those who were tasked with prosecuting it.

"I love those guys," Mr. Beriain said, looking wistfully out the window of the media cloister in the Green Zone that is the Combined Press Information Center. "From the first time you go kick a door with them, they accept you--you're one of them. I've even got a 'family photo' with them" to remember them by. "I really hated to leave."

Such a radical transformation--and such a strong bond of affection--can rarely be forged in so little time outside of the constant, universal peril of a wartime environment. "It is those common experiences," Mr. Beriain explained, "where you are all in danger, and you go through it together. It builds a relationship instantly."

It doesn't matter how skeptical of the war a journalist might be, according to an Army public affairs officer who spoke with me about it on condition of anonymity. "So often, they come out of that experience and--even if their opinion of the war hasn't changed--they're completely won over by the troops."

"I was one of those," admitted Mr. Beriain, speaking broken English and blinking away tears. "No matter what you think of the war, or what has happened here, you cannot be around the soldiers and not be completely affected. They are amazing people, and they represent themselves and the Army better than anyone could ever imagine." A retired Army officer concurred, telling me that "young troops are some of the best goodwill ambassadors we've ever produced. It would never occur to one to not tell you what he's really thinking, and they are so earnest" that it is almost impossible not to be won over by them if given enough time.


The most spectacular recent case of a journalist with an antiwar mindset being completely overwhelmed into a change of heart by American soldiers, according to the public affairs officer, was a Greek public television reporter who had been embedded with an infantry unit that became entrenched in a 45-minute firefight with insurgents. Yanked out of the line of fire by a soldier who put the journalist's life above his own, he waited under cover and in fear of his life for the almost hourlong duration of the battle, with the best view possible of American soldiers in action against an armed and murderous enemy. He credits his having lived to tell the tale directly to those young troops.

"He had tears in his eyes as he talked about it," said the public affairs officer. "He just kept saying, 'They saved my life, they saved my life. . . . These are great men; they are heroes.' Even after telling it several times, he couldn't get through the story without choking up--and this was a man who had arrived here with all of the disdain for the Iraq mission and for the American soldiers who he [like seemingly most Europeans] had seen as the bad guys in this fight."

While embedding may be decried by some for causing journalists, who claim the utopian titles of "objective" and "neutral" for their reportage, to lose their cold detachment and actually begin to see the soldiers they live alongside as humans, it is that very quality that makes the practice of embedding reporters with military units so beneficial to both parties. Rather than observing events from a safely detached distance--and thus being able to remove the human element from the equation--embedded reporters are forced to face up to the humanity of their subjects, and to share common experiences--often of the life-and-death variety--with those they are covering.

Human nature being what it is, such close working conditions, and such common, life-threatening experiences, will have an effect on both parties involved--and it is a testament both to the soldiers themselves, and to the journalists who volunteer to live and work alongside them, that that effect has, in so many cases, been so positive.

Vive La France! What the French can Teach us

By Paul Greenberg
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Any American wondering what this year's presidential election in France can teach us need only recall this country's back in 1980. That was the last year of the steady demoralization of American politics known as the Carter administration. It was the year the American electorate finally had had enough, and made a U-turn. In the right direction.

The French have been in decline even longer under Jacques Chirac, who by the time he left office had become as irrelevant as Jimmy Carter during the final year of his ever shrinking presidency. The French were ready for a change - just as Americans were in 1980, when Ronald Reagan came along radiating what was then a strange new sensation in American politics: optimism.

It is hard, thank goodness, to recapture the general sense of hopelessness that marked the American mood in 1980. How describe it? It was a most un-American mix of entropy and the acceptance of it. Around the globe, this country was in retreat and, worse, being told by its president to get used to it. According to Jimmy Carter, Americans needed to get over our "inordinate fear of communism" - even while Soviet proxies, including large numbers of Cuban mercenaries, were spreading out all over the Third World.

Dispensing with any intermediaries, the Soviets themselves had just invaded Afghanistan - with little or no opposition at the time. Meanwhile, the American hostages in Teheran were deep into their captivity. And there was no sign they'd be released as long as the mullahs had nothing to fear from Washington.

At home, the Carter touch was evident everywhere, like one big smudge. There was the double-digit inflation that gave the economy a positively South American flavor. Unemployment hovered around 7 percent, and interest rates topped 20 percent. Gasoline lines came to be expected. Americans, especially the more sophisticated sort, were starting to accept malaise as the natural order of things. Stagflation, it was called.

When he dared suggest that the country could stage a comeback at home and abroad, Ronald Reagan was either denounced as a dangerous radical or dismissed as some kind of dolt - "an amiable dunce," Democratic eminence Clark Clifford would call him. He was amiable, all right, but no dunce.

In the last year of the Carter collapse, there was little but a general dispiritedness left. No wonder the American electorate voted for change.

This year, so did the French. Despite a destructive multi-party electoral system that usually defeats any hope of national consensus, this year French voters were actually given something like a straight choice between left and right - and flocked to the right.

In Nicolas ("The American") Sarkozy, the French went for a presidential candidate who promised to revive values like "work, authority, morality, respect and merit." How Reaganesque.

What's more, the winner openly proclaimed himself a friend of America even in these trying times, when the only unifying ethos Europeans can claim is anti-Americanism.

This was the year the French finally had had it with their long slow decline into mediocrity and below. The triumph of Nicolas Sarkozy represents their Ronald Reagan moment, their Margaret Thatcher turnaround. At least let's hope so.

It won't be easy rousing France out of its own version of Carterism. The symptoms are all there-the 9 percent unemployment rate (22 percent for able-bodied persons under the age of 24), the welfare programs the state can less and less afford even as they sap individual initiative, the cultural miasma styled multiculturalism, the growing ring of slums reserved for Muslim immigrants around every big city, the rising crime rate and sporadic rioting to all of which the powers that be responded with little more than a Gallic shrug.

At the center of the French slide has been the disintegration of the family: From 1970 to 2005, the divorce rate in France went from 12 percent to almost 40 percent; 20 percent of all French couples are unwed; a third of all French mothers live alone; 40 percent of all French children are born to unmarried couples and so sadly on. (Sound familiar?)

Christianity, whether the Catholic or Protestant variety, has faded as an influence in France, as it has all over Western Europe, while the old secular faiths, chief among them communism and socialism, have lost their appeal, too.

Nicholas Sarkozy, a tough-talking minister of the interior in the previous government, has his work cut out for him and the odds stacked against him. But they said Reagan and Thatcher wouldn't change things, either, just before both did. Dramatically.

By their votes, the French have said they're ready to reverse course, but being ready for change and actually changing are two different things. It's one thing to prescribe strong medicine, another to take it.

Whatever the difficulties ahead for France, there is a new sense of hope in the air, a feeling of renewed confidence. As if the French were about to have, to use Ronald Reagan's phrase, a new beginning.

How strange, then, that just as Old Europe becomes new again, our own newly elected Congress proposes to reverse the Reagan Revolution. Capital gains would be taxed heavily again, ignoring a lesson that has been taught again and again since the Kennedy round of tax cuts: The lower the tax rates on capital, the more jobs it produces - and the more government revenue. (April's federal tax revenues were the highest of any month in American history, up 11 percent over the previous year.)

But under the Democrats' proposed new budget, the economic boom that the Bush tax cuts have fueled could be cut short, smothered by higher tax rates.

Just as the French awaken from the old nostrums that have made their economy one of the sickest in Europe, here a new Congress seems determined to adopt them here. Yes, strange. And dangerous.

Standing Up Against The Anti-Police Axis

By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

On May 11, in Franconia, New Hampshire, 48-year-old police Cpl. Bruce McKay pulled over a 24-year-old, longhaired ne'er-do-well named Liko Kenney for speeding. The two had met before -- in 2003, Kenney pled guilty to assaulting McKay during an arrest.

Now, Kenney blithely informed McKay that he would prefer to deal with another officer. Then he drove off. McKay quickly followed in his patrol vehicle. About a mile down the road, he forced Kenney off the road, then pepper-sprayed Kenney to subdue him.

Kenney then pulled out a handgun and shot McKay four times. As McKay staggered toward his vehicle to call for help, Kenney drove over him with his car, killing him.

Ex-Marine Gregory Floyd, passing the murder site in his car, saw what was happening. He stopped his vehicle, grabbed McKay's gun and shot Kenney to death.

McKay was a solid police officer, the father of a 9-year-old girl. He was scheduled to marry his fiancee in July. Kenney was a hippie with violent tendencies -- his own aunt took out a restraining order against him.

Yet the town of Franconia, New Hampshire is split over the McKay homicide and the Kenney death. "It's a tragic situation -- two men lost and two families devastated," mourned local store-owner Steve Heath. Local florist Jean McClean called McKay's murder "vigilante justice."

In Los Angeles, a continent away, pro-illegal immigration activists continue to flay the Los Angeles Police Department. On May Day, illegal immigration advocates held two large rallies. The first rally proceeded without a hitch. The second rally, attended by 10,000 people in the Mexican gang-infested MacArthur Park area, devolved into chaos around 6 p.m.

Protesters began throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, refusing to disperse after ordered to do so. Local teenagers -- likely gang members -- began obstructing streets with plastic garbage cans. Some threw material at cars; one threw a hubcap, while another bashed at a bus with a piece of wood. Members of the LAPD responded by advancing on the protesters, firing foam bullets into the unruly crowd and restrainedly batoning resistant protesters. No one was seriously injured.

Nonetheless, allegations of police brutality followed immediately on the heels of the protest. Leading the charge against the LAPD was Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. On May 17, Villaraigosa spoke at another MacArthur Park rally. "We're here because we love this great country and we want to share in the American dream," Villaraigosa stated in Spanish. "Only with justice can we get to peace." LAPD Chief William Bratton has already reassigned the two ranking officers at the rally.

In the 1960s, counterculture anti-war protesters routinely labeled police officers "pigs." Today, the counterculture has become part of the legitimate culture. An alliance has formed between those who wish to break the law and their former-hippie enablers. And that alliance is hell bent on crippling police officers' ability to protect and serve the public.

Americans are rightly cautious with regard to police power -- no one wants to see brutality become the rule rather than the exception. But the answer isn't castrating the police every time a violent protester meets the business end of a foam bullet. In the wake of the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal, the LAPD hobbled itself, adopting insanely restrictive self-policing standards that devastated morale and recruitment. Predictably, gang activity flourished.

No other group of people endures the level of hatred police officers do; none acts with more honor under fire. But we cannot expect the police to pursue crime with alacrity if we cut their Achilles tendon. Sympathizing with cop killers is cutting the Achilles tendon. Throwing officers under the bus for responding to violence is cutting the Achilles tendon. There will be no one left to protect and serve if we continue to watch idly as anti-police radicals sharpen their scalpels.

The Amnesty Fraud: Part II

By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Every aspect of the current immigration bill, and of the arguments made for it, has Fraud written all over it.

The first, and perhaps biggest, fraud is the argument that illegal aliens are "doing jobs Americans won't do." There are no such jobs.

Even in the sector of the economy in which illegal immigrants have the highest representation -- agriculture -- they are just 24 percent of the workers. Where did the other 76 percent come from, if these are jobs that Americans won't do?

The argument that illegal agricultural workers are "making a contribution to the economy" is likewise misleading.

For well over half a century, this country has had chronic agricultural surpluses which have cost the taxpayers billions of dollars a year to buy, store, and try to get rid of on the world market at money-losing prices.

If there were fewer agricultural workers and smaller agricultural surpluses, the taxpayers would save money.

What about illegal immigrants working outside of agriculture? They are a great bargain for their employers, because they are usually hard-working people who accept low pay and don't cause any trouble on the job.

But they are no bargain for the taxpayers who cover their medical bills, the education of their children and the costs of imprisoning those who commit a disproportionate share of crime.

Analogies with immigrants who came to this country in the 19th century and early 20th century are hollow, and those who make such analogies must know how different the situation is today.

People who crossed an ocean to get here, many generations ago, usually came here to become Americans. There were organized efforts within their communities, as well as in the larger society around them, to help them assimilate.

Today, there are activists working in just the opposite direction, to keep foreigners foreign, to demand that society adjust to them by making everything accessible to them in their own language, minimizing their need to learn English.

As activists are working hard to keep alive a foreign subculture in so-called "bilingual" and other programs, they are also feeding the young especially with a steady diet of historic grievances about things that happened before the immigrants got here -- and before they were born.

These Balkanization efforts are joined by other Americans as part of the "multicultural" ideology that pervades the education system, the media, and politics.

The ease with which people can move back and forth between the United States and Mexico -- as contrasted with those who made a one-way trip across the Atlantic in earlier times -- reduces still further the likelihood that these new immigrants will assimilate and become an integral part of the American society as readily as many earlier immigrants did.

Claims that the new immigration bill will have "tough" requirements, including learning English, have little credibility in view of the way existing laws are not being enforced.

What does "learning English" mean? I can say "arrivederci" and "buongiorno" but does that mean that I speak Italian?

Does anyone expect a serious effort to require a real knowledge of English from a government that captures people trying to enter the country illegally and then turns them loose inside the United States with instructions to report back to court -- which of course they are not about to do?

Another fraudulent argument for the new immigration bill is that it would facilitate the "unification of families." People can unify their families by going back home to them. Otherwise every illegal immigrant accepted can mean a dozen relatives to follow.

"What can we do with the 12 million people already here illegally?" is the question asked by amnesty supporters. We can stop them from becoming 40 million or 50 million, the way 3 million illegals became 12 million after the previous amnesty.

The most fundamental question of all has not been asked: Who should decide how many people, with what qualifications and prospects, are to be admitted into this country? Is that decision supposed to be made by anyone in Mexico who wants to come here?

The American Liberal Liberties Union

The ACLU is becoming very selective about what it considers "free" speech.

By Wendy Kaminer
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 12:01 a.m.

"ACLU Defends Nazi's Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters," the humor magazine The Onion announced in 1999. Those of us who loved the ACLU, and celebrated its willingness to defend the rights of Nazis and others who had no regard for our rights, considered the joke a compliment. Today it's more like a reproach. Once the nation's leading civil liberties group and a reliable defender of everyone's speech rights, the ACLU is being transformed into just another liberal human-rights group that reliably defends the rights of liberal speakers.

This transformation is gradual, unacknowledged and not readily apparent, since evidence of it lies mainly in cases the ACLU does not take. It's naturally easier to know what an organization is doing (and advertising) than what it is not doing. But a review of recent free-speech press releases turns up only a handful of cases in which ACLU state affiliates defended the rights of conservative, antigay or otherwise politically incorrect speakers. And lately the national organization has been remarkably quiet in several important free-speech cases and controversies.

One of the clearest indications of a retreat from defending all speech regardless of content is the ACLU's virtual silence in Harper v. Poway, an important federal case involving a high-school student's right to wear a T-shirt condemning homosexuality. Of course, the ACLU doesn't speak out on every case, but historically it has vigorously defended student speech rights, as its Web site stresses. It is currently representing a student in a speech case before the Supreme Court, Morse v. Frederick (involving the right of a student to carry a nonsensical "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner at an off-campus event). The ACLU pays particular attention to the right to wear T-shirts with pro-gay messages in school, proudly citing cases in which it represented students wearing pro-gay (as well as anti-Bush) T-shirts. This year, the ACLU awarded a Youth Activist Scholarship to a student who fought the efforts of her school to bar students from wearing T-shirts that said "Gay, Fine by me."

So in 2004, when Tyler Chase Harper was disciplined for wearing a T-shirt declaring his religious objections to homosexuality, civil libertarians might have expected the ACLU to protest loudly. Mr. Harper was barred from attending classes when he wore the antigay T-shirt to school on an official "Day of Silence," when gay students taped their mouths to symbolize the silencing effect of intolerance. Represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, he sued the school district. That same year, the ACLU initiated the first of two actions against a Missouri school that punished students for wearing "gay supportive T-shirts," eventually securing a promise from the school to "stop censoring," the ACLU Web site boasts. Mr. Harper, however, was unsuccessful in his quest to stop school censorship. In a patronizing, antilibertarian decision in which Judge Stephen Reinhardt stressed the imagined feelings of gay students, the Ninth Circuit rejected Mr. Harper's First Amendment claims. (There was a sharp dissent from Judge Alex Kozinski.)

Perhaps the ACLU was observing its own prolonged Day of Silence, because, while it pays close attention to federal appellate court decisions on civil liberties, it effectively ignored this terrible precedent, even when Mr. Harper appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case as moot because Mr. Harper had graduated but took the unusual step of vacating the decision so that it no longer exists as precedent (no thanks to the ACLU). Mr. Harper's younger sister, still in school, continued pressing his claims and her case is pending before the Ninth circuit. The ACLU has not adopted her cause either.

The Harpers didn't need representation from the ACLU. But the organization frequently speaks up for the rights of people it does not represent, like Guantanamo detainees, and often files amicus briefs in important civil liberties cases. Given its focus on student rights and religious liberty (one of the ACLU's priorities), it's hard to explain the ACLU's apparent equanimity about the violation of Mr. Harper's First Amendment rights--unless you consider the content of his speech.


This case does not appear to be anomalous. Despite its professed commitment to religious liberty, for example, the ACLU tends to absent itself from cases on college campuses involving the associational rights of Christian student groups to discriminate against gay students, in accordance with their religious beliefs. But conservative students might be grateful for the ACLU's absence. Consider its intervention in a successful federal court challenge to an unconstitutional speech code at Georgia Tech, brought by the Alliance Defense Fund in 2006 on behalf of two conservative religious students. The ACLU of Georgia filed an amicus brief proposing a substitute but still overbroad "antiharassment" policy that included a prohibition on "injurious communications . . . directed toward an individual because of their characteristics or beliefs." In other words: Students should be punished for sharply criticizing or satirizing each other's beliefs if their remarks are deemed "injurious." Occasionally an ACLU affiliate does intervene in defense of politically incorrect speech and vigorous debate on campus. But the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education has become a much more reliable advocate for the rights of all college students, regardless of ideology or religion. (I serve on both FIRE's advisory board and the board of the Massachusetts ACLU affiliate.)

The ACLU was even AWOL in one of the most visible and frightening free-speech controversies in recent years--the Muhammad cartoons, which many condemned as "hate speech." When Muslim groups violently protested the cartoons (first published in the Danish press), when American newspapers declined to publish them for fear of reprisals, and when the U.S. State Department condemned their publication--the ACLU exercised its right to remain silent. In fact, its press office actually advised ducking questions about the cartoons that might arise during discussions of torture at Abu Ghraib. A set of talking points from the press office recommended responding to questions about the cartoons by exhorting the U.S. government to "demonstrate . . . that it is taking the Abu Ghraib images seriously." (This was later spun as an effort to stay on message about abuses at Abu Ghraib.)

Not until an ACLU donor complained about this silence on the cartoon controversy, and questions about it were raised before the ACLU board, did ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero speak up--quietly. He mentioned the controversy in a relatively obscure dinner speech to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He sent a letter to the University of Illinois urging it not to discipline student editors who published the cartoons in a campus paper. In a letter to the ACLU board, Mr. Romero both denied and defended the ACLU's relative silence: "With regard to the cartoons, rather than put out a hortatory statement that no one would read (except insiders) but might make us feel good about ourselves, we have tried to engage in thoughtful forums and discussions that relate to the issue. Speaking out on an issue involves more than slapping a paragraph together and posting it on a website."

Perhaps. But, like other advocacy groups, the ACLU routinely circulates hortatory statements to insiders that herald the organization's important work. And it regularly posts slapped-together paragraphs on the ACLU Web site (and in emails) about the abuses of the Bush administration, among other subjects. In fact, much of the ACLU's post 9/11 work (and its budget priorities) involves public education. Whatever Mr. Romero's reasons for staying out of the cartoon controversy, they did not include disdain for paying lip service to free speech.

Why did the ACLU avoid issuing a loud and clear public statement decrying violent efforts to suppress the Muhammad cartoons? Its silence may have reflected growing sympathy among ACLU leaders and supporters for restricting what many liberals condemn as hate speech. "Take hate speech," Mr. Romero remarked to the New York Times in May 2006. "While believing in free speech, we do not believe in or condone speech that attacks minorities." (He was commenting on a proposal to bar board members from criticizing the ACLU--a proposal that was amended only after being exposed in the Times.)


Liberal sympathy for restricting hate speech may also explain the failure of the New York Civil Liberties Union to oppose the New York City Council's recent, symbolic moratorium on use of the n-word. NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman justified her silence to the New York Times, explaining that, "The Council is entitled to a point of view. It would be an entirely different matter if the Council was considering a law to ban use of the n-word." But this ignores the natural tendency of an official, symbolic ban on speech to encourage support for an actual ban. If the City Council passed a symbolic resolution denouncing flag burning or criticizing the president, I'd bet my yearly contribution to the ACLU that Ms. Lieberman would oppose it vociferously.

Finally, the ACLU has affirmatively supported legislative restrictions on speech it does not like, even when it is clearly political. Last March, the ACLU announced its support for a bill introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) aimed at barring antiabortion centers from advertising "abortion counseling" services. While some crisis pregnancy centers that offer abortion counseling can fairly be accused of engaging in a bait and switch (trying to lure women seeking abortions into counseling sessions with antiabortion advocates), they're also engaged in political speech at the core of First Amendment protections. Not surprisingly, the ACLU's endorsement of legislation restricting this speech generated controversy when it was reported in the New York Sun. How did ACLU leaders respond? The press release announcing support for the Maloney bill was deleted from the ACLU Web site. Today, one year later, the national board is seriously considering adopting a policy on commercial speech that would support restrictions on advertising by nonprofit antiabortion clinics.

This is not the same organization that once took pride in its costly, principled decision to defend the rights of neo-Nazis to march in a community of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Of course the ACLU hasn't definitively abandoned its defense of speech: Large, national organizations change incrementally. But people should no longer depend on the ACLU to defend what they preach (especially at a cost), if it disapproves of what they practice.

The Amnesty Fraud

By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Nothing is more common than political "solutions" to immediate problems which create much bigger problems down the road. The current immigration bill in the Senate is a classic example.

The big talking point of those who want to legalize the illegal immigrants currently in the United States is to say that it is "unrealistic" to round up and deport 12 million people.

Back in 1986 it was "unrealistic" to round up and deport the 3 million illegal immigrants in the United States then. So they were given amnesty -- honestly labeled, back then -- which is precisely why there are now 12 million illegal immigrants.

As a result of the current amnesty bill -- not honestly labeled, this time -- will it be "unrealistic" to round up and deport 40 million or 50 million illegal immigrants in the future?

If the current immigration bill is as "realistic" as its advocates claim, why is it being rushed through the Senate faster than a local zoning ordinance could be passed?

We are, after all, talking about a major and irreversible change in the American population, the American culture, and the American political balance. Why is there no time to talk about it?

Are its advocates afraid that the voting public might discover what a fraud it is? The biggest fraud is denying that this is an amnesty bill.

Its advocates' argument is that illegal immigrants will have to meet certain requirements to become citizens. But amnesty is not about how you become a citizen.

The word is from the same root as "amnesia." It means you forget or overlook some crime, as if it never happened. All this elaborate talk about the steps illegal immigrants must go through to become citizens is a distraction from the crime they committed when they crossed the border illegally.

Instead, all attention is focused on what to do to accommodate those who committed this crime. It is a question that would be recognized as an insult to our intelligence on any other issue.

For example, there are undoubtedly thousands, perhaps millions, of unsolved crimes and uncaught criminals in this country and we cannot realistically expect to find and prosecute all these fugitives from justice.

But does anyone suggest that our focus should be on trying to normalize the lives of domestic fugitives from justice -- "bring them out of the shadows" in Ted Kennedy's phrase -- and develop some path by which they can be given an acceptable legal status?

Does anyone suggest that, if domestic criminals come forward, pay some fine, and apply to have their crimes overlooked, they can be put on a path to be restored to good standing in our society?

Just as we don't need to solve every crime and catch every criminal, in order to have deterrents to crime, neither do we have to ferret out and deport every one of the 12 million illegal aliens in this country in order to deter a flood of new illegal aliens.

All across this country, illegal aliens are being caught by the police for all sorts of violations of American laws, from traffic laws to laws against murder. Yet in many, if not most, places the police are under orders not to report these illegal aliens to the federal government.

Imprisoning known and apprehended lawbreakers for the crime of illegally entering this country, in addition to whatever other punishment they receive for other laws that they have broken -- and then sending them back where they came from after their sentences have been served -- would be something that would not be lost on others who are here illegally or who are thinking of coming here illegally.

Just as people can do many things better for themselves than the government can do those things for them, illegal aliens could begin deporting themselves if they found that their crime of coming here illegally was being punished as a serious crime, and that they themselves were no longer being treated as guests of the taxpayers when it comes to their medical care, the education of their children, and other welfare state benefits.

Incidentally, remember that 700-mile fence that Congress authorized last year? Only two miles have been built. That should tell us something about how seriously they are going to enforce other border security provisions in the current bill.

Michael Moore's Sicko Propoganda

By Rich Lowry
Monday, May 21, 2007

Is all that ails the U.S. health-care system that it's not run by a communist dictatorship? That has long been a premise of apologists for Fidel Castro who extol the virtues of medical care on his totalitarian island nation. Left-wing documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is reviving this Cold War relic of an argument in his new movie on health care, "Sicko," which premieres in a few weeks and favorably compares the Cuban health-care system to ours. Moore ostentatiously took a few sick 9/11 workers to Cuba for care. "If they can do this," Moore told Time magazine, referring to the Cubans, "we can do it." All that the Cuban government has done, however, is run a decades-long propaganda campaign to convince credulous or dishonest people that its health-care system is worth emulating. These people believe -- or pretend to believe for ideological reasons -- that a dictatorship can crush a country's economy and spirit, yet still deliver exemplary medical care. Cuban health care works only for the select few: if you are a high-ranking member of the party or the military and have access to top-notch clinics; or a health-care tourist who can pay in foreign currency at a special facility catering to foreigners; or a documentarian who can be relied upon to produce a lickspittle film whitewashing the system.

Ordinary Cubans experience the wasteland of the real system. Even aspirin and Pepto-Bismol can be rare and there's a black market for them. According to a report in the Canadian newspaper the National Post: "Hospitals are falling apart, surgeons lack basic supplies and must reuse latex gloves. Patients must buy their sutures on the black market and provide bed sheets and food for extended hospital stays."

How could it be any different when Cuba embarked on a campaign of economic self-sabotage with the revolution of 1959? It went from third in per capita food consumption in Latin America to near the bottom, according to a State Department report. Per capita consumption of basic foodstuffs like cereals and meat actually has declined from the 1950s. There are fewer cars (true of no other country in the hemisphere), and development of electrical power has trailed every other Latin American country except Haiti.

But the routine medical care, we're supposed to believe, is superb. The statistic frequently cited for this proposition is that Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America. Put aside that the reflexively dishonest Cuban government is the ultimate source for these figures. Cuba had the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America prior to the revolution and has lost ground to other countries around the world since. It also has an appallingly high abortion rate, meaning most problem pregnancies are pre-emptively ended.

Other countries in Latin America have made advances in health without Cuba's vicious suppression of human rights (which, no doubt, contributes to the island having the highest suicide rate in Latin America). The way public health works in Cuba was nicely illustrated by the case of Dr. Desi Mendoza Rivero, who complained of an outbreak of dengue fever that the regime preferred to ignore in the late 1990s, and was jailed for his trouble.

As is always the case with Cuba, anything that's wrong is blamed on the United States. If there is a shortage of medicine, well, that's because of the U.S. embargo. But the United States is not the only country in the world that sells drugs. Cuba could buy them from Europe or elsewhere, and the U.S. embargo makes an exception for medicines.

The only reason to fantasize about Cuban health care is to stick a finger in the eye of the Yanquis. For the likes of Michael Moore, the true glory of Cuba is less its health care than the fact that it is an enemy of the United States. That's why romanticizing Cuban medicine isn't just folly, but itself qualifies as a kind of sickness.

The Immigration Debacle

By David Limbaugh
Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The almost-stealth immigration bill light-speeding its way through Congress represents all that is wrong with politics and an elitist political class that is too far removed from its constituencies.

There is so much wrong with this bill procedurally, and substantively, that one can barely scratch the surface in a short column, but I'll recapitulate some of the most egregious concerns and share a few pet peeves.

First, we are bogged down in a semantic debate over whether the bill constitutes "amnesty." Open-borders apologists take umbrage at the term, saying the bill does not constitute amnesty because illegal immigrants will be punished, never mind how inconsequentially.

But I would argue that those insisting it is amnesty are, in a sense, understating their case. In certain respects it's worse than amnesty. Not only will criminal violators of the immigration laws receive a mere wrist-slap for their infractions; they will be rewarded for them.

Consider the treatment of those convicted of other crimes -- take stealing, for example. The convict not only faces criminal penalties; the law seeks to restore him and his victims to their status prior to the crime, to the extent that's practicable or possible. The bank robber is not allowed to retain the fruits of his crime. He must pay restitution, if applicable, in addition to whatever fines or jail time to which he is sentenced.

By contrast, millions of illegal immigrants under the bill would not be sent back home but would become legal permanent residents of this country. By being allowed to stay, they would be, in effect, keeping the fruits of their crime. More importantly, many of them would become recipients of federal government largesse via a smorgasbord of entitlements.

As reported in the Washington Times, the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector calculates that during their lifetimes, they will likely receive "$2.5 trillion more in government services than they will pay in taxes." Among those benefits are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, public housing, subsidized college education and Social Security Disability Insurance. So those persisting in challenging the amnesty characterization should be reminded that many illegals will be receiving an enormous economic windfall to accompany their anemic wrist-slapping.

Second, many of the bill's proponents have long resorted to ad-hominem assaults on the opponents, falsely portraying their valid, prudent, noble and patriotic opposition as racist, nativist and ultra-restrictionist.

But again, those who should have the burden of proof in this matter (the proponents) have turned the table on the opponents. How dare those who are promoting legislation that would flout the rule of law, reward criminal behavior, undermine our unique American culture, balkanize our society, dilute our sense of nationalism, make us more vulnerable to attack from our global terrorist enemies and coerce a massive redistribution of resources from lawful, taxpaying American citizens, call those who favor reasonable measures to preserve what is worth preserving about America -- which has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, by the way -- "racists"?

The misguided arrogance of those playing the race card to demonize open-borders opponents is staggering. Then again, inflaming the passions against your adversaries obviates addressing the issues factually.

I dare say that opponents of the bill would be opposed no matter the ethnicity or nationality of the windfall transferees. It's not about their ethnicity; it's not even primarily about them. It's about the rule of law, our national security, the American culture, the English language, national unity during time of war, the constitutional rights of American citizens and the fiscal concerns of American taxpayers and their descendants.

It's especially shameful that many of the bill's greatest supporters are motivated by crass political concerns rather than the best interests of the United States. If it were otherwise, would they be so adamant about fast-tracking this bill and drafting it in duplicitous terms? On that note, be aware that some experts who have briefly studied the bill's fine print have noted that the bill's so-called "triggers" -- the events that must occur as a sop to enforcement types before the wrist-brushings and windfalls kick in -- are virtually defined out of existence in many cases by exceptions that swallow the rule.

One silver lining in this unfortunate series of events is that such cavalier displays of power by the elite governing class serve to catalyze patriots in this nation and crystallize their thinking about what is still right with America and worth preserving despite the highhandedness and callousness of those who masquerade as representing their interests.

Just say "no" to this legislation.

Lying About Taxes

By Robert D. Novak
Monday, May 21, 2007

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In routine party-line votes last week, both houses of Congress completed action on a Democratic-crafted budget containing the biggest tax increase in U.S. history. That this was overlooked attests to the legerdemain of Sen. Kent Conrad of Bismarck, N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

Conrad, a 59-year-old third-termer, is a monotone orator whose use of statistical charts betrays his dozen years as a North Dakota state tax collector. He seems so straight an arrow that it is hard to accuse him of the big lie. But that is precisely what he has done.

Conrad has repeatedly insisted his budget contains no higher taxes. But how, then, can it increase discretionary spending $200 billion over five years, while promising immense budget surpluses in the future? By raising taxes not only on upper-bracket income earners but also on dividends and capital gains, affecting many more Americans.

Conrad has been in denial. After I described his budget as an old-fashioned Democratic tax-and-spend formula on March 28, Conrad wrote a letter to newspapers accusing me of "blind ideology and meaningless partisan rhetoric." His budget, he said, "neither assumes nor requires a tax increase." That is exactly what he has been saying for months on the Senate floor.

A typical exchange occurred May 9, when Republican Sen. John Thune displayed spend-and-tax charts. "Not true," responded Conrad. "There is no tax increase in the proposal before us." In the final debate last Thursday, Conrad again contradicted the assertions of higher taxes by his Republican counterpart on the Budget Committee, Sen. Judd Gregg.

Different in kind from normal congressional debate, this is based not on the merits of higher taxes but disagreement on the existence of any increase. The mystery is easily solved. Under the Democratic budget, the Bush administration's tax cuts are permitted to expire at the end of 2010. That means higher taxes if Congress does nothing.

Conrad has defended his no-tax-increase claim on grounds that the Democratic budget's five-year revenues total $14.827 trillion, compared with a "virtually identical" $14.826 trillion in President Bush's budget. But he is comparing apples and oranges -- calculations by the Congressional Budget Office and by the Office of Management and Budget using varying techniques and economic assumptions. That they are so close to each other was an accident.

After months of Conrad's assurances that his budget contained no tax increases, the Senate adopted, 97 to one, an amendment by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus that decreased estimated revenues by $195 billion. It would save the child tax credit, marriage penalty relief, estate tax decreases and other expiring tax proposals. If the budget "does not raise taxes," asked Rep. Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, on May 10, "why has there been a discussion about whether or not to adopt the Baucus amendment?" It survived in the final version of the resolution.

Conrad's insistence has affected the way the budget resolution has been reported. The Associated Press account never mentions tax increases. The Wall Street Journal's headline cautiously refers to a "partial lapse of tax cuts."

Conrad's fellow Democrats in the Senate buy into his euphemisms. Not a single Democratic senator voted against the tax-increasing budget -- not even Nebraska's Ben Nelson, who often departs from the party line and who supported the Bush tax cuts.

But the budget resolution's tax increases sounded a warning signal for the House, which passed it by only 214 to 209. Until now, the new Democratic majority in the House has been solid amid substantial Republican defections. But no Republican member voted for the budget, while 13 Democrats opposed it. Of the defectors, left-wing Rep. Dennis Kucinich voted no because he said the budget would fund President Bush's Iraqi war effort throughout his term.

The other 12 were moderates, including six freshmen who defeated Republicans last year. One freshman was Rep. Harry E. Mitchell of Arizona, who upset Rep. J.D. Hayworth in the heavily Republican Tempe district. "I simply cannot support a budget that allows key tax cuts to expire," said Mitchell, calling for extended capital gains and estate tax cuts. Kent Conrad didn't fool Harry Mitchell.

Pyongyang's Perfidy

North Korea violates another deal. Where's the outrage?

By John R. Bolton
Sunday, May 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Over a month has passed since sweetness and light were due to break out on the Korean Peninsula. On Feb. 13, the Six-Party Talks in Beijing ratified a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and North Korea, providing for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear programs. The first step, 60 days after ratification, was to be that North Korea "will shut down and seal for the purpose of eventual abandonment" the Yongbyon nuclear facility, and readmit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Other steps were to follow, but the first move was unequivocally to be made by Pyongyang. The 60 days came and went, and indeed, another 37 days have come and gone. No IAEA inspectors have been readmitted, and not even Pyongyang claims that it has "shut down" Yongbyon.

Instead, observers--especially Iran and other nuclear weapons aspirants--have witnessed embarrassing U.S. weakness on a supposedly unrelated issue, unmentioned in the Feb. 13 agreement. That issue involves North Korea's widely publicized demand that approximately $25 million frozen in Macau-based Banco Delta Asia (BDA) accounts be released and transferred to Pyongyang. The funds came from North Korean counterfeiting of U.S. currency, money laundering and other fraudulent activities uncovered by a U.S. Treasury investigation begun in 2003. The accounts were frozen in 2005 and the BDA was promptly put on Treasury's blacklist for illicit activity.


While the Bush administration denies a direct link, the North Koreans have said publicly that they will not comply with the bilateral agreement until the BDA funds are safely under their control. This obvious quid pro quo is not only embarrassing, it sets a dangerous precedent for other regimes that would blackmail the U.S. What are the consequences of the BDA meltdown?

First, the timetable of the Feb. 13 agreement is already shredded. President Bush said at the time of the deal: "Those who say that the North Koreans have got to prove themselves by actually following through on the deal are right, and I'm one." Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill, the deal's U.S. architect and chief negotiator, said: "We need to avoid above all missing deadlines. It's like a broken-window theory: one window is unrepaired, and before you know it you'll have a lot of broken windows and nobody cares."

Those statements were correct when made, and they are correct today. Sadly, however, they no longer seem to be "operative."

Second, by making secret side deals with North Korea, the State Department has left itself vulnerable to future renegotiation efforts. This is the North's classic style: Negotiate hard to reach an agreement, sign it, and then start renegotiating, not to mention violating the deal at will. America's serial concessions on BDA simply confirm to Pyongyang that State is well into the "save the deal" mode, which bodes well for future North Korean efforts to recast it. Consider the sequence of administration positions on BDA: Initially, the criminal investigation and the nuclear issue were not supposed to be connected, but the North insisted and the U.S. gave in.

Then, North Korea moved the renegotiation into high gear, demanding the return of the funds as a precondition to complying with its own commitments. Unwilling to "just say no," the Bush administration tried to distinguish between "licit" and "illicit" funds, returning only those that were legitimate. (This, of course begs the question whether anything that the criminal conspiracy running North Korea does is "licit.") Even the "licit" funds returned, however, were to be used only for "humanitarian" projects in North Korea rather than returned to Kim Jong Il's grasp--although how in an age of the U.N.'s "Cash for Kim" program the State Department thought this was to be verified remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, North Korea was not satisfied, insisting that all the funds had to be returned to the actual account holders, with no restrictions on their use, even though all agree that at least some were acting illicitly. This, too, State accepted.

Third, we now face the nagging question whether there are other secret side deals beyond BDA. Of course, the BDA agreement was not so secret that Kim Jong Il was barred from knowing about it, by definition. Most troubling, however, is that State apparently thought it too sensitive to share with the American people until the February deal broke down in an unavoidably public way. But even this was not enough for North Korea, which, sensing U.S. weakness, continues to press for more. Although conflicting stories abound, North Korea may be seeking not just the return of the BDA funds, but something much more significant: guaranteed access to international financial markets, even through an American bank. Indeed, last week Wachovia Corp. confirmed that it had been approached by the State Department to assist in the transfer of funds.

Here, the issue is inescapably related to North Korea's nuclear program. The North's access to international financial markets to launder its ill-gotten revenues is critical both to continued financing of its nuclear regime and to keeping Kim Jong Il in power. If this is even close to what the State Department is prepared to do, who will ever again take us seriously when we threaten financial strangulation of rogue states and terrorist groups? Granting this North Korean demand would make U.S. concessions on BDA look paltry by comparison.

Fourth, the BDA affair calls the remainder of the Feb. 13 agreement into question. Just to remind, 2007 is the 13th anniversary of the Agreed Framework, a predecessor U.S.-North Korean agreement, and the 15th anniversary of the Joint North-South Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. In all likelihood, it is also the 13th and 15th anniversaries, respectively, of North Korea's first violations of those agreements. No serious observer contends there is any sign of a strategic decision by North Korea to give up its nuclear program, which means, therefore, there is no more reason to believe the North will comply with the Feb. 13 deal than it has complied with its predecessors.


It is not even clear if North Korea actually gave up anything significant in the Feb. 13 deal. It is entirely possible, for example, that Yongbyon is now a hulk, well past its useful life span, and that the North agreed, in effect, to shut down a wreck. Even if Yongbyon is not in such parlous condition, it may be that the North has extracted all the plutonium possible from the fuel rods it has, and that Yongbyon therefore offers it nothing more. Here, the omissions in the Feb. 13 agreement become significant. The deal says nothing about the plutonium, perhaps weaponized perhaps not, that North Korea has already reprocessed.

How these issues play out will have ramifications far beyond North Korea, particularly for Iran. Some say the Bush administration entered the Feb. 13 deal because it desperately needed a success. One thing is for certain: It does not need a failure. The president can easily extricate himself from the deal, just based on North Korea's actions to date. He should take the first opportunity to do so.

Sarkozy's task

By George Will
Sunday, May 20, 2007

Arson is a form of commentary favored by the French left, so at least 1,000 vehicles were torched by disappointed supporters of the Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal after she was defeated 53-47 by Nicolas Sarkozy. Last spring, rioting was the left's economic argument when the government proposed, then retreated from, legislation that would have made it somewhat easier for businesses to fire younger workers in the first two years of employment. The idea behind the legislation was that employers would be more likely to hire workers if it were not a legal ordeal to fire them. The rioters were, of course, mostly young.

France's unemployment rate is 8.7 percent, nearly double the U.S. rate of 4.5 percent. Among persons under age 25, a cohort that supported Royal, the rate is 21.2 percent, and is apt to stay there unless Sarkozy can implement reforms that irritate rioters.

Sarkozy has a mandate from an 84 percent turnout. Seen, however, in the flickering glow of smoldering Peugeots, his chances of fundamentally reforming France seem fragile, and his idea of fundamental reform -- he remains an ardent protectionist -- seems pallid. Nevertheless, his attempt merits Americans' attention because he is confronting, in an especially virulent form, a problem that is becoming more acute here. The problem is the cultural contradictions of the welfare state.

Two decades ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about ``the cultural contradictions of capitalism'' to express this worry: Capitalism flourishes because of virtues that its flourishing undermines. Its success requires thrift, industriousness and deferral of gratifications, but that success produces abundance, expanding leisure and the emancipation of appetites, all of which weaken capitalism's moral prerequisites.

The cultural contradictions of welfare states are comparable. Such states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job-creation, corporate profits and individuals' incomes from which come tax revenues needed to fund entitlements. But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections that contribute to welfare understood as material well-being, enhanced security and enlarged leisure.

The low pain threshold causes a ruinous flinch from the rigors, insecurities, uncertainties and dislocations inherent in the creative destruction of dynamic capitalism. The flinch takes the form of protectionism, regulations and other government-imposed inefficiencies that impede the economic growth that the welfare state requires.

So welfare states are, paradoxically, both enervating and energizing -- and infantilizing. They are enervating because they foster dependency; they are energizing because they aggravate an aggressive (think of burning Peugeots) sense of entitlement; they are infantilizing because it is infantile to will an end without willing the means to that end, and people who desire welfare states increasingly desire relief from the rigors necessary to finance them.

Twenty-five years ago, President Francois Mitterrand, a socialist who had won election by promising to ``break with the logic of profitability,'' was keeping that promise and, in the process, killing socialism. He promised stimulative spending through expanded entitlements, a short workweek with no reduced compensation, job-creation through public spending, and higher taxes on the investing classes. So productivity fell and unemployment -- it has not been below 8 percent since 1981 -- rose.

Statism, the inevitable concomitant of government attempts to administer France's three ideological incompatibles ("liberty, equality, fraternity"), continued. And 47 percent of the French electorate just voted for Royal's promise of much more of it, even though France's 2006 growth rate was lower than that of 21 of the (then) 25 members of the European Union.

Sarkozy wants to lower taxes, including inheritance taxes, and eliminate the tax on overtime work. That tax, along with government snoops patrolling companies' parking lots to detect antisocial industriousness, enforces the 35-hour workweek. He wants to do what Margaret Thatcher did after she was elected in 1979 because Britain was weary of being governed less by parliament than by unions. Even before Sarkozy was elected, public sector unions -- government organized to pressure itself to fatten itself -- threatened a paralyzing national strike because he opposes allowing 500,000 employees of government-controlled companies to retire earlier than private sector employees, and with larger pensions.

During the 25 years that the French left and some right-wing nationalists have spent reviling "cold, heartless impoverishing Anglo-American capitalism," France's per capita GDP has slumped from seventh in the world to 17th. Sarkozy's task is to persuade the French that their government's solicitousness on behalf of their security and leisure explains the work they must now do to reduce their insecurity.