Bill Steigerwald
Monday, June 30, 2008
Constitutionalists everywhere cheered the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday, June 26, affirming that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms. The 5-4 vote in District of Columbia v. Heller struck down Washington's super-strict ban on handguns and ended decades of debate about whether the Framers meant to constitutionally protect the gun rights of all individuals or only those who were members of militias.
No one was happier on Thursday morning than Bob Levy, the senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. He spent a lot of his own money and five years of careful legal plotting to make sure Heller made it to the high court. I talked to him by telephone from his office in Washington shortly after the decision was announced:
Q: In layman’s terms, what does today’s ruling mean?
A: For residents of Washington, D.C., if they want a handgun, they can go down now and apply to register one and the D.C. government is obligated to give them a registration and a license to carry that gun in their own home and use it if the occasion arises where they need to defend themselves. So that’s good news for the people of Washington, D.C.
Q: In broad constitutional terms, what does this do?
A: It means that a majority of the Supreme Court has declared unequivocally that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, not necessarily one that has to be exercised in the context of militia service. That will mean that nationwide -- once it is determined that the Second Amendment applies to the states, and that question was not at issue in our case because Washington, D.C., is not a state -- oppressive gun laws like the one in Washington will not be permissible under the U.S. Constitution.
Q: How happy are you with the decision?
A: Well, it’s 154 pages and I must say we’ve just gotten a copy. So I haven’t had a chance to look through it. All I know is what Justice Scalia said in court and what Justice Stevens said in the way of summarizing his dissent. From what I could glean, the majority of the court, and of course that’s what matters, has adopted all of the arguments that we put forth in our brief -- arguments by the way that are supported by law scholars across the ideological spectrum, from left to right.
So we’re very pleased with what the court had to say. The court couldn’t have been clearer. There’s no ambiguity. It is quite precise. And it does indicate that there is an individual right and it encompasses not just militia service -- that’s one purpose, but not the only purpose -- but also such things as self-defense, providing your family with food because you want to use weapons for hunting, and a number of other uses that might be permissible. The Second Amendment secures a broad-based individual right.
Q: Is there anything that you’ve seen that disappoints you?
A: I would have liked to have seen -- and I’m not sure, again, because I haven’t thoroughly examined the opinion -- the court say that all future reviews of gun-control regulations would be rigorously scrutinized by the court and that the court would impose what legal scholars call “strict scrutiny.” I don’t think the court quite went that far. But it did say that the D.C. gun ban wouldn’t pass any of the levels of review that the court has historically imposed upon enumerated rights that are set out in the Constitution. So that’s good news. I’m not sure it went as far as I would have liked to have seen the court go, but we’ll take it. It’s perfectly good enough.
Q: In the dissenting opinion there was concern this would endanger the constitutionality of other gun laws across the country. Do you think that is likely?
A: I hope it’s likely. There are some gun laws across the country that should be endangered. But the majority was quite clear in saying that certain gun regulations are perfectly OK. You can keep guns away from kids. You can keep guns away from felons and from people who are deemed to be crazy. You can stop some types of weapons from being kept and from being borne. Some concealed-carry restrictions might be permissible. So while some regulations will be accepted, other regulations will not be. There are a number of cities that have gun bans that are pretty much the same as Washington, D.C., and they will be at risk -- and I’m happy to say that they will be at risk.
Q: My boss, Colin McNickle, is way ahead of you. He’s already on Page 57 of the opinion ….
A: He hasn’t been talking to guys like you all day! (laughs)
Q: He thinks this decision is a nearly perfect balance that should make everyone happy -- it affirms individual gun rights but still allows for reasonable regulations.
A: Again, from what I have been able to glean from the opinion, it is something that we can all live with, we can all be happy with it. And it does indicate that the court -- for the first time in 70 years -- has given some meaning to the Second Amendment, a provision that was ratified in 1791, and which meant pretty much what the Framers intended it to mean until U.S. v. Miller, the case in 1939, which was misinterpreted by courts across the country to suggest that you could only use guns in the context of militia service. The Supreme Court finally put that to rest.
Q: Do you consider this a historic case?
A: Yes, I do think it is historic. For seven decades we’ve been living under a fog. The fog has now been lifted by this case, and I am happy to have been part of it.
Q: You played a major role in getting this case to the Supreme Court. It sounds like your efforts paid off.
A: Yes. I think so. I think the court still has to resolve whether or not the regulations will be applicable to the states -- I think that determination will be made very quickly. It still has to put some flesh on the skeletons so we know which regulations will be permitted and which won’t be permitted. But this decision establishes the foundation and the framework. And it’s a darn good start. So we’re very happy with it.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Our Worst Justice
Rich Lowry
Monday, June 30, 2008
Why did the Founders bother toiling in the summer heat of Philadelphia in 1787 writing a Constitution when they could have relied on the consciences of Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy instead?
Kennedy is the Supreme Court's most important swing vote and its worst justice. Whatever else you think of them, a Justice Scalia or Ginsburg has a consistent judicial philosophy, while Kennedy expects the nation to bend to his moral whimsy. With apologies to Louis XIV, Kennedy might as well declare "la constitution, c'est moi!"
In a 2005 interview, Kennedy said of the court, "You know, in any given year, we may make more important decisions than the legislative branch does -- precluding foreign affairs, perhaps." (He was wise to include the "perhaps," in light of the recent Guantanamo Bay decision.) He went on to note how judges need "an understanding that you have an opportunity to shape the destiny of the country."
So much for the country's destiny being shaped by a free people acting through their representative institutions, within certain constraints it enshrines in the Constitution. That wouldn't allow nearly enough room for what Jeffrey Rosen, in a devastating profile of the justice in The New Republic, calls Kennedy's "self-dramatizing moralism."
On any politically charged case, we are supposed to wait with bated breath while the famously agonizing Kennedy decides which side he is going to bless with his coveted fifth vote. In so doing, Kennedy believes he is, in Rosen's description, creating "a national consensus about American values that will usher in what he calls 'the golden age of peace.'" Observers less besotted with Justice Kennedy than Justice Kennedy might put it differently: making it up as he goes along.
Two years ago, Kennedy joined the majority in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case that urged the president to obtain congressional approval for the system of military tribunals at Gitmo. President Bush did, but Kennedy wrote the 5-4 majority decision in this year's Boumediene v. Bush striking down the system anyway.
Kennedy quoted the World War II-era Eisentrager decision -- upholding the military trial of German detainees -- to show that there were greater practical difficulties back then with judicial interference in military detentions. He left unremarked that the Eisentrager decision unmistakably says -- a mere paragraph after his citation! -- that the Constitution does not apply extraterritorially: "No decision of this Court supports such a view. None of the learned commentators on our Constitution has ever hinted at it."
Indeed, Kennedy blew through some 200 years of precedent with nary a backward glance. Just another day at the Kennedy Court.
It should be no surprise how Kennedy construes the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments." It is warrant for the court to exercise its "independent judgment" of "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," as Kennedy put it in this term's 5-4 Kennedy v. Louisiana decision forbidding capital punishment in cases of child rape.
The signature of a Kennedy opinion is vaporous moralizing, whatever side he comes down on. In the 1992 Casey decision upholding Roe v. Wade, he waxed poetic about "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life." In the 2007 Carhart decision upholding the partial-birth abortion ban, he waxed again, this time about "respect for human life find[ing] an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child."
Evidently, Kennedy goes about his job unburdened by the fact that his views on existence or on the mother-child bond have nothing whatsoever to do with the Constitution. But so it goes, as long as the Supreme Court is divided between four liberals, four conservatives and one self-important man who can't differentiate between his inner compass and the nation's fundamental law.
Kennedy fashions himself an instructor to the nation. And he is -- in the arbitrary ways of judicial lawlessness.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Why did the Founders bother toiling in the summer heat of Philadelphia in 1787 writing a Constitution when they could have relied on the consciences of Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy instead?
Kennedy is the Supreme Court's most important swing vote and its worst justice. Whatever else you think of them, a Justice Scalia or Ginsburg has a consistent judicial philosophy, while Kennedy expects the nation to bend to his moral whimsy. With apologies to Louis XIV, Kennedy might as well declare "la constitution, c'est moi!"
In a 2005 interview, Kennedy said of the court, "You know, in any given year, we may make more important decisions than the legislative branch does -- precluding foreign affairs, perhaps." (He was wise to include the "perhaps," in light of the recent Guantanamo Bay decision.) He went on to note how judges need "an understanding that you have an opportunity to shape the destiny of the country."
So much for the country's destiny being shaped by a free people acting through their representative institutions, within certain constraints it enshrines in the Constitution. That wouldn't allow nearly enough room for what Jeffrey Rosen, in a devastating profile of the justice in The New Republic, calls Kennedy's "self-dramatizing moralism."
On any politically charged case, we are supposed to wait with bated breath while the famously agonizing Kennedy decides which side he is going to bless with his coveted fifth vote. In so doing, Kennedy believes he is, in Rosen's description, creating "a national consensus about American values that will usher in what he calls 'the golden age of peace.'" Observers less besotted with Justice Kennedy than Justice Kennedy might put it differently: making it up as he goes along.
Two years ago, Kennedy joined the majority in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case that urged the president to obtain congressional approval for the system of military tribunals at Gitmo. President Bush did, but Kennedy wrote the 5-4 majority decision in this year's Boumediene v. Bush striking down the system anyway.
Kennedy quoted the World War II-era Eisentrager decision -- upholding the military trial of German detainees -- to show that there were greater practical difficulties back then with judicial interference in military detentions. He left unremarked that the Eisentrager decision unmistakably says -- a mere paragraph after his citation! -- that the Constitution does not apply extraterritorially: "No decision of this Court supports such a view. None of the learned commentators on our Constitution has ever hinted at it."
Indeed, Kennedy blew through some 200 years of precedent with nary a backward glance. Just another day at the Kennedy Court.
It should be no surprise how Kennedy construes the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments." It is warrant for the court to exercise its "independent judgment" of "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," as Kennedy put it in this term's 5-4 Kennedy v. Louisiana decision forbidding capital punishment in cases of child rape.
The signature of a Kennedy opinion is vaporous moralizing, whatever side he comes down on. In the 1992 Casey decision upholding Roe v. Wade, he waxed poetic about "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life." In the 2007 Carhart decision upholding the partial-birth abortion ban, he waxed again, this time about "respect for human life find[ing] an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child."
Evidently, Kennedy goes about his job unburdened by the fact that his views on existence or on the mother-child bond have nothing whatsoever to do with the Constitution. But so it goes, as long as the Supreme Court is divided between four liberals, four conservatives and one self-important man who can't differentiate between his inner compass and the nation's fundamental law.
Kennedy fashions himself an instructor to the nation. And he is -- in the arbitrary ways of judicial lawlessness.
There Is No 'The Economy'
By Zachary Karabell
Monday, June 30, 2008
It used to be said that the two things not to discuss at a dinner party were religion and politics. Today, those pose less risk of flying food or guests storming out than the subject of "the economy."
One side decries the sorry state of affairs, and the other grumpily rebuts the claims of doom. The public debate is being won by those who say that the economy is in bad shape and getting worse. The consumer confidence report just released by the Conference Board registered one of the lowest readings on record, based on pessimism about food and fuel prices, slack labor markets and plummeting home prices.
Democrats, recognizing a potent election-year issue, emphasize economic problems whenever possible. Republicans can hardly gild the lily given much of the data, but they point out that all is not grim. Retail sales and consumer spending were up decently in May, in spite of worsening confidence. Exports have been solid, and GDP figures have yet to register a contraction.
As this debate intensifies in the coming months, which side is right? The answer is both, and neither.
To steal a phrase from Sen. Joseph Biden, we are all entitled to our own opinions, not to our own facts. Yet in the case of the economy, even when the facts are correct they don't apply evenly to all people. Or to put it another way, there is no such thing as "the economy."
Once upon a time, and for most of the 20th century, there was. The data that we use today is a product of the nation-state, and was created in order to give government the tools to gauge the health of the nation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures the unemployment rate and inflation, was created around the turn of the 20th century, and for much of that century the U.S. was a cohesive unit. It was its own most important market, its own source of consumption, and its own source of credit.
Big-picture statistics form the basis of almost every discussion about "the economy." But these statistics are averages reporting one blended number that is treated as if it applies to all 300 million Americans. It brings to mind the joke about Bill Gates walking into a bar and suddenly everyone in the room becomes a millionaire. Statistically, by averaging the incomes in the room, the statement is true.
Macro data and big-picture statistics like GDP growth, the unemployment rate and consumer spending are all large averages. The fact that the economy is growing or contracting by 1% or 2% is taken as a proxy not just for the economic health of the nation, but for the economic health of the bulk of its citizens. The same goes for consumer spending. If it goes up or down 2%, that is taken as representative not just of the statistical fiction called "the American consumer" but as indicative of the behavior and attitudes of U.S. consumers writ large.
To begin with, someone in the upper-income brackets is living a different life than those in the lower-income brackets. The top 20% of income earners spend more than the lower 60% combined. The wealthiest 400 people have more than $1 trillion in net worth, which exceeds the discretionary spending of the entire federal government. These groups are all American, yet it would be stretching the facts to the breaking point to assert that they share an economic reality. On the upper end, the soaring price of food and fuel hardly matter; on the other end, they matter above all else. The upper end does matter quantitatively, but the group of people on the lower end is vastly larger and therefore has more resonance in our public and electoral debate.
Look at housing, widely regarded as a national calamity. The regional variations depict something different. In Stockton, Calif., one in 75 households are in foreclosure; in Nebraska, the figure is one in every 1,459; and the greater Omaha area is thriving. Similar contrasts could be made between Houston and Tampa, or between Las Vegas and Manhattan. Home prices have plunged in certain regions such as Miami-Dade, and stayed stable in others such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Houston, bolstered by soaring oil prices, has a 3.9% unemployment rate; the rate in Detroit, depressed by a collapsing U.S. auto industry, is 6.9%. The notion that these disparate areas share a common housing malaise or similar employment challenges is a fiction.
We hear continual stories of the subprime economy and its fallout on Main Street and Wall Street. All true. Yet there is also an iPhone economy and a Blackberry economy. Ten million iPhones were sold last year at up to $499 a pop, and estimates are for 20 million iPhones sold this year, many at $199 each. That's billions of dollars worth of iPhones. Add in the sales of millions of Blackberrys, GPS devices, game consoles and so on, and you get tens of billions more.
The economy that supports the purchases of these electronic devices is by and large not the same economy that is seeing rampant foreclosures. The economy of the central valley of California is not the same economy of Silicon Valley, any more than the economy of Buffalo is the same as the economy of greater New York City. Yet in our national discussion, it is as if those utterly crucial distinctions simply don't exist. Corn-producing states are doing just fine; car-producing states aren't.
The notion that the U.S. can be viewed as one national economy makes increasingly less sense. More than half the profits of the S&P 500 companies last year came from outside the country, yet in indirect ways those profits did add to the economic growth in the U.S. None of that was captured in our economic statistics, because the way we collect data – sophisticated as it is – has not caught up to the complicated web of capital flows and reimportation of goods by U.S.-listed entities for sale here.
These issues are not confined to the U.S. Every country is responsible for its own national data, and every country is falling victim to a similar fallacy that its national data represent something meaningful called "the economy."
In truth, what used to be "the economy" is just one part of a global chess board, and the data we have is incomplete, misleading, and simultaneously right and wrong. It is right given what it measures, and wrong given what most people conclude on the basis of it.
The world is composed of hundreds of economies that interact with one another in unpredictable and unexpected ways. We cling to the notion of one economy because it creates an illusion of shared experiences. As comforting as that illusion is, it will not restore a simplicity that no longer exists, and clinging to it will not lead to viable solutions for pressing problems.
So let's welcome this new world and discard familiar guideposts, inadequate data and outmoded frameworks. That may be unsettling, but it is a better foundation for wise analysis and sound solutions than clinging to a myth.
Monday, June 30, 2008
It used to be said that the two things not to discuss at a dinner party were religion and politics. Today, those pose less risk of flying food or guests storming out than the subject of "the economy."
One side decries the sorry state of affairs, and the other grumpily rebuts the claims of doom. The public debate is being won by those who say that the economy is in bad shape and getting worse. The consumer confidence report just released by the Conference Board registered one of the lowest readings on record, based on pessimism about food and fuel prices, slack labor markets and plummeting home prices.
Democrats, recognizing a potent election-year issue, emphasize economic problems whenever possible. Republicans can hardly gild the lily given much of the data, but they point out that all is not grim. Retail sales and consumer spending were up decently in May, in spite of worsening confidence. Exports have been solid, and GDP figures have yet to register a contraction.
As this debate intensifies in the coming months, which side is right? The answer is both, and neither.
To steal a phrase from Sen. Joseph Biden, we are all entitled to our own opinions, not to our own facts. Yet in the case of the economy, even when the facts are correct they don't apply evenly to all people. Or to put it another way, there is no such thing as "the economy."
Once upon a time, and for most of the 20th century, there was. The data that we use today is a product of the nation-state, and was created in order to give government the tools to gauge the health of the nation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures the unemployment rate and inflation, was created around the turn of the 20th century, and for much of that century the U.S. was a cohesive unit. It was its own most important market, its own source of consumption, and its own source of credit.
Big-picture statistics form the basis of almost every discussion about "the economy." But these statistics are averages reporting one blended number that is treated as if it applies to all 300 million Americans. It brings to mind the joke about Bill Gates walking into a bar and suddenly everyone in the room becomes a millionaire. Statistically, by averaging the incomes in the room, the statement is true.
Macro data and big-picture statistics like GDP growth, the unemployment rate and consumer spending are all large averages. The fact that the economy is growing or contracting by 1% or 2% is taken as a proxy not just for the economic health of the nation, but for the economic health of the bulk of its citizens. The same goes for consumer spending. If it goes up or down 2%, that is taken as representative not just of the statistical fiction called "the American consumer" but as indicative of the behavior and attitudes of U.S. consumers writ large.
To begin with, someone in the upper-income brackets is living a different life than those in the lower-income brackets. The top 20% of income earners spend more than the lower 60% combined. The wealthiest 400 people have more than $1 trillion in net worth, which exceeds the discretionary spending of the entire federal government. These groups are all American, yet it would be stretching the facts to the breaking point to assert that they share an economic reality. On the upper end, the soaring price of food and fuel hardly matter; on the other end, they matter above all else. The upper end does matter quantitatively, but the group of people on the lower end is vastly larger and therefore has more resonance in our public and electoral debate.
Look at housing, widely regarded as a national calamity. The regional variations depict something different. In Stockton, Calif., one in 75 households are in foreclosure; in Nebraska, the figure is one in every 1,459; and the greater Omaha area is thriving. Similar contrasts could be made between Houston and Tampa, or between Las Vegas and Manhattan. Home prices have plunged in certain regions such as Miami-Dade, and stayed stable in others such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Houston, bolstered by soaring oil prices, has a 3.9% unemployment rate; the rate in Detroit, depressed by a collapsing U.S. auto industry, is 6.9%. The notion that these disparate areas share a common housing malaise or similar employment challenges is a fiction.
We hear continual stories of the subprime economy and its fallout on Main Street and Wall Street. All true. Yet there is also an iPhone economy and a Blackberry economy. Ten million iPhones were sold last year at up to $499 a pop, and estimates are for 20 million iPhones sold this year, many at $199 each. That's billions of dollars worth of iPhones. Add in the sales of millions of Blackberrys, GPS devices, game consoles and so on, and you get tens of billions more.
The economy that supports the purchases of these electronic devices is by and large not the same economy that is seeing rampant foreclosures. The economy of the central valley of California is not the same economy of Silicon Valley, any more than the economy of Buffalo is the same as the economy of greater New York City. Yet in our national discussion, it is as if those utterly crucial distinctions simply don't exist. Corn-producing states are doing just fine; car-producing states aren't.
The notion that the U.S. can be viewed as one national economy makes increasingly less sense. More than half the profits of the S&P 500 companies last year came from outside the country, yet in indirect ways those profits did add to the economic growth in the U.S. None of that was captured in our economic statistics, because the way we collect data – sophisticated as it is – has not caught up to the complicated web of capital flows and reimportation of goods by U.S.-listed entities for sale here.
These issues are not confined to the U.S. Every country is responsible for its own national data, and every country is falling victim to a similar fallacy that its national data represent something meaningful called "the economy."
In truth, what used to be "the economy" is just one part of a global chess board, and the data we have is incomplete, misleading, and simultaneously right and wrong. It is right given what it measures, and wrong given what most people conclude on the basis of it.
The world is composed of hundreds of economies that interact with one another in unpredictable and unexpected ways. We cling to the notion of one economy because it creates an illusion of shared experiences. As comforting as that illusion is, it will not restore a simplicity that no longer exists, and clinging to it will not lead to viable solutions for pressing problems.
So let's welcome this new world and discard familiar guideposts, inadequate data and outmoded frameworks. That may be unsettling, but it is a better foundation for wise analysis and sound solutions than clinging to a myth.
Markets for the Poor in Mexico
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Monday, June 30, 2008
Helping the poor may be virtuous, but when the poverty industry starts losing "clients" because the market is performing good works, watch out.
Compartamos Banco knows what it's like to have a tarnished halo. The Mexican bank specializes in microfinancing for low-income entrepreneurs in a country that never used to have a financial industry serving the poor. Compartamos not only figured out how to meet the needs of this excluded population, but also how to make money at it.
As a result, the bank has been growing fast. With an average loan size of only $450, it now has more than 900,000 clients – 15 times as many as it had in 2000.
This strong growth suggests that the bank's for-profit model makes both borrowers and lenders better off. Yet the triumph is not good news for everyone. In the economic sector that Compartamos serves – those making about $10 a day – the international charity brigade is at risk of becoming obsolete. Perhaps this explains why people who make their living giving away other people's money are badmouthing Compartamos for the vulgar practice of earning "too much" profit.
Lending to microenterprises took off some years ago as economists recognized that the poor, just like the middle class, can make productive use of credit. The most famous microfinancier is Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Compartamos got its start in southern Mexico in 1990 as a nonprofit providing working capital to small businesspeople like food preparers, vendors and handicraft producers. Its funds initially came from private-sector charity and governments, and its clients were – and still are – largely female. This group is often illiterate but it is also entrepreneurial and, as it turns out, a very good credit risk. In lieu of collateral, the bank typically accepts the credit of a group of entrepreneurs who effectively co-sign for a peer.
After 10 years, Compartamos was financing 60,000 microborrowers. But it recognized that the need for its service was much greater. In 2000, to raise new capital, it formed a for-profit company to utilize private-sector capital as well as loans and grants from government agencies and charities. In 2002, it issued $70 million in debt, and four years later its client base had grown to more than 600,000.
By 2006, bankers in the developing world who had traditionally ignored the "C" and "D" economic classes – with "A" being the wealthiest and "E" being the poorest – began to realize that lending to lower-income entrepreneurs is good business. One reason for the change was that computer software advances enabled banks to handle small accounts more efficiently.
What was once written off as an unviable market became a hot opportunity, and Compartamos was well positioned to capitalize on it in Mexico. Last year the company launched an initial public offering that was oversubscribed 13 times. That's when the do-gooders stepped in to question the company's ethics.
In a commentary published last June on the Compartamos IPO, Richard Rosenberg, a consultant for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor – not part of the World Bank but housed on its premises – observes that the demand for shares in the company was driven, in part, by "exceptional growth and profitability." He then ruminates for some 16 pages on whether Compartamos's for-profit model is at odds with the goal of lifting the poor. A similar, though far less rigorous, challenge to Compartamos titled "Microloan Sharks" appears in the summer issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
In his "reflections" on "microfinance interest rates and profits," Mr. Rosenberg writes that "overcharg[ing]" clients under a nonprofit model is OK because it is done for the sake of future borrowers. But when profits go to providers of capital through dividends, then there is a "conflict between the welfare of clients and the welfare of investors." It's not the commercialization of the lending, we're told, but the "size" of the profits that must be scrutinized.
What seems to elude Mr. Rosenberg is the fact that there is no way for him to know whether there is "overcharg[ing]" or by how much. That information can be delivered only by the market, when innovative new entrants see they can provide services at a better price. This has been happening since for-profit microfinance began to emerge, and the result has been greater competition. Rates have been coming down even as the demand for and availability of services have gone up.
How much better it would have been, Mr. Rosenberg suggests, if Compartamos had raised capital through "socially motivated investors" like the "international financial institutions" – i.e., the World Bank and the like. How much better indeed, for him and his poverty lobby cohorts, but not, it seems, for Mexico's entrepreneurial poor.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Helping the poor may be virtuous, but when the poverty industry starts losing "clients" because the market is performing good works, watch out.
Compartamos Banco knows what it's like to have a tarnished halo. The Mexican bank specializes in microfinancing for low-income entrepreneurs in a country that never used to have a financial industry serving the poor. Compartamos not only figured out how to meet the needs of this excluded population, but also how to make money at it.
As a result, the bank has been growing fast. With an average loan size of only $450, it now has more than 900,000 clients – 15 times as many as it had in 2000.
This strong growth suggests that the bank's for-profit model makes both borrowers and lenders better off. Yet the triumph is not good news for everyone. In the economic sector that Compartamos serves – those making about $10 a day – the international charity brigade is at risk of becoming obsolete. Perhaps this explains why people who make their living giving away other people's money are badmouthing Compartamos for the vulgar practice of earning "too much" profit.
Lending to microenterprises took off some years ago as economists recognized that the poor, just like the middle class, can make productive use of credit. The most famous microfinancier is Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Compartamos got its start in southern Mexico in 1990 as a nonprofit providing working capital to small businesspeople like food preparers, vendors and handicraft producers. Its funds initially came from private-sector charity and governments, and its clients were – and still are – largely female. This group is often illiterate but it is also entrepreneurial and, as it turns out, a very good credit risk. In lieu of collateral, the bank typically accepts the credit of a group of entrepreneurs who effectively co-sign for a peer.
After 10 years, Compartamos was financing 60,000 microborrowers. But it recognized that the need for its service was much greater. In 2000, to raise new capital, it formed a for-profit company to utilize private-sector capital as well as loans and grants from government agencies and charities. In 2002, it issued $70 million in debt, and four years later its client base had grown to more than 600,000.
By 2006, bankers in the developing world who had traditionally ignored the "C" and "D" economic classes – with "A" being the wealthiest and "E" being the poorest – began to realize that lending to lower-income entrepreneurs is good business. One reason for the change was that computer software advances enabled banks to handle small accounts more efficiently.
What was once written off as an unviable market became a hot opportunity, and Compartamos was well positioned to capitalize on it in Mexico. Last year the company launched an initial public offering that was oversubscribed 13 times. That's when the do-gooders stepped in to question the company's ethics.
In a commentary published last June on the Compartamos IPO, Richard Rosenberg, a consultant for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor – not part of the World Bank but housed on its premises – observes that the demand for shares in the company was driven, in part, by "exceptional growth and profitability." He then ruminates for some 16 pages on whether Compartamos's for-profit model is at odds with the goal of lifting the poor. A similar, though far less rigorous, challenge to Compartamos titled "Microloan Sharks" appears in the summer issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
In his "reflections" on "microfinance interest rates and profits," Mr. Rosenberg writes that "overcharg[ing]" clients under a nonprofit model is OK because it is done for the sake of future borrowers. But when profits go to providers of capital through dividends, then there is a "conflict between the welfare of clients and the welfare of investors." It's not the commercialization of the lending, we're told, but the "size" of the profits that must be scrutinized.
What seems to elude Mr. Rosenberg is the fact that there is no way for him to know whether there is "overcharg[ing]" or by how much. That information can be delivered only by the market, when innovative new entrants see they can provide services at a better price. This has been happening since for-profit microfinance began to emerge, and the result has been greater competition. Rates have been coming down even as the demand for and availability of services have gone up.
How much better it would have been, Mr. Rosenberg suggests, if Compartamos had raised capital through "socially motivated investors" like the "international financial institutions" – i.e., the World Bank and the like. How much better indeed, for him and his poverty lobby cohorts, but not, it seems, for Mexico's entrepreneurial poor.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Self-Inflicted Economic Death of Ohio
By Chester E. Finn Jr.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Once known as the Mother of Presidents, Ohio is now getting poorer, older and dumber – and making all the wrong moves to reverse the situation.
And that may actually be a plus for Barack Obama. His party is finding that lofty, vague promises of change combined with high-spending, high-tax, welfare state-ish policies are a political winner in the state. How else to explain why Gov. Ted Strickland's approval ratings are in the mid-50s or why Democrats may even win control of the state House for the first time in 14 years?
But as a formula for economic revival, it is madness. Ohio already has the fifth-heaviest state and local tax burden in the country (up from 30th in 1990) and finds itself stagnating. Its unemployment rate, 6.3%, is above the national rate of 5.5%, even as the state's work force shrinks as people emigrate. Ohio's median household income is also falling – in 2006 it was $44,500, down 0.5% from the previous year – while the national figure ($48,500) was up 1.6%. During the closing decades of the 20th century, incomes rose twice as fast across the country as in Ohio.
The state has been deindustrializing for ages – the sprawling General Motors and NCR plants of my Dayton childhood are long gone. Every metropolitan area has seen manufacturing employment plunge. The state lost more than 200,000 nonfarm jobs over the past seven years alone. Of Ohio's 10 largest corporations (including Procter & Gamble and other well known companies), just two have posted positive returns so far this year. A surefire way to have one's portfolio underperform the market these days is to invest in Ohio.
Any sane strategy for turning this around would start by strengthening the state's human capital for a globalized, knowledge-based economy while making Ohio more hospitable to high-tech and brain-powered firms. To his credit, higher education chancellor Eric Fingerhut is moving to make the state's colleges more accountable for their performance, and more transparent to students and taxpayers. Primary-secondary schooling has seen a few decent efforts, too, such as a new initiative to beef up science and technology education. The state's first "KIPP" academy will soon open in Columbus.
But the distance to be covered is vast. Ohio ranks 41st in the percentage of adults with bachelor's degrees. Though it has many fine colleges, their young graduates don't stick around. They head for the coasts or for "happening places" in between, none of which (with the partial exception of Columbus) happens to be in the Buckeye State.
Bright Ohio kids aren't even enrolling in nearby colleges. The Cincinnati Enquirer recently reported that almost half the top seniors in local high schools were headed for out-of-state campuses. As jobs and young people exit, the remaining population ages. The Census Bureau projects that Ohioans over 65 will rise to 20% by 2030, up from 13% in 2000.
Even some well-established cultural institutions are faltering. The 57-year-old Columbus Symphony is broke and canceled its summer season. There is not a single downtown in Ohio that could be described as "lively" in the evening.
The government sector is still growing, of course, abetted by rising taxes on what's left of the private economy. Some big nonprofits are doing well, too, especially major medical institutions such as the acclaimed Cleveland Clinic. But urban public school systems – beset by shrinking enrollments, obdurate teacher unions and an aging workforce – are stumbling, ever more dependent for revenue on local bond issues that strapped voters are ever likelier to reject.
In both the public and private sectors, what one witnesses in Ohio are the most senior employees clinging to what's left of the economy, fending off change, demanding ever more burdensome contracts and costlier benefits. The ship is slowly sinking, but as the more agile passengers and crew take to the lifeboats and sail off, those who remain on board climb to the upper decks, determined to grab whatever plunder they can, confident that the rising waters won't reach them.
Few are paying attention to tomorrow and even those who do often come up with harebrained schemes. Gov. Strickland, for one, has yet to unveil an education-reform strategy a full two years into his term, but has been inviting education interest groups to briefings and workshops filled with vague, psychobabbling talk of creativity and innovation. While demanding greater control over the K-12 system than his predecessors enjoyed, he has also signaled his intention to back away from academic standards, testing and accountability, and to abandon Ohio's pioneering school-voucher and charter-school programs.
Mr. Strickland's approval ratings remain strong, perhaps because he's giving the teacher unions and other adult interests what they want.
Yet Ohio needs wrenching change on almost every front, not feel-good policies designed to placate and cosset survivors of the current economic meltdown.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Once known as the Mother of Presidents, Ohio is now getting poorer, older and dumber – and making all the wrong moves to reverse the situation.
And that may actually be a plus for Barack Obama. His party is finding that lofty, vague promises of change combined with high-spending, high-tax, welfare state-ish policies are a political winner in the state. How else to explain why Gov. Ted Strickland's approval ratings are in the mid-50s or why Democrats may even win control of the state House for the first time in 14 years?
But as a formula for economic revival, it is madness. Ohio already has the fifth-heaviest state and local tax burden in the country (up from 30th in 1990) and finds itself stagnating. Its unemployment rate, 6.3%, is above the national rate of 5.5%, even as the state's work force shrinks as people emigrate. Ohio's median household income is also falling – in 2006 it was $44,500, down 0.5% from the previous year – while the national figure ($48,500) was up 1.6%. During the closing decades of the 20th century, incomes rose twice as fast across the country as in Ohio.
The state has been deindustrializing for ages – the sprawling General Motors and NCR plants of my Dayton childhood are long gone. Every metropolitan area has seen manufacturing employment plunge. The state lost more than 200,000 nonfarm jobs over the past seven years alone. Of Ohio's 10 largest corporations (including Procter & Gamble and other well known companies), just two have posted positive returns so far this year. A surefire way to have one's portfolio underperform the market these days is to invest in Ohio.
Any sane strategy for turning this around would start by strengthening the state's human capital for a globalized, knowledge-based economy while making Ohio more hospitable to high-tech and brain-powered firms. To his credit, higher education chancellor Eric Fingerhut is moving to make the state's colleges more accountable for their performance, and more transparent to students and taxpayers. Primary-secondary schooling has seen a few decent efforts, too, such as a new initiative to beef up science and technology education. The state's first "KIPP" academy will soon open in Columbus.
But the distance to be covered is vast. Ohio ranks 41st in the percentage of adults with bachelor's degrees. Though it has many fine colleges, their young graduates don't stick around. They head for the coasts or for "happening places" in between, none of which (with the partial exception of Columbus) happens to be in the Buckeye State.
Bright Ohio kids aren't even enrolling in nearby colleges. The Cincinnati Enquirer recently reported that almost half the top seniors in local high schools were headed for out-of-state campuses. As jobs and young people exit, the remaining population ages. The Census Bureau projects that Ohioans over 65 will rise to 20% by 2030, up from 13% in 2000.
Even some well-established cultural institutions are faltering. The 57-year-old Columbus Symphony is broke and canceled its summer season. There is not a single downtown in Ohio that could be described as "lively" in the evening.
The government sector is still growing, of course, abetted by rising taxes on what's left of the private economy. Some big nonprofits are doing well, too, especially major medical institutions such as the acclaimed Cleveland Clinic. But urban public school systems – beset by shrinking enrollments, obdurate teacher unions and an aging workforce – are stumbling, ever more dependent for revenue on local bond issues that strapped voters are ever likelier to reject.
In both the public and private sectors, what one witnesses in Ohio are the most senior employees clinging to what's left of the economy, fending off change, demanding ever more burdensome contracts and costlier benefits. The ship is slowly sinking, but as the more agile passengers and crew take to the lifeboats and sail off, those who remain on board climb to the upper decks, determined to grab whatever plunder they can, confident that the rising waters won't reach them.
Few are paying attention to tomorrow and even those who do often come up with harebrained schemes. Gov. Strickland, for one, has yet to unveil an education-reform strategy a full two years into his term, but has been inviting education interest groups to briefings and workshops filled with vague, psychobabbling talk of creativity and innovation. While demanding greater control over the K-12 system than his predecessors enjoyed, he has also signaled his intention to back away from academic standards, testing and accountability, and to abandon Ohio's pioneering school-voucher and charter-school programs.
Mr. Strickland's approval ratings remain strong, perhaps because he's giving the teacher unions and other adult interests what they want.
Yet Ohio needs wrenching change on almost every front, not feel-good policies designed to placate and cosset survivors of the current economic meltdown.
America's Universities Are Living a Diversity Lie
By Peter Schmidt
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better education to all students.
To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social science is not on their side.
In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.
Selective colleges began lowering the bar for minority applicants back in the late 1960s to promote social justice and help keep the peace. They felt an obligation to help remedy society's racial discrimination, even if they generally weren't willing to acknowledge their own. And with riots devastating the nation's big cities, they saw a need to send black America a clear signal that the establishment it was rebelling against was in fact open to it – and that getting a good college education, not violence, represented the best path to wealth and power.
In the mid 1970s, when colleges talked about the educational benefits of race-conscious admissions, what they had in mind were the benefits reaped by minority students. And tellingly, the University of California had said nothing about the educational benefits of diversity in defending the UC-Davis medical school's strict racial quotas against the lawsuit brought by Allan P. Bakke, a rejected white applicant.
When the U.S. Supreme Court took up that decision on appeal, however, the educational diversity argument was tucked into a few of the many friend-of-the-court briefs submitted in the case.
Justice Powell would come to rely heavily on one of those briefs, in which Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania joined in arguing, without any empirical evidence, that diversity "makes the university a better learning environment." Like the four other conservatives on the court, Powell rejected the social-justice rationale for such policies, arguing that the government should not be in the business of deciding which segments of American society owed what to whom for past misdeeds. Nevertheless, he did not want the court to be radically changing how colleges did business. Looking for a way out, he ended up saying the four elite colleges had convinced him of the educational benefits of treating some applicants' minority status as a "plus factor."
Most selective colleges interpreted Justice Powell's controlling opinion in the case as a green light to keep doing what they had been as far as racial and ethnic-group admissions preferences were concerned. At the same time, they fretted little about how their campuses were actually becoming less diverse in socioeconomic terms as they jacked up tuitions and increasingly favored applicants from families wealthy enough to fatten endowments and pay their children's full fare. And despite a professed concern with viewpoint diversity, some colleges adopted rigid speech codes aimed at squelching statements that made minority students uncomfortable.
Academe got a rude awakening in 1996. Californians passed a ballot measure in that year barring public colleges from considering race and ethnicity in admissions. And a federal appeals court rejected Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a lawsuit, Hopwood v. Texas, involving the University of Texas law school. In his book, "Diversity Challenged," Gary Orfield, a staunch advocate of affirmative action, says people in higher education looked around and suddenly realized "no consensus existed on the benefits of diversity" and "the research had not been done to prove the academic benefits."
Over the next several years, education researchers scrambled to find such proof and repeatedly met with college leaders to discuss their progress. Their work took on a sense of urgency, on the expectation the Supreme Court would soon be revisiting Bakke. Yet again and again, their studies were shown to have gaping holes and deemed too weak to hold up in the courts.
Fortunately for affirmative-action advocates, the Center for Individual Rights, which coordinated the legal assault on race-conscious admissions, made a tactical decision not to seriously challenge such research – out of a belief it could win on legal principle. When the Supreme Court waded back into the controversy, it reaffirmed Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a 2003 decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan law school. The opinions revealed that the majority of justices had been swayed by a barrage of friend-of-the-court briefs spinning and exaggerating what the research said about the alleged educational benefits of diversity.
Proponents of race-conscious admissions policies have yet to produce a study of their educational benefits without some limitation or flaw. Many focus only on benefits to minority students. Others define benefits in nakedly ideological terms, declaring the policies successful if they seem correlated with the adoption of liberal views. A large share relies on survey data that substitute subjective opinions for an objective measurement of learning. The University of Michigan's star witness, Patricia Gurin, a professor of psychology and women's studies, presented studies showing the educational benefits of classes and campus programs that promote interracial understanding. Those may exist at colleges that don't consider an applicant's race.
Affirmative action advocates argue that it is unreasonable to expect more of the research, because no education policy has incontrovertible proof of effectiveness. But affirmative-action preferences are not just any education policy; they require some students to suffer racial discrimination for the sake of a perceived common good. In grounding his definition of that good in the shifting sands of social science, Justice Powell may have left colleges legally vulnerable for decades to come. The courts, after all, are known for diverse opinions.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better education to all students.
To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social science is not on their side.
In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.
Selective colleges began lowering the bar for minority applicants back in the late 1960s to promote social justice and help keep the peace. They felt an obligation to help remedy society's racial discrimination, even if they generally weren't willing to acknowledge their own. And with riots devastating the nation's big cities, they saw a need to send black America a clear signal that the establishment it was rebelling against was in fact open to it – and that getting a good college education, not violence, represented the best path to wealth and power.
In the mid 1970s, when colleges talked about the educational benefits of race-conscious admissions, what they had in mind were the benefits reaped by minority students. And tellingly, the University of California had said nothing about the educational benefits of diversity in defending the UC-Davis medical school's strict racial quotas against the lawsuit brought by Allan P. Bakke, a rejected white applicant.
When the U.S. Supreme Court took up that decision on appeal, however, the educational diversity argument was tucked into a few of the many friend-of-the-court briefs submitted in the case.
Justice Powell would come to rely heavily on one of those briefs, in which Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania joined in arguing, without any empirical evidence, that diversity "makes the university a better learning environment." Like the four other conservatives on the court, Powell rejected the social-justice rationale for such policies, arguing that the government should not be in the business of deciding which segments of American society owed what to whom for past misdeeds. Nevertheless, he did not want the court to be radically changing how colleges did business. Looking for a way out, he ended up saying the four elite colleges had convinced him of the educational benefits of treating some applicants' minority status as a "plus factor."
Most selective colleges interpreted Justice Powell's controlling opinion in the case as a green light to keep doing what they had been as far as racial and ethnic-group admissions preferences were concerned. At the same time, they fretted little about how their campuses were actually becoming less diverse in socioeconomic terms as they jacked up tuitions and increasingly favored applicants from families wealthy enough to fatten endowments and pay their children's full fare. And despite a professed concern with viewpoint diversity, some colleges adopted rigid speech codes aimed at squelching statements that made minority students uncomfortable.
Academe got a rude awakening in 1996. Californians passed a ballot measure in that year barring public colleges from considering race and ethnicity in admissions. And a federal appeals court rejected Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a lawsuit, Hopwood v. Texas, involving the University of Texas law school. In his book, "Diversity Challenged," Gary Orfield, a staunch advocate of affirmative action, says people in higher education looked around and suddenly realized "no consensus existed on the benefits of diversity" and "the research had not been done to prove the academic benefits."
Over the next several years, education researchers scrambled to find such proof and repeatedly met with college leaders to discuss their progress. Their work took on a sense of urgency, on the expectation the Supreme Court would soon be revisiting Bakke. Yet again and again, their studies were shown to have gaping holes and deemed too weak to hold up in the courts.
Fortunately for affirmative-action advocates, the Center for Individual Rights, which coordinated the legal assault on race-conscious admissions, made a tactical decision not to seriously challenge such research – out of a belief it could win on legal principle. When the Supreme Court waded back into the controversy, it reaffirmed Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a 2003 decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan law school. The opinions revealed that the majority of justices had been swayed by a barrage of friend-of-the-court briefs spinning and exaggerating what the research said about the alleged educational benefits of diversity.
Proponents of race-conscious admissions policies have yet to produce a study of their educational benefits without some limitation or flaw. Many focus only on benefits to minority students. Others define benefits in nakedly ideological terms, declaring the policies successful if they seem correlated with the adoption of liberal views. A large share relies on survey data that substitute subjective opinions for an objective measurement of learning. The University of Michigan's star witness, Patricia Gurin, a professor of psychology and women's studies, presented studies showing the educational benefits of classes and campus programs that promote interracial understanding. Those may exist at colleges that don't consider an applicant's race.
Affirmative action advocates argue that it is unreasonable to expect more of the research, because no education policy has incontrovertible proof of effectiveness. But affirmative-action preferences are not just any education policy; they require some students to suffer racial discrimination for the sake of a perceived common good. In grounding his definition of that good in the shifting sands of social science, Justice Powell may have left colleges legally vulnerable for decades to come. The courts, after all, are known for diverse opinions.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
News Flash: The Constitution Means What It Says
By Randy E. Barnett
Friday, June 27, 2008
Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in yesterday's Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is historic in its implications and exemplary in its reasoning.
A federal ban on an entire class of guns in ordinary use for self-defense – such as the handgun ban adopted by the District of Columbia – is now off the table. Every gun controller's fondest desire has become a constitutional pipe dream.
Two important practical issues remain. First, will this ruling also apply to states and municipalities? That will depend on whether the Supreme Court decides to "incorporate" the right to keep and bear arms into the 14th Amendment. But in the middle of his opinion Justice Scalia acknowledges that the 39th Congress that enacted the 14th Amendment did so, in part, to protect the individual right to arms of freedmen and Southern Republicans so they might defend themselves from violence.
My prediction: This ruling will eventually be extended to the states.
Second, how will the court deal with firearms regulations that fall short of a ban? The majority opinion strongly suggests that such regulations must now be subjected to meaningful judicial scrutiny. The exact nature of this scrutiny is not clear, but Justice Scalia explicitly rejects the extremely deferential "rationality" review advocated by Justice Stephen Breyer.
Most likely, gun laws will receive the same sort of judicial scrutiny that is now used to evaluate "time, place and manner" regulations of speech and assembly. Such regulations of First Amendment freedoms are today upheld if they are narrowly tailored to achieve a truly important government purpose, but not if they are really a pretext for undermining protected liberties.
My prediction? Because gun-rights groups like the NRA have so successfully prevented enactment of unreasonable gun laws, most existing gun regulations falling short of a ban will eventually be upheld. But more extreme or merely symbolic laws that are sometimes proposed – whose aim is to impose an "undue burden" by raising the cost of gun production, ownership and sale – would likely be found unconstitutional. All gun regulations – for example, safe storage laws and licensing – will have to be shown to be consistent with an effective right of self-defense by law-abiding citizens.
Justice Scalia's opinion is exemplary for the way it was reasoned. It will be studied by law professors and students for years to come. It is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be adopted by a majority of the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia begins with the text, and carefully parses the grammatical relationship of the "operative clause" identifying "the right to keep and bear arms" to the "prefatory clause" about the importance of a "well-regulated militia." Only then does he consider the extensive evidence of original meaning that has been uncovered by scholars over the past 20 years – evidence that was presented to the Court in numerous "friends of the court" briefs.
Justice Scalia's opinion is the finest example of what is now called "original public meaning" jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court. This approach stands in sharp contrast to Justice John Paul Stevens's dissenting opinion that largely focused on "original intent" – the method that many historians employ to explain away the text of the Second Amendment by placing its words in what they call a "larger context." Although original-intent jurisprudence was discredited years ago among constitutional law professors, that has not stopped nonoriginalists from using "original intent" – or the original principles "underlying" the text – to negate its original public meaning.
Of course, the originalism of both Justices Scalia's and Stevens's opinions are in stark contrast with Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, in which he advocates balancing an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. Guess which wins out in the balancing? As Justice Scalia notes, this is not how we normally protect individual rights, and was certainly not how Justice Breyer protected the individual right of habeas corpus in the military tribunals case decided just two weeks ago.
So what larger lessons does Heller teach? First, the differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same.
We should also seek to get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions or "precedents" that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text. This shows why elections matter – especially presidential elections – and why we should vet our politicians to see if they appreciate how the Constitution ought to be interpreted.
Good legal scholarship was absolutely crucial to this outcome. No justice is capable of producing the historical research and analysis upon which Justice Scalia relied. Brilliant as it was in its execution, his opinion rested on the work of many scholars of the Second Amendment, as I am sure he would be the first to acknowledge. (Disclosure: I joined a brief by Academics for the Second Amendment supporting the individual rights interpretation; one of my articles was cited by Justice Scalia and another by Justice Breyer in his dissent.)
Due to the political orthodoxy among most constitutional law professors, some of the most important and earliest of this scholarship was produced by nonacademics like Don Kates, Stephen Halbrook, David Kopel, Clayton Cramer and others. Believe it or not, Heller was a case of nearly first impression, uninhibited by any prior decisions misinterpreting the Second Amendment.
Last but not least, tribute must be paid to the plaintiffs – Shelly Parker, Dick Anthony Heller, Tom Palmer, Gillian St. Lawrence, Tracey Ambeau, and George Lyon – who went where the National Rifle Association feared to tread, and to their lawyers Robert Levy, Clark Neily, and lead counsel Alan Gura. I was privileged to witness Mr. Gura argue the case – his first Supreme Court argument ever – and he was outstanding. Heller provides yet another reminder of the crucial role that private lawyers play in the preservation of our liberties.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in yesterday's Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is historic in its implications and exemplary in its reasoning.
A federal ban on an entire class of guns in ordinary use for self-defense – such as the handgun ban adopted by the District of Columbia – is now off the table. Every gun controller's fondest desire has become a constitutional pipe dream.
Two important practical issues remain. First, will this ruling also apply to states and municipalities? That will depend on whether the Supreme Court decides to "incorporate" the right to keep and bear arms into the 14th Amendment. But in the middle of his opinion Justice Scalia acknowledges that the 39th Congress that enacted the 14th Amendment did so, in part, to protect the individual right to arms of freedmen and Southern Republicans so they might defend themselves from violence.
My prediction: This ruling will eventually be extended to the states.
Second, how will the court deal with firearms regulations that fall short of a ban? The majority opinion strongly suggests that such regulations must now be subjected to meaningful judicial scrutiny. The exact nature of this scrutiny is not clear, but Justice Scalia explicitly rejects the extremely deferential "rationality" review advocated by Justice Stephen Breyer.
Most likely, gun laws will receive the same sort of judicial scrutiny that is now used to evaluate "time, place and manner" regulations of speech and assembly. Such regulations of First Amendment freedoms are today upheld if they are narrowly tailored to achieve a truly important government purpose, but not if they are really a pretext for undermining protected liberties.
My prediction? Because gun-rights groups like the NRA have so successfully prevented enactment of unreasonable gun laws, most existing gun regulations falling short of a ban will eventually be upheld. But more extreme or merely symbolic laws that are sometimes proposed – whose aim is to impose an "undue burden" by raising the cost of gun production, ownership and sale – would likely be found unconstitutional. All gun regulations – for example, safe storage laws and licensing – will have to be shown to be consistent with an effective right of self-defense by law-abiding citizens.
Justice Scalia's opinion is exemplary for the way it was reasoned. It will be studied by law professors and students for years to come. It is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be adopted by a majority of the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia begins with the text, and carefully parses the grammatical relationship of the "operative clause" identifying "the right to keep and bear arms" to the "prefatory clause" about the importance of a "well-regulated militia." Only then does he consider the extensive evidence of original meaning that has been uncovered by scholars over the past 20 years – evidence that was presented to the Court in numerous "friends of the court" briefs.
Justice Scalia's opinion is the finest example of what is now called "original public meaning" jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court. This approach stands in sharp contrast to Justice John Paul Stevens's dissenting opinion that largely focused on "original intent" – the method that many historians employ to explain away the text of the Second Amendment by placing its words in what they call a "larger context." Although original-intent jurisprudence was discredited years ago among constitutional law professors, that has not stopped nonoriginalists from using "original intent" – or the original principles "underlying" the text – to negate its original public meaning.
Of course, the originalism of both Justices Scalia's and Stevens's opinions are in stark contrast with Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, in which he advocates balancing an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. Guess which wins out in the balancing? As Justice Scalia notes, this is not how we normally protect individual rights, and was certainly not how Justice Breyer protected the individual right of habeas corpus in the military tribunals case decided just two weeks ago.
So what larger lessons does Heller teach? First, the differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same.
We should also seek to get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions or "precedents" that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text. This shows why elections matter – especially presidential elections – and why we should vet our politicians to see if they appreciate how the Constitution ought to be interpreted.
Good legal scholarship was absolutely crucial to this outcome. No justice is capable of producing the historical research and analysis upon which Justice Scalia relied. Brilliant as it was in its execution, his opinion rested on the work of many scholars of the Second Amendment, as I am sure he would be the first to acknowledge. (Disclosure: I joined a brief by Academics for the Second Amendment supporting the individual rights interpretation; one of my articles was cited by Justice Scalia and another by Justice Breyer in his dissent.)
Due to the political orthodoxy among most constitutional law professors, some of the most important and earliest of this scholarship was produced by nonacademics like Don Kates, Stephen Halbrook, David Kopel, Clayton Cramer and others. Believe it or not, Heller was a case of nearly first impression, uninhibited by any prior decisions misinterpreting the Second Amendment.
Last but not least, tribute must be paid to the plaintiffs – Shelly Parker, Dick Anthony Heller, Tom Palmer, Gillian St. Lawrence, Tracey Ambeau, and George Lyon – who went where the National Rifle Association feared to tread, and to their lawyers Robert Levy, Clark Neily, and lead counsel Alan Gura. I was privileged to witness Mr. Gura argue the case – his first Supreme Court argument ever – and he was outstanding. Heller provides yet another reminder of the crucial role that private lawyers play in the preservation of our liberties.
Drill Here. Drill Now. Drill ANWR.
Paul Driessen
Saturday, June 28, 2008
“We can’t drill our way out of our energy problem.” This daily mantra, mostly from Democrats, underscores an abysmal grasp of economics by the politicians, activists, bureaucrats and judges who are dictating US policies. If only their hot air could be converted into usable energy.
Drilling is no silver bullet. But it is vital. It won’t generate overnight production. But just announcing that America is finally hunting oil again would send a powerful signal to energy markets … and to speculators – many of whom are betting that continued US drilling restrictions will further exacerbate the global demand-supply imbalance, and send “futures” prices even higher.
Pro-drilling policies would likely bring lower prices, as did recent announcements that Brazil had found new offshore oil fields and Iraq would sign contracts to increase oil production. Conversely, news that supplies are tightening – because of sabotage in Nigeria’s delta region, or more congressional bans on leasing – will send prices upward.
One of our best prospects is Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which geologists say contains billions of barrels of recoverable oil. If President Clinton hadn’t bowed to Wilderness Society demands and vetoed 1995 legislation, we’d be producing a million barrels a day from ANWR right now. That’s equal to US imports from Saudi Arabia, at $50 billion annually.
Drilling in ANWR would get new oil flowing in 5-10 years, depending on how many lawsuits environmentalists file. That’s far faster than benefits would flow from supposed alternatives: devoting millions more acres of cropland to corn or cellulosic ethanol, converting our vehicle fleet to hybrid and flex-fuel cars, building dozens of new nuclear power plants, and blanketing thousands of square miles with wind turbines and solar panels. These alternatives would take decades to implement, and all face political, legal, technological, economic and environmental hurdles.
ANWR is the size of South Carolina. Its narrow coastal plain is frozen and windswept most of the year. Wildlife flourish amid drilling and production in other Arctic regions, and would do so near ANWR facilities. Inuits who live there know this, and support drilling by an 8:1 margin. Gwich’in Indians who oppose drilling live hundreds of miles away – and have leased and drilled their own tribal lands, including caribou migratory routes.
Drilling and production operations would impact only 2,000 acres – to produce 15 billion gallons of oil annually. Saying this tiny footprint would spoil the refuge is like saying a major airport along South Carolina’s northern border would destroy the state’s scenery and wildlife.
Drilling and production operations would impact only 2,000 acres – to produce 15 billion gallons of oil annually. Saying this tiny footprint would spoil the refuge is like saying a major airport along South Carolina’s northern border would destroy the state’s scenery and wildlife.
It’s a far better bargain than producing 7 billion gallons of ethanol in 2007 from corn grown on and area the size of Indiana (23 million acres). It’s far better than using wind to generate enough electricity to power New York City, which would require blanketing Connecticut (3 million acres) with turbines.
Anti-drilling factions also assert: “US energy prices are high, because Americans consume 25% of the world’s oil, while possessing only 3% of its proven oil reserves.”
Possession has nothing to do with prices – any more than owning a library, but never opening the books, improves intellectual abilities; or owning farmland that’s never tilled feeds hungry people.
It is production that matters – and the United States has locked up vast energy resources. Not just an estimated 169 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, Rockies, Great Lakes, Southwest and ANWR – but also natural gas, coal, uranium and hydroelectric resources.
“Proven reserves” are resources that drilling has confirmed exist and can be produced with current technology and prices. By imposing bans on leasing, and encouraging environmentalists to challenge seismic and drilling permits on existing leases, politicians ensure that we will never increase our proven reserves. In fact, reserves will decrease, as we deplete existing deposits and don’t replace them. The rhetoric is clever – but disingenuous, fraudulent and harmful.
The Geological Survey and Congressional Research Service say it’s 95% likely that there are 15.6 billion barrels of oil beneath ANWR. With today’s prices and technology, 60% of that is recoverable. At $135 a barrel, that represents $1.3 trillion that we would not have to send to Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. It means lower prices and reduced risks of oil spills from tankers carrying foreign crude.
It represents another $400 billion in state and federal royalties and corporate income taxes – plus billions in lease sale revenues, plus thousands of direct and indirect jobs, in addition to numerous jobs created when this $1.7 trillion total is invested in the USA.
It means additional billions in income tax revenues that those jobs would generate, and new opportunities for minority, poor and blue collar families to improve their lives and living standards. It means lower prices for gasoline, heating, cooling, food and other products.
That’s just ANWR. Factor in America’s other locked-up energy, and we’re talking tens of trillions of dollars that we either keep in the United States, by producing that energy … or ship overseas.
This energy belongs to all Americans. It’s not the private property of environmental pressure groups, or of politicians who cater to them in exchange for re-election support.
This energy is likewise the common heritage of mankind. Politicians and eco-activists have no right to keep it off limits – and tell the rest of the world: We have no intention of developing American energy. We don’t care if you need oil, soaring food and energy prices are pummeling your poor, or drilling in your countries harms your habitats to produce oil for US consumers.
Those attitudes are immoral and intolerable. It’s time to drill again here in America – while conserving more and pursuing new energy technologies for the future.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
“We can’t drill our way out of our energy problem.” This daily mantra, mostly from Democrats, underscores an abysmal grasp of economics by the politicians, activists, bureaucrats and judges who are dictating US policies. If only their hot air could be converted into usable energy.
Drilling is no silver bullet. But it is vital. It won’t generate overnight production. But just announcing that America is finally hunting oil again would send a powerful signal to energy markets … and to speculators – many of whom are betting that continued US drilling restrictions will further exacerbate the global demand-supply imbalance, and send “futures” prices even higher.
Pro-drilling policies would likely bring lower prices, as did recent announcements that Brazil had found new offshore oil fields and Iraq would sign contracts to increase oil production. Conversely, news that supplies are tightening – because of sabotage in Nigeria’s delta region, or more congressional bans on leasing – will send prices upward.
One of our best prospects is Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which geologists say contains billions of barrels of recoverable oil. If President Clinton hadn’t bowed to Wilderness Society demands and vetoed 1995 legislation, we’d be producing a million barrels a day from ANWR right now. That’s equal to US imports from Saudi Arabia, at $50 billion annually.
Drilling in ANWR would get new oil flowing in 5-10 years, depending on how many lawsuits environmentalists file. That’s far faster than benefits would flow from supposed alternatives: devoting millions more acres of cropland to corn or cellulosic ethanol, converting our vehicle fleet to hybrid and flex-fuel cars, building dozens of new nuclear power plants, and blanketing thousands of square miles with wind turbines and solar panels. These alternatives would take decades to implement, and all face political, legal, technological, economic and environmental hurdles.
ANWR is the size of South Carolina. Its narrow coastal plain is frozen and windswept most of the year. Wildlife flourish amid drilling and production in other Arctic regions, and would do so near ANWR facilities. Inuits who live there know this, and support drilling by an 8:1 margin. Gwich’in Indians who oppose drilling live hundreds of miles away – and have leased and drilled their own tribal lands, including caribou migratory routes.
Drilling and production operations would impact only 2,000 acres – to produce 15 billion gallons of oil annually. Saying this tiny footprint would spoil the refuge is like saying a major airport along South Carolina’s northern border would destroy the state’s scenery and wildlife.
Drilling and production operations would impact only 2,000 acres – to produce 15 billion gallons of oil annually. Saying this tiny footprint would spoil the refuge is like saying a major airport along South Carolina’s northern border would destroy the state’s scenery and wildlife.
It’s a far better bargain than producing 7 billion gallons of ethanol in 2007 from corn grown on and area the size of Indiana (23 million acres). It’s far better than using wind to generate enough electricity to power New York City, which would require blanketing Connecticut (3 million acres) with turbines.
Anti-drilling factions also assert: “US energy prices are high, because Americans consume 25% of the world’s oil, while possessing only 3% of its proven oil reserves.”
Possession has nothing to do with prices – any more than owning a library, but never opening the books, improves intellectual abilities; or owning farmland that’s never tilled feeds hungry people.
It is production that matters – and the United States has locked up vast energy resources. Not just an estimated 169 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, Rockies, Great Lakes, Southwest and ANWR – but also natural gas, coal, uranium and hydroelectric resources.
“Proven reserves” are resources that drilling has confirmed exist and can be produced with current technology and prices. By imposing bans on leasing, and encouraging environmentalists to challenge seismic and drilling permits on existing leases, politicians ensure that we will never increase our proven reserves. In fact, reserves will decrease, as we deplete existing deposits and don’t replace them. The rhetoric is clever – but disingenuous, fraudulent and harmful.
The Geological Survey and Congressional Research Service say it’s 95% likely that there are 15.6 billion barrels of oil beneath ANWR. With today’s prices and technology, 60% of that is recoverable. At $135 a barrel, that represents $1.3 trillion that we would not have to send to Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. It means lower prices and reduced risks of oil spills from tankers carrying foreign crude.
It represents another $400 billion in state and federal royalties and corporate income taxes – plus billions in lease sale revenues, plus thousands of direct and indirect jobs, in addition to numerous jobs created when this $1.7 trillion total is invested in the USA.
It means additional billions in income tax revenues that those jobs would generate, and new opportunities for minority, poor and blue collar families to improve their lives and living standards. It means lower prices for gasoline, heating, cooling, food and other products.
That’s just ANWR. Factor in America’s other locked-up energy, and we’re talking tens of trillions of dollars that we either keep in the United States, by producing that energy … or ship overseas.
This energy belongs to all Americans. It’s not the private property of environmental pressure groups, or of politicians who cater to them in exchange for re-election support.
This energy is likewise the common heritage of mankind. Politicians and eco-activists have no right to keep it off limits – and tell the rest of the world: We have no intention of developing American energy. We don’t care if you need oil, soaring food and energy prices are pummeling your poor, or drilling in your countries harms your habitats to produce oil for US consumers.
Those attitudes are immoral and intolerable. It’s time to drill again here in America – while conserving more and pursuing new energy technologies for the future.
Leap of Nuclear Faith
Wall Street Journal
Friday, June 27, 2008
North Korea delivered its long-overdue nuclear declaration yesterday, and President Bush immediately announced his intention to remove it from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations. We called this "faith-based nonproliferation" when it was first announced in February 2007, and that's still what it looks like today.
Yesterday's accounting is far from the "complete declaration of all nuclear programs" that Pyongyang pledged to supply. There's no mention of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the device it exploded in October 2006. Also missing is an accounting of its uranium program – despite new evidence of uranium traces found on 18,000 pages of North Korean documents, as reported by the Washington Post last weekend. Nor is there any mention of the North's proliferation, including the nuclear facility in Syria destroyed by Israel last year.
This doesn't sound like nuclear "disarmament," and it's a long way from the Libyan model, whereby Moammar Gadhafi was required to relinquish every aspect of his nuclear program before receiving a clean diplomatic slate.
Mr. Bush nonetheless justifies this deal as the only way to control the North's stash of plutonium, which could be sold or spread around the world. But even here the U.S. is saying it isn't sure of a complete accounting. News reports say the North is admitting to 37 kilograms, enough for about a half dozen weapons. U.S. intelligence believes it could have as much as 50 kilograms.
The U.S. says that with access to the records and reactor at Yongbyon, it should be able to track down any remaining plutonium clues. Our intelligence sources say this will depend on intrusive verification, including snap, on-demand inspections anywhere in North Korea. When we asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about snap inspections last week, she said they would be intrusive enough. We'll wait for those details before joining the believers, and for that matter until the North grants a snap inspection request.
The larger strategic bet is that Kim Jong Il will now finally come in from the Cold War, a la Mikhail Gorbachev. We'd like to believe this too, except that Kim has shown no inclination to open up anything beyond inviting his own elite to hear the New York Philharmonic. He can't reform without collapsing his prison of a regime.
It's more likely that he'll stick to his past pattern: Pocket the U.S. concessions and then threaten proliferation or some other provocation unless we make more concessions. At the very least, he'll now run out the clock until after the U.S. election on the expectation that he can win more concessions from President Obama. Mr. Bush downplayed the terror delisting yesterday, noting that North Korea will still be subject to numerous other sanctions. True enough, but political pressure will build to ease those too, as well as for the World Bank and other international bodies to start sending cash to the North.
This dance of detente is also embarrassing to our Japanese allies, and may even topple Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. Tokyo wants Pyongyang to come clean about the Japanese citizens it kidnapped in the 1970s and '80s. Mr. Bush said yesterday that "The United States will never forget the abduction[s]," but who can blame the Japanese if they believe the U.S. has sold them out for the sake of this diplomatic "progress."
Most troubling is the message all of this sends to Iran, or other rogue states. The lesson is that when you build a weapon, your political leverage increases. Play enough brinksmanship, and you can even receive diplomatic absolution without admitting to having the kind of nuclear device you exploded less than two years earlier. We understand that diplomacy often includes winks and nods, but it shouldn't require denial.
Friday, June 27, 2008
North Korea delivered its long-overdue nuclear declaration yesterday, and President Bush immediately announced his intention to remove it from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations. We called this "faith-based nonproliferation" when it was first announced in February 2007, and that's still what it looks like today.
Yesterday's accounting is far from the "complete declaration of all nuclear programs" that Pyongyang pledged to supply. There's no mention of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the device it exploded in October 2006. Also missing is an accounting of its uranium program – despite new evidence of uranium traces found on 18,000 pages of North Korean documents, as reported by the Washington Post last weekend. Nor is there any mention of the North's proliferation, including the nuclear facility in Syria destroyed by Israel last year.
This doesn't sound like nuclear "disarmament," and it's a long way from the Libyan model, whereby Moammar Gadhafi was required to relinquish every aspect of his nuclear program before receiving a clean diplomatic slate.
Mr. Bush nonetheless justifies this deal as the only way to control the North's stash of plutonium, which could be sold or spread around the world. But even here the U.S. is saying it isn't sure of a complete accounting. News reports say the North is admitting to 37 kilograms, enough for about a half dozen weapons. U.S. intelligence believes it could have as much as 50 kilograms.
The U.S. says that with access to the records and reactor at Yongbyon, it should be able to track down any remaining plutonium clues. Our intelligence sources say this will depend on intrusive verification, including snap, on-demand inspections anywhere in North Korea. When we asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about snap inspections last week, she said they would be intrusive enough. We'll wait for those details before joining the believers, and for that matter until the North grants a snap inspection request.
The larger strategic bet is that Kim Jong Il will now finally come in from the Cold War, a la Mikhail Gorbachev. We'd like to believe this too, except that Kim has shown no inclination to open up anything beyond inviting his own elite to hear the New York Philharmonic. He can't reform without collapsing his prison of a regime.
It's more likely that he'll stick to his past pattern: Pocket the U.S. concessions and then threaten proliferation or some other provocation unless we make more concessions. At the very least, he'll now run out the clock until after the U.S. election on the expectation that he can win more concessions from President Obama. Mr. Bush downplayed the terror delisting yesterday, noting that North Korea will still be subject to numerous other sanctions. True enough, but political pressure will build to ease those too, as well as for the World Bank and other international bodies to start sending cash to the North.
This dance of detente is also embarrassing to our Japanese allies, and may even topple Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. Tokyo wants Pyongyang to come clean about the Japanese citizens it kidnapped in the 1970s and '80s. Mr. Bush said yesterday that "The United States will never forget the abduction[s]," but who can blame the Japanese if they believe the U.S. has sold them out for the sake of this diplomatic "progress."
Most troubling is the message all of this sends to Iran, or other rogue states. The lesson is that when you build a weapon, your political leverage increases. Play enough brinksmanship, and you can even receive diplomatic absolution without admitting to having the kind of nuclear device you exploded less than two years earlier. We understand that diplomacy often includes winks and nods, but it shouldn't require denial.
Europe's Bloodsport
By Matthew Kaminski
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The English striker Gary Lineker once said, "Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win."
The wisdom is eternal – infuriatingly so. Turks are the latest to feel its sting. Their side pulled off miracles to reach the final four at the current European Championship and looked the better against Germany for most of Wednesday night. Then the inevitable happened: Germany 3, Turkey 2. The Portuguese always play beautifully until an important game comes along, when they collapse – at this year's tournament, to the Germans in the quarterfinals.
I feel their misery. Better than most. By blood, I am a Pole. In European football – let's dispense, in deference to prevailing global sports tastes, with "soccer" – blood is what counts. My land of birth has, over the years, had a few run-ins with its western neighbors. None ended all that well, certainly not in football.
I'm also American. It is the place my family found refuge and I got some schooling and a job. Split characters like me are often asked: Do you feel more X or Y? There's no straight answer. America is a state of mind. You choose your America. You choose your sports teams. I once loved the Orioles and, since that Pete Angelos guy bought and ruined the team, couldn't care less today.
To be a Pole or a Turk or a Portuguese is in the bones. There is no place for free will, in identity and sporting terms. No other team can ever make me feel as miserable as Poland.
Yes, in this globalizing era, Europe is changing fast, becoming more like America. Sweden's star striker is a Bosniak. The French side is mostly made up of children of immigrants from Africa. The best Polish player is Roger Guerreiro, born in Sao Paulo and handed a newly minted Polish passport just before this tournament.
The Germans are no more racially pure. In the predictable 2-0 defeat of Poland, our Roger proved no match for their Lukasz Podolski, a striker bred in Poland who scored both goals for his adopted Germany. After each, Mr. Podolski looked almost disconsolate. You don't celebrate yet another humiliation of your people.
German flags are all over Berlin these days. But "the Turks are the only people who own German flags here," a German friend half-joked, before we went to watch the Portugal match. Many Turkish shop owners hang them out with the Turkish flag to ward away any drunken postmatch trouble.
The Germans know all too well that an atavistic attachment to "blood and soil" has been Europe's undoing. So "Europe" may be the straitjacket willingly worn – and for Germany, a way to try to deflect the Continent's resentment of its football team. But every four years the passions stirred by this tournament remind us that the postmodern "European" identity isn't even skin-deep.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The English striker Gary Lineker once said, "Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win."
The wisdom is eternal – infuriatingly so. Turks are the latest to feel its sting. Their side pulled off miracles to reach the final four at the current European Championship and looked the better against Germany for most of Wednesday night. Then the inevitable happened: Germany 3, Turkey 2. The Portuguese always play beautifully until an important game comes along, when they collapse – at this year's tournament, to the Germans in the quarterfinals.
I feel their misery. Better than most. By blood, I am a Pole. In European football – let's dispense, in deference to prevailing global sports tastes, with "soccer" – blood is what counts. My land of birth has, over the years, had a few run-ins with its western neighbors. None ended all that well, certainly not in football.
I'm also American. It is the place my family found refuge and I got some schooling and a job. Split characters like me are often asked: Do you feel more X or Y? There's no straight answer. America is a state of mind. You choose your America. You choose your sports teams. I once loved the Orioles and, since that Pete Angelos guy bought and ruined the team, couldn't care less today.
To be a Pole or a Turk or a Portuguese is in the bones. There is no place for free will, in identity and sporting terms. No other team can ever make me feel as miserable as Poland.
Yes, in this globalizing era, Europe is changing fast, becoming more like America. Sweden's star striker is a Bosniak. The French side is mostly made up of children of immigrants from Africa. The best Polish player is Roger Guerreiro, born in Sao Paulo and handed a newly minted Polish passport just before this tournament.
The Germans are no more racially pure. In the predictable 2-0 defeat of Poland, our Roger proved no match for their Lukasz Podolski, a striker bred in Poland who scored both goals for his adopted Germany. After each, Mr. Podolski looked almost disconsolate. You don't celebrate yet another humiliation of your people.
German flags are all over Berlin these days. But "the Turks are the only people who own German flags here," a German friend half-joked, before we went to watch the Portugal match. Many Turkish shop owners hang them out with the Turkish flag to ward away any drunken postmatch trouble.
The Germans know all too well that an atavistic attachment to "blood and soil" has been Europe's undoing. So "Europe" may be the straitjacket willingly worn – and for Germany, a way to try to deflect the Continent's resentment of its football team. But every four years the passions stirred by this tournament remind us that the postmodern "European" identity isn't even skin-deep.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Why Liberals Lie About What They Believe
John Hawkins
Friday, June 27, 2008
Once you've watched liberals long enough to understand how they think -- scratch that, how they feel -- they become extraordinarily predictable.
To begin with, the liberal agenda is, in many respects, the same as it was in the thirties. Whether you call it communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or progressivism, the only real difference is how much they believe they can get away with, the way they sell it to people, and the latest trendy name for what they believe.
So, once the liberals pick a policy from their stale program to push, the next step is to get it implemented. This is where liberals have problems because whether a policy makes sense, is practical, or actually improves people's lives is of secondary importance to them. What is important to liberals is whether supporting or opposing that policy makes them feel good about themselves.
This is why liberals continue to support dysfunctional policies that have been failing miserably for decades and why they often oppose common sense programs that have been proven to work time and time again -- because it isn't about whether it works or not, it's about how it makes them feel.
In other words, a liberal will almost always prefer a policy that's extremely expensive, is difficult to implement, helps almost no one, but seems "nice" -- to a policy that is cheap, simple to implement, extremely effective, and seems "mean."
However, since most Americans make decisions about policies based on whether or not they believe the policy makes people's lives better or worse, liberals have had to become habitually dishonest about what they believe and want to do to get their ideas put into action.
This is a point worth stressing because many people who aren't familiar with politics believe that conservatives and liberals are simply flip sides of the same coin and therefore, approach issues the same way. However, conservatives genuinely believe that this is a center-right country. That's why conservatives have no qualms about being publicly labeled as conservatives and it's part of the reason why we're much more honest than the Left -- because we believe that a majority of the American people generally agree with us and share our values.
So, those of us on the Right spend our time trying to explain to the American people what we really want to do, while the Left spends its time trying to hide what it really wants to do from the American people.
Because of this, when liberals don't feel that the political winds are blowing in their direction, not only will they generally avoid discussing the things they believe, they will typically deny that they believe them at all.
Additionally, liberals go to bizarre lengths to tilt the political playing field in their favor. They move into the mainstream media so that they can tip what are supposed to be "objective" news stories in their favor. They get into positions of power in our educational system so that they can teach kids liberal propaganda before they're old enough to know better. They uniformly support judges who care nothing about the Constitution as long as it moves liberal ideological goals forward. Even the Left's support of illegal immigration is rooted in the desire to bring in millions of poor people from socialist countries who are more likely to vote Democratic. If they can't convince the American voters they're right, then they'll just bring in some new voters.
More disturbing is the Left's ever-increasing reliance on what are commonly thought of as fascist tactics. Liberals at college campuses attempt to disrupt conservative speeches and the Democrats want to try to drive conservative talk radio hosts off the air with the Fairness Doctrine. Conservatives like Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter have been targeted criminally for political reasons and there's even talk of trying to jail members of the Bush Administration over policy differences after they're out of office. Ideological soulmates of modern liberals -- like Stalin, Lenin, and Mao -- would certainly approve of those tactics.
Still, even though this is a center-right country, we do have political cycles and there are times when those cycles favor the Left. When that happens and the Lefties start to get a bit more confident, usually a few liberals at the edges will start talking about what they want to do. At that early point, most other liberals will still vehemently deny their ideological goals to the public out of fear that it will prevent them from getting into power.
However, when the Left gains enough strength to be capable of getting one of the policies they favor implemented, all the liberals who previously denied that they supported it will unapologetically shift on a dime and vote for it en masse -- while they rely on their ideological allies in the media and the fact that many Americans are ill informed about politics to cover their tracks.
So, if you want to know what liberals want to do, their words mean absolutely nothing because lying about their agenda has become as natural to them as chasing a cat is to a dog.
Instead, what you have to do is watch what other liberals have done when they have come into power. Look at Canada, where conservatives are being put on trial for hate crimes because they've dared to criticize Muslims. Look at European countries, where they have socialistic economies, sky high tax rates, rigid speech codes, and overweening nannystates. You can even look at liberal enclaves in the United States like Berkeley and San Francisco, where members of the military are treated like pariahs and they boo the national anthem.
If you believe the liberals in Berkeley, France, Canada or for that matter in the bowels of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post, are significantly different than, say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, you are kidding yourself. The only differences are in what they think they can get away with and how honest they are willing to be about their agenda.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Once you've watched liberals long enough to understand how they think -- scratch that, how they feel -- they become extraordinarily predictable.
To begin with, the liberal agenda is, in many respects, the same as it was in the thirties. Whether you call it communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or progressivism, the only real difference is how much they believe they can get away with, the way they sell it to people, and the latest trendy name for what they believe.
So, once the liberals pick a policy from their stale program to push, the next step is to get it implemented. This is where liberals have problems because whether a policy makes sense, is practical, or actually improves people's lives is of secondary importance to them. What is important to liberals is whether supporting or opposing that policy makes them feel good about themselves.
This is why liberals continue to support dysfunctional policies that have been failing miserably for decades and why they often oppose common sense programs that have been proven to work time and time again -- because it isn't about whether it works or not, it's about how it makes them feel.
In other words, a liberal will almost always prefer a policy that's extremely expensive, is difficult to implement, helps almost no one, but seems "nice" -- to a policy that is cheap, simple to implement, extremely effective, and seems "mean."
However, since most Americans make decisions about policies based on whether or not they believe the policy makes people's lives better or worse, liberals have had to become habitually dishonest about what they believe and want to do to get their ideas put into action.
This is a point worth stressing because many people who aren't familiar with politics believe that conservatives and liberals are simply flip sides of the same coin and therefore, approach issues the same way. However, conservatives genuinely believe that this is a center-right country. That's why conservatives have no qualms about being publicly labeled as conservatives and it's part of the reason why we're much more honest than the Left -- because we believe that a majority of the American people generally agree with us and share our values.
So, those of us on the Right spend our time trying to explain to the American people what we really want to do, while the Left spends its time trying to hide what it really wants to do from the American people.
Because of this, when liberals don't feel that the political winds are blowing in their direction, not only will they generally avoid discussing the things they believe, they will typically deny that they believe them at all.
Additionally, liberals go to bizarre lengths to tilt the political playing field in their favor. They move into the mainstream media so that they can tip what are supposed to be "objective" news stories in their favor. They get into positions of power in our educational system so that they can teach kids liberal propaganda before they're old enough to know better. They uniformly support judges who care nothing about the Constitution as long as it moves liberal ideological goals forward. Even the Left's support of illegal immigration is rooted in the desire to bring in millions of poor people from socialist countries who are more likely to vote Democratic. If they can't convince the American voters they're right, then they'll just bring in some new voters.
More disturbing is the Left's ever-increasing reliance on what are commonly thought of as fascist tactics. Liberals at college campuses attempt to disrupt conservative speeches and the Democrats want to try to drive conservative talk radio hosts off the air with the Fairness Doctrine. Conservatives like Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter have been targeted criminally for political reasons and there's even talk of trying to jail members of the Bush Administration over policy differences after they're out of office. Ideological soulmates of modern liberals -- like Stalin, Lenin, and Mao -- would certainly approve of those tactics.
Still, even though this is a center-right country, we do have political cycles and there are times when those cycles favor the Left. When that happens and the Lefties start to get a bit more confident, usually a few liberals at the edges will start talking about what they want to do. At that early point, most other liberals will still vehemently deny their ideological goals to the public out of fear that it will prevent them from getting into power.
However, when the Left gains enough strength to be capable of getting one of the policies they favor implemented, all the liberals who previously denied that they supported it will unapologetically shift on a dime and vote for it en masse -- while they rely on their ideological allies in the media and the fact that many Americans are ill informed about politics to cover their tracks.
So, if you want to know what liberals want to do, their words mean absolutely nothing because lying about their agenda has become as natural to them as chasing a cat is to a dog.
Instead, what you have to do is watch what other liberals have done when they have come into power. Look at Canada, where conservatives are being put on trial for hate crimes because they've dared to criticize Muslims. Look at European countries, where they have socialistic economies, sky high tax rates, rigid speech codes, and overweening nannystates. You can even look at liberal enclaves in the United States like Berkeley and San Francisco, where members of the military are treated like pariahs and they boo the national anthem.
If you believe the liberals in Berkeley, France, Canada or for that matter in the bowels of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post, are significantly different than, say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, you are kidding yourself. The only differences are in what they think they can get away with and how honest they are willing to be about their agenda.
Business Failures Are Not a Crime
By Robert A. Mintz
Friday, June 26, 2008
Anyone surprised by last week's arrest of two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers must have slept through the Enron era. If Enron, WorldCom, Tyco – and the list goes on – taught us anything, it is that whenever the investing public suffers staggering losses on Wall Street, we can expect to see someone hauled off in handcuffs. The real question is not why it happened, but where it will end.
Despite the complex nature of the subprime meltdown, the government has presented an indictment that reads very much like a garden-variety fraud. In essence, the case turns on the simple proposition that Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin lied to their investors about their funds' true status and prospects. That is, the government has alleged that they were telling the outside investing public one thing, while secretly harboring a far gloomier scenario.
There is no question that at some point permissible spin crosses the line and becomes willful misrepresentation. That is really what this prosecution is all about. In making its case, the government weaves together a series of emails that paint a portrait of once high-flying fund managers scrambling to save their careers, and trying to keep their funds afloat, by knowingly misleading their investors.
The indictment quotes Mr. Cioffi emailing a Bear Stearns colleague: "I'm fearful of these markets. Matt [Tannin] said it's either a melt down or the greatest buying opportunity ever, I'm leaning more towards the former. . . ." Mr. Tannin is quoted emailing Mr. Cioffi at one point urging that the funds be closed down and telling him, "if [the CDO report] is correct then the entire subprime market is toast." Several days later, according to the indictment, Mr. Tannin told investors, "we're very comfortable with exactly where we are. . . ."
Even more damning from the prosecutors' perspective is the allegation that Mr. Cioffi pulled his own money out, without disclosing it to investors, while at the same time encouraging others to pump more money into the funds. All of these alleged misrepresentations go to the question of intent – whether the statements made by Messrs. Cioffi and Tannin to their investors were knowingly false – and form the basis of the charges of securities fraud, wire fraud and insider trading.
But this case also raises the more troubling question of whether all of Wall Street's ills can – or should – be reduced to criminal prosecutions, rather than leaving it up to appropriate financial regulators to fight it out in the civil arena. Put another way, are we attempting to criminalize conduct primarily based upon the fact that we now know that the investing decisions led to a disastrous end?
Let's put this case in some perspective. This is not Enron, where executives were charged and ultimately convicted of cooking the books. Nor is it Tyco, a case in which the CEO was convicted of using corporate assets for his own personal gain. Rather, this is part of a much larger failure that extends well beyond these two defendants and their former employer to include many of our largest financial institutions.
This indictment, like all indictments, benefits from the wisdom of 20/20 hindsight. We all know how the story ends, and it isn't pretty. But these two hedge fund managers were not alone in reaping huge profits for years from the subprime market. Nor were they alone in understanding the fundamentally risky nature of investments that relied so heavily on the misguided expectation of perpetual real estate appreciation. True, it is clear that at some point they feared, and perhaps believed, that a meltdown was imminent, but so did many others. High yields have always been associated with high risk.
Unfortunately, these two were among the first to see their funds implode and that, perhaps more than any other reason, is why they now find themselves facing the prospect of significant jail time.
Lying to the investing public is a serious breach that cannot be condoned if we are to maintain the integrity of our markets, and we will ultimately find out if that's what happened here. But it is all too tempting for the government to ride in after a colossal collapse that many should have seen coming and look for someone to blame, when clearly there's plenty of blame to go around.
Friday, June 26, 2008
Anyone surprised by last week's arrest of two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers must have slept through the Enron era. If Enron, WorldCom, Tyco – and the list goes on – taught us anything, it is that whenever the investing public suffers staggering losses on Wall Street, we can expect to see someone hauled off in handcuffs. The real question is not why it happened, but where it will end.
Despite the complex nature of the subprime meltdown, the government has presented an indictment that reads very much like a garden-variety fraud. In essence, the case turns on the simple proposition that Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin lied to their investors about their funds' true status and prospects. That is, the government has alleged that they were telling the outside investing public one thing, while secretly harboring a far gloomier scenario.
There is no question that at some point permissible spin crosses the line and becomes willful misrepresentation. That is really what this prosecution is all about. In making its case, the government weaves together a series of emails that paint a portrait of once high-flying fund managers scrambling to save their careers, and trying to keep their funds afloat, by knowingly misleading their investors.
The indictment quotes Mr. Cioffi emailing a Bear Stearns colleague: "I'm fearful of these markets. Matt [Tannin] said it's either a melt down or the greatest buying opportunity ever, I'm leaning more towards the former. . . ." Mr. Tannin is quoted emailing Mr. Cioffi at one point urging that the funds be closed down and telling him, "if [the CDO report] is correct then the entire subprime market is toast." Several days later, according to the indictment, Mr. Tannin told investors, "we're very comfortable with exactly where we are. . . ."
Even more damning from the prosecutors' perspective is the allegation that Mr. Cioffi pulled his own money out, without disclosing it to investors, while at the same time encouraging others to pump more money into the funds. All of these alleged misrepresentations go to the question of intent – whether the statements made by Messrs. Cioffi and Tannin to their investors were knowingly false – and form the basis of the charges of securities fraud, wire fraud and insider trading.
But this case also raises the more troubling question of whether all of Wall Street's ills can – or should – be reduced to criminal prosecutions, rather than leaving it up to appropriate financial regulators to fight it out in the civil arena. Put another way, are we attempting to criminalize conduct primarily based upon the fact that we now know that the investing decisions led to a disastrous end?
Let's put this case in some perspective. This is not Enron, where executives were charged and ultimately convicted of cooking the books. Nor is it Tyco, a case in which the CEO was convicted of using corporate assets for his own personal gain. Rather, this is part of a much larger failure that extends well beyond these two defendants and their former employer to include many of our largest financial institutions.
This indictment, like all indictments, benefits from the wisdom of 20/20 hindsight. We all know how the story ends, and it isn't pretty. But these two hedge fund managers were not alone in reaping huge profits for years from the subprime market. Nor were they alone in understanding the fundamentally risky nature of investments that relied so heavily on the misguided expectation of perpetual real estate appreciation. True, it is clear that at some point they feared, and perhaps believed, that a meltdown was imminent, but so did many others. High yields have always been associated with high risk.
Unfortunately, these two were among the first to see their funds implode and that, perhaps more than any other reason, is why they now find themselves facing the prospect of significant jail time.
Lying to the investing public is a serious breach that cannot be condoned if we are to maintain the integrity of our markets, and we will ultimately find out if that's what happened here. But it is all too tempting for the government to ride in after a colossal collapse that many should have seen coming and look for someone to blame, when clearly there's plenty of blame to go around.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
U.N. Leaders: Wrong on Rights
Ed Feulner
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
You know you’re doing a good job if you upset the right people -- such as petty bureaucrats at the United Nations.
Recently, an online publication reported that UN Television had purchased six high-definition video cameras, but couldn’t use them because it had failed to purchase lenses for them. Worse, Inner City Press reported, the U.N. building isn’t even wired for such cameras.
When a reporter went to question the woman in charge of UN Television, she startled him with a question of her own: “Do you work for The Heritage Foundation?”
Well, no. But those of us who do work at Heritage appreciate the back-handed compliment. It shows that the agency is well (if not painfully) aware of our work, which has exposed countless examples of waste, fraud and abuse at the U.N. over the years. Why do we do it? Because it’s American tax dollars being squandered by U.N. mismanagement.
The problems don’t stop with incompetence. Take the case of Nicaraguan Reverend Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, who was elected the next president of the U.N. General Assembly. He may have risen to power in 2008, but his ideas seem stuck in the 1960s.
D’Escoto has called the United States “the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples” and has declared Americans to be “the most ignorant people around the world.” Strong words from a man who served as foreign minister during the Sandinista dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in the 1980s.
Ironically, it’s D’Escoto’s homeland and his soon-to-be employer that increasingly block freedom and democracy.
“Nicaragua is rapidly emerging as a key friend and an ally of some of the most odious regimes on the face of the earth,” observes Nile Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Thatcher Center, and Ray Walser, Heritage’s expert on Latin America. Gardiner and Walser document Nicaragua’s ties with Iran and Venezuela, two nations that adamantly oppose American interests: “The presence of one of its key political figures at the head of the U.N. General Assembly is a demonstration of the organization’s callous disregard for the principles of liberty and freedom on the world stage.”
Amazingly, even as the U.N. wastes money by the bucketload and puts unrepentant leftists into positions of power, it wants to spend even more money on an investigation of supposed human-rights abuses -- in the U.S.
In May, Doudou Diene, the U.N. special rapporteur charged with investigating “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” came to our shores. His record as an investigator isn’t promising.
He’s managed to find what he calls “institutionalized racism” in many Western countries, including Japan, Canada, Denmark and Switzerland. Little doubt he’ll report finding it here as well. Meanwhile, Diene has said little about real human-rights abusers in dictatorial states ranging from Africa through the Middle East and on into the rest of Asia.
Diene’s report is certain to be a sad joke, not unlike his employer, the U.N. Human Rights Council. China, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- all human rights abusers to one extent or another -- are all proud members of the HRC. How nice for them to steal the spotlight away from their very real sins and train it on a trumped-up “report” decrying the U.S. as a human-rights ogre.
In the halls of the U.N., the United States is frequently portrayed as a bad global citizen. In the real world, nothing could be further from the truth. We provide some 22 percent of the funding for the U.N., money that is often then used to criticize us.
It’s time for the United Nations to turn its investigators loose on itself, to identify and eliminate the abuses that have come to define the world body. Hopefully they’ll do that soon -- and with some cameras that actually work.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
You know you’re doing a good job if you upset the right people -- such as petty bureaucrats at the United Nations.
Recently, an online publication reported that UN Television had purchased six high-definition video cameras, but couldn’t use them because it had failed to purchase lenses for them. Worse, Inner City Press reported, the U.N. building isn’t even wired for such cameras.
When a reporter went to question the woman in charge of UN Television, she startled him with a question of her own: “Do you work for The Heritage Foundation?”
Well, no. But those of us who do work at Heritage appreciate the back-handed compliment. It shows that the agency is well (if not painfully) aware of our work, which has exposed countless examples of waste, fraud and abuse at the U.N. over the years. Why do we do it? Because it’s American tax dollars being squandered by U.N. mismanagement.
The problems don’t stop with incompetence. Take the case of Nicaraguan Reverend Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, who was elected the next president of the U.N. General Assembly. He may have risen to power in 2008, but his ideas seem stuck in the 1960s.
D’Escoto has called the United States “the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples” and has declared Americans to be “the most ignorant people around the world.” Strong words from a man who served as foreign minister during the Sandinista dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in the 1980s.
Ironically, it’s D’Escoto’s homeland and his soon-to-be employer that increasingly block freedom and democracy.
“Nicaragua is rapidly emerging as a key friend and an ally of some of the most odious regimes on the face of the earth,” observes Nile Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Thatcher Center, and Ray Walser, Heritage’s expert on Latin America. Gardiner and Walser document Nicaragua’s ties with Iran and Venezuela, two nations that adamantly oppose American interests: “The presence of one of its key political figures at the head of the U.N. General Assembly is a demonstration of the organization’s callous disregard for the principles of liberty and freedom on the world stage.”
Amazingly, even as the U.N. wastes money by the bucketload and puts unrepentant leftists into positions of power, it wants to spend even more money on an investigation of supposed human-rights abuses -- in the U.S.
In May, Doudou Diene, the U.N. special rapporteur charged with investigating “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” came to our shores. His record as an investigator isn’t promising.
He’s managed to find what he calls “institutionalized racism” in many Western countries, including Japan, Canada, Denmark and Switzerland. Little doubt he’ll report finding it here as well. Meanwhile, Diene has said little about real human-rights abusers in dictatorial states ranging from Africa through the Middle East and on into the rest of Asia.
Diene’s report is certain to be a sad joke, not unlike his employer, the U.N. Human Rights Council. China, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- all human rights abusers to one extent or another -- are all proud members of the HRC. How nice for them to steal the spotlight away from their very real sins and train it on a trumped-up “report” decrying the U.S. as a human-rights ogre.
In the halls of the U.N., the United States is frequently portrayed as a bad global citizen. In the real world, nothing could be further from the truth. We provide some 22 percent of the funding for the U.N., money that is often then used to criticize us.
It’s time for the United Nations to turn its investigators loose on itself, to identify and eliminate the abuses that have come to define the world body. Hopefully they’ll do that soon -- and with some cameras that actually work.
Liberal Smears Unchallenged
Brent Bozell III
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The general election season is under way, and the leftists are already displaying their hypocrisy. They've launched pre-emptive warnings against a Republican "swiftboating" of Barack Obama at the same time they're making up wild allegations about the villainous ultraconservative plots against goodness planned by John McCain. The supposed civility police in the media are emphasizing the Obama warnings of a right-wing onslaught, but not the nasty leftist attacks on McCain. Once again, Republicans are painted as the agents of character assassination, while Democrats are angels whose style is sweet civility and whose substance is the refreshing truth.
Obama's campaign is putting up its dukes with a new website called "Fight the Smears." It's topped by an inspirational quote from Obama's June 3 victory speech. "What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge or patriotism as a bludgeon." In the words of the Almighty Barack, Team Obama pledges to steer clear of negative personal attacks, and avoid seeing their opponents "not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first."
The Democrats and the media are going to take a holiday from demonizing conservatives and Republicans? Ridiculous.
Try this exercise. Sign up for Fight the Smears electronic "Action Wire" alerts, and you receive this message from Obama's fundraisers: "Now take the next step and make a donation to help push back on the petty and divisive methods of our opponents."
So much for not demonizing the opponents.
Already, Obama's army of left-wing slime merchants is up on the television airwaves running ridiculous commercials. Did you see the one from MoveOn.org? It features a quavering blond mommy talking about how her baby makes her heart pitter-patter fiercely, but she's gravely concerned the baby might be going to war. "John McCain, when you say would stay in Iraq for a hundred years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can't have him."
What a pile of ridiculously inaccurate assumptions. First, we have an all-volunteer military. Second, even if President McCain were elected, he wouldn't serve in office for 18 years so he could make sure all the liberal babies of 2008 are sent to Iraq. USA Today was one of the few media outlets to suggest this ad was a foul ball. The Washington Post declared it "dramatically and personally" illustrated McCain's open-ended approach to Iraq better than Obama had done.
Just as Obama's media allies are silent about the left's hypocritical approach to negative campaigns, so, too, are they silent about nasty left-wing videos on YouTube. Robert Greenwald's "Brave New Films" collective has a commercial suggesting that under John McCain, contraceptives would be banned in America. They call their campaign "The Real McCain."
The ad is set in "President McCain's Women's Health Clinic." When a woman asks the perky blond nurse about her contraceptive options, she's handed a list. When the woman protests it's a blank piece of paper and repeats that she asked about birth-control options, the nurse cheerily replies: "And at the McCain Clinic, you don't have any."
Then a graphic reads: "John McCain voted against requiring insurance companies to cover prescription birth control." The fallacious argument within is that if the government doesn't pay for contraceptives, or force insurers to pay for contraceptives, then no contraceptives are available. There's no "option" to purchase your own condoms or birth-control prescriptions? Where are the media smear-fighters on this obvious howler?
Or take a virulent campaign called "I'm Voting Republican" from a firm accurately called Synthetic Human Pictures. Their Republicans are synthetic caricatures. A male doctor proclaims, "I'm voting Republican because I don't really want a cure for AIDS and breast cancer. They're just gays and women." This video clearly isn't meant to be factual, just vicious. This video has 2.3 million views at YouTube.
Cynical liberals think that the only way Obama can lose is for conservatives to take their well-traveled "low road" with negative ads. They've utterly forgotten -- if they ever acknowledged -- the low road they've traveled with millions of dollars in harsh ads against George W. Bush in the last two election cycles. Negative campaigning doesn't always work. But the media always see negative campaigning as a game only Republicans and conservatives play.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The general election season is under way, and the leftists are already displaying their hypocrisy. They've launched pre-emptive warnings against a Republican "swiftboating" of Barack Obama at the same time they're making up wild allegations about the villainous ultraconservative plots against goodness planned by John McCain. The supposed civility police in the media are emphasizing the Obama warnings of a right-wing onslaught, but not the nasty leftist attacks on McCain. Once again, Republicans are painted as the agents of character assassination, while Democrats are angels whose style is sweet civility and whose substance is the refreshing truth.
Obama's campaign is putting up its dukes with a new website called "Fight the Smears." It's topped by an inspirational quote from Obama's June 3 victory speech. "What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge or patriotism as a bludgeon." In the words of the Almighty Barack, Team Obama pledges to steer clear of negative personal attacks, and avoid seeing their opponents "not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first."
The Democrats and the media are going to take a holiday from demonizing conservatives and Republicans? Ridiculous.
Try this exercise. Sign up for Fight the Smears electronic "Action Wire" alerts, and you receive this message from Obama's fundraisers: "Now take the next step and make a donation to help push back on the petty and divisive methods of our opponents."
So much for not demonizing the opponents.
Already, Obama's army of left-wing slime merchants is up on the television airwaves running ridiculous commercials. Did you see the one from MoveOn.org? It features a quavering blond mommy talking about how her baby makes her heart pitter-patter fiercely, but she's gravely concerned the baby might be going to war. "John McCain, when you say would stay in Iraq for a hundred years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can't have him."
What a pile of ridiculously inaccurate assumptions. First, we have an all-volunteer military. Second, even if President McCain were elected, he wouldn't serve in office for 18 years so he could make sure all the liberal babies of 2008 are sent to Iraq. USA Today was one of the few media outlets to suggest this ad was a foul ball. The Washington Post declared it "dramatically and personally" illustrated McCain's open-ended approach to Iraq better than Obama had done.
Just as Obama's media allies are silent about the left's hypocritical approach to negative campaigns, so, too, are they silent about nasty left-wing videos on YouTube. Robert Greenwald's "Brave New Films" collective has a commercial suggesting that under John McCain, contraceptives would be banned in America. They call their campaign "The Real McCain."
The ad is set in "President McCain's Women's Health Clinic." When a woman asks the perky blond nurse about her contraceptive options, she's handed a list. When the woman protests it's a blank piece of paper and repeats that she asked about birth-control options, the nurse cheerily replies: "And at the McCain Clinic, you don't have any."
Then a graphic reads: "John McCain voted against requiring insurance companies to cover prescription birth control." The fallacious argument within is that if the government doesn't pay for contraceptives, or force insurers to pay for contraceptives, then no contraceptives are available. There's no "option" to purchase your own condoms or birth-control prescriptions? Where are the media smear-fighters on this obvious howler?
Or take a virulent campaign called "I'm Voting Republican" from a firm accurately called Synthetic Human Pictures. Their Republicans are synthetic caricatures. A male doctor proclaims, "I'm voting Republican because I don't really want a cure for AIDS and breast cancer. They're just gays and women." This video clearly isn't meant to be factual, just vicious. This video has 2.3 million views at YouTube.
Cynical liberals think that the only way Obama can lose is for conservatives to take their well-traveled "low road" with negative ads. They've utterly forgotten -- if they ever acknowledged -- the low road they've traveled with millions of dollars in harsh ads against George W. Bush in the last two election cycles. Negative campaigning doesn't always work. But the media always see negative campaigning as a game only Republicans and conservatives play.
Was Iraq Worth It?
Tony Blankley
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
It has been fashionable -- indeed, de rigueur in political and media circles -- to view contemptuously President Bush's assertion that we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight them here. Even conservative commentators have tended to tiptoe around the proposition. We are all far too sophisticated to believe such simplicities. Nor will any self-respecting public chatterer even raise the little matter of America not being hit by terrorism on our soil for the almost seven years since Sept. 11.
And yet the undeniable facts certainly would justify a debate -- if not yet a consensus of agreement -- on President Bush's assertions. Regarding killing Islamist terrorists in Iraq rather than New York City, consider the numbers: According to USA Today in September 2007, more than 19,000 insurgents had been killed by coalition forces since 2003. The number obviously has gone up in the nine months since then (these were midsurge numbers), but I don't have reliable updated numbers.
Of course, most of those 19,000 killed insurgents were not foreign terrorists, but local Iraqis moved to action by our occupation. However, according to studies by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and by the Defense Intelligence Agency, foreign-born jihadists in Iraq are believed to number between 4 and10 percent of the total insurgent strength. So it is reasonable to assume that we have killed -- as of nine months ago -- between 800 and 1,900 non-Iraqi terrorists who otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere. It only took a couple of dozen to commit the atrocities of Sept. 11.
Moreover, we know specifically that Al-Qaida in Iraq has been decimated recently. According to the British newspaper The Times in February: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an 'extraordinary crisis'. The terrorist group's security structure suffered 'total collapse'."
And last month, Strategy Page reported: "Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about 'why we (al-Qaida) lost in Iraq'. Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. If you can read Arabic, you can easily find these pro-terrorism sites, and see for yourself how al Qaeda is trying to explain its own destruction (in Iraq) to its remaining supporters."
Now, it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida's recruitment. I have been told that by U.S. government experts I trust. But that is an old fact. What Osama bin Laden famously said about recruitment is also true: People follow the strong horse. And the new fact is that as we are winning in Iraq, as we are killing al-Qaida fighters and other Islamist terrorists there by the truckload (along with other insurgent opponents of the Iraqi government we support with our blood and wealth), we are proving to be the strong horse after all and can expect to see a reduced attraction for young men to join the Islamist terrorist ranks.
Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?
The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.
On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush's political courage -- and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) -- America's willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century -- with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam.
It is time to reconsider whether President Bush or Barack Obama was right on whether to fight. Obama has had a good political run on the early and inconclusive evidence. As victory starts to emerge in Iraq, more persuasive data begin to fall on President Bush's side of the argument. This is a debate worth having before November.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
It has been fashionable -- indeed, de rigueur in political and media circles -- to view contemptuously President Bush's assertion that we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight them here. Even conservative commentators have tended to tiptoe around the proposition. We are all far too sophisticated to believe such simplicities. Nor will any self-respecting public chatterer even raise the little matter of America not being hit by terrorism on our soil for the almost seven years since Sept. 11.
And yet the undeniable facts certainly would justify a debate -- if not yet a consensus of agreement -- on President Bush's assertions. Regarding killing Islamist terrorists in Iraq rather than New York City, consider the numbers: According to USA Today in September 2007, more than 19,000 insurgents had been killed by coalition forces since 2003. The number obviously has gone up in the nine months since then (these were midsurge numbers), but I don't have reliable updated numbers.
Of course, most of those 19,000 killed insurgents were not foreign terrorists, but local Iraqis moved to action by our occupation. However, according to studies by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and by the Defense Intelligence Agency, foreign-born jihadists in Iraq are believed to number between 4 and10 percent of the total insurgent strength. So it is reasonable to assume that we have killed -- as of nine months ago -- between 800 and 1,900 non-Iraqi terrorists who otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere. It only took a couple of dozen to commit the atrocities of Sept. 11.
Moreover, we know specifically that Al-Qaida in Iraq has been decimated recently. According to the British newspaper The Times in February: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an 'extraordinary crisis'. The terrorist group's security structure suffered 'total collapse'."
And last month, Strategy Page reported: "Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about 'why we (al-Qaida) lost in Iraq'. Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. If you can read Arabic, you can easily find these pro-terrorism sites, and see for yourself how al Qaeda is trying to explain its own destruction (in Iraq) to its remaining supporters."
Now, it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida's recruitment. I have been told that by U.S. government experts I trust. But that is an old fact. What Osama bin Laden famously said about recruitment is also true: People follow the strong horse. And the new fact is that as we are winning in Iraq, as we are killing al-Qaida fighters and other Islamist terrorists there by the truckload (along with other insurgent opponents of the Iraqi government we support with our blood and wealth), we are proving to be the strong horse after all and can expect to see a reduced attraction for young men to join the Islamist terrorist ranks.
Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?
The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.
On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush's political courage -- and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) -- America's willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century -- with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam.
It is time to reconsider whether President Bush or Barack Obama was right on whether to fight. Obama has had a good political run on the early and inconclusive evidence. As victory starts to emerge in Iraq, more persuasive data begin to fall on President Bush's side of the argument. This is a debate worth having before November.
British Novelist Who "Despises Islamism" May Face Hate Crime Charges
Matt Purple
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
An acclaimed British author could be charged with committing a hate crime after offering a scathing criticism of Islamic radicalism.
Ian McEwan, author of widely praised novels Atonement and Enduring Love, condemned Muslim extremists for attempting to establish a tyrannical society intolerant of women and homosexuals. His comments were made in the context of defending his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis, who had previously been denounced as a racist for other supposedly anti-Islamic remarks.
“Martin is not a racist,” McEwan told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well.”
He also attacked pro-Muslim political correctness. “As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticizes it is racist,” he said.
McEwan’s comments caused an uproar and were promptly denounced by the Muslim Council of Britain.
And that could be just the beginning. McEwan could also be brought up on hate crime charges, according to The [UK] Independent.
The British Home Office defines a hate crime as “[a]ny incident, which constitutes a criminal offense, which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate.” This includes certain forms of speech and expression, including “offensive posters and leaflets, abusive gestures … and bullying at school or in the workplace”.
This language is sometimes interpreted broadly. Earlier this year, a police officer in West Midlands told two Christian evangelicals that they could be charged with committing a hate crime for preaching their message in an Islamic neighborhood. “You have been warned. If you come back here and get beaten up, well you have been warned,” he said.
Martin Amis, the novelist whom McEwan was defending, found himself in hot water when he published an essay in which he wondered whether Muslims should be prevented from traveling and even deported.
“There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’” he wrote.
Neither Amis nor McEwan have yet to be charged with hate crimes.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
An acclaimed British author could be charged with committing a hate crime after offering a scathing criticism of Islamic radicalism.
Ian McEwan, author of widely praised novels Atonement and Enduring Love, condemned Muslim extremists for attempting to establish a tyrannical society intolerant of women and homosexuals. His comments were made in the context of defending his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis, who had previously been denounced as a racist for other supposedly anti-Islamic remarks.
“Martin is not a racist,” McEwan told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well.”
He also attacked pro-Muslim political correctness. “As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticizes it is racist,” he said.
McEwan’s comments caused an uproar and were promptly denounced by the Muslim Council of Britain.
And that could be just the beginning. McEwan could also be brought up on hate crime charges, according to The [UK] Independent.
The British Home Office defines a hate crime as “[a]ny incident, which constitutes a criminal offense, which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate.” This includes certain forms of speech and expression, including “offensive posters and leaflets, abusive gestures … and bullying at school or in the workplace”.
This language is sometimes interpreted broadly. Earlier this year, a police officer in West Midlands told two Christian evangelicals that they could be charged with committing a hate crime for preaching their message in an Islamic neighborhood. “You have been warned. If you come back here and get beaten up, well you have been warned,” he said.
Martin Amis, the novelist whom McEwan was defending, found himself in hot water when he published an essay in which he wondered whether Muslims should be prevented from traveling and even deported.
“There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’” he wrote.
Neither Amis nor McEwan have yet to be charged with hate crimes.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Bush Doctrine Is Relevant Again
Bret Stephens
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Here's a prediction: Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize's few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe's goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people's well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a "violent, illegitimate sham."
Here's another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai's Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe's politics as Aung San Suu Kyi's has had on Burma's. Effectively, zero.
Zimbabwe is now another spot on the map of the civilized world's troubled conscience. Burma is also there, along with Tibet and Darfur. (Question: When will "Free Zimbabwe" bumper stickers become ubiquitous?) These are uniquely nasty places, and not just because uniquely nasty things are happening. They're nasty because the dissonance between the wider world's professed concern and what it actually does is almost intolerable.
Look at the legislation that has been proposed or passed in the U.S. Congress on Darfur. There is the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (H.R. 3127), signed by President Bush into law in 2006, which sanctions officials identified as responsible for the genocide. There is House Resolution 992, which urges the president to appoint a special envoy to Sudan. (The president did appoint an envoy; care to remember his name?)
There is the 2007 Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, which allows (but does not require) U.S. states and municipalities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. There is Senate Resolution 559, urging the president to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. There is the Clinton Amendment, the Reid Amendment, the Menendez Amendment, the Durbin/Leahy Amendment, the Jackson Amendment, the Lieberman Resolution, the Obama/Reid Amendment and the Peace in Darfur Act.
This is a partial list. Meantime, here are the accumulating estimates of the conflict's toll on Darfuri lives. September 2004: 50,000, according to the World Health Organization. May 2005: between 63,000 and 146,000 "excess deaths," according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain. March 2008: 200,000 deaths, according to U.N. officials. April 2008: The U.N. acknowledges the previous month's estimate might have undercounted about 100,000 victims.
In a video clip for the Save Darfur coalition, Barack Obama offered that the genocide is "a stain on our souls." His proposal for removing it? "Ratcheting up sanctions" on the Sudanese government and making "firm commitments in terms of the logistics, and the transport and the equipping" of an international peacekeeping mission for Darfur. No word, however, as to whether Mr. Obama would actually risk the lives of American soldiers to stop the slaughter.
It's a similar story in Zimbabwe. The U.N. Security Council met yesterday to discuss the crisis, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament "the world is of one view: that the status quo cannot continue."
But, of course, the status quo will continue. Just possibly, Mr. Mugabe and his senior ministers will no longer be allowed to travel to Europe, though that does nothing for the people of Zimbabwe. Other sanctions will have no effect: The regime is already busy expelling relief workers and seizing food aid. Mr. Mugabe wants "his people" to die – it means fewer mouths to feed, and fewer potential opposition supporters to jail, maim or murder.
A solution for Zimbabwe's crisis isn't hard to come by: Someone – ideally the British – must remove Mr. Mugabe by force, install Mr. Tsvangirai as president, arm his supporters, prevent any rampages, and leave. "Saving Darfur" is a somewhat different story, but it also involves applying Western military force to whatever degree is necessary to get Khartoum to come to terms with an independent or autonomous Darfur. Burma? Same deal.
International relations theorists, including prominent Obama adviser Susan Rice, justify these sorts of interventions under the rubric of a "Responsibility to Protect" – a concept that comes oddly close to Kipling's White Man's Burden. So close, in fact, that its inherent paternalism has hitherto inhibited many liberals from endorsing the kinds of interventions toward which they are now tip-toeing, thousands of deaths too late.
So let's by all means end the hand-wringing and embrace the responsibility to protect, wherever necessary and feasible. Let's spare the thousands of innocents, punish the wicked, oppose tyrants, and support democrats – both in places where it is now fashionable to do so (Burma) and in places where it is not (Iraq). If that turns out to be Mr. Obama's foreign policy, it will be a worthy one. It does come oddly close to the Bush Doctrine.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Here's a prediction: Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize's few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe's goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people's well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a "violent, illegitimate sham."
Here's another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai's Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe's politics as Aung San Suu Kyi's has had on Burma's. Effectively, zero.
Zimbabwe is now another spot on the map of the civilized world's troubled conscience. Burma is also there, along with Tibet and Darfur. (Question: When will "Free Zimbabwe" bumper stickers become ubiquitous?) These are uniquely nasty places, and not just because uniquely nasty things are happening. They're nasty because the dissonance between the wider world's professed concern and what it actually does is almost intolerable.
Look at the legislation that has been proposed or passed in the U.S. Congress on Darfur. There is the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (H.R. 3127), signed by President Bush into law in 2006, which sanctions officials identified as responsible for the genocide. There is House Resolution 992, which urges the president to appoint a special envoy to Sudan. (The president did appoint an envoy; care to remember his name?)
There is the 2007 Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, which allows (but does not require) U.S. states and municipalities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. There is Senate Resolution 559, urging the president to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. There is the Clinton Amendment, the Reid Amendment, the Menendez Amendment, the Durbin/Leahy Amendment, the Jackson Amendment, the Lieberman Resolution, the Obama/Reid Amendment and the Peace in Darfur Act.
This is a partial list. Meantime, here are the accumulating estimates of the conflict's toll on Darfuri lives. September 2004: 50,000, according to the World Health Organization. May 2005: between 63,000 and 146,000 "excess deaths," according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain. March 2008: 200,000 deaths, according to U.N. officials. April 2008: The U.N. acknowledges the previous month's estimate might have undercounted about 100,000 victims.
In a video clip for the Save Darfur coalition, Barack Obama offered that the genocide is "a stain on our souls." His proposal for removing it? "Ratcheting up sanctions" on the Sudanese government and making "firm commitments in terms of the logistics, and the transport and the equipping" of an international peacekeeping mission for Darfur. No word, however, as to whether Mr. Obama would actually risk the lives of American soldiers to stop the slaughter.
It's a similar story in Zimbabwe. The U.N. Security Council met yesterday to discuss the crisis, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament "the world is of one view: that the status quo cannot continue."
But, of course, the status quo will continue. Just possibly, Mr. Mugabe and his senior ministers will no longer be allowed to travel to Europe, though that does nothing for the people of Zimbabwe. Other sanctions will have no effect: The regime is already busy expelling relief workers and seizing food aid. Mr. Mugabe wants "his people" to die – it means fewer mouths to feed, and fewer potential opposition supporters to jail, maim or murder.
A solution for Zimbabwe's crisis isn't hard to come by: Someone – ideally the British – must remove Mr. Mugabe by force, install Mr. Tsvangirai as president, arm his supporters, prevent any rampages, and leave. "Saving Darfur" is a somewhat different story, but it also involves applying Western military force to whatever degree is necessary to get Khartoum to come to terms with an independent or autonomous Darfur. Burma? Same deal.
International relations theorists, including prominent Obama adviser Susan Rice, justify these sorts of interventions under the rubric of a "Responsibility to Protect" – a concept that comes oddly close to Kipling's White Man's Burden. So close, in fact, that its inherent paternalism has hitherto inhibited many liberals from endorsing the kinds of interventions toward which they are now tip-toeing, thousands of deaths too late.
So let's by all means end the hand-wringing and embrace the responsibility to protect, wherever necessary and feasible. Let's spare the thousands of innocents, punish the wicked, oppose tyrants, and support democrats – both in places where it is now fashionable to do so (Burma) and in places where it is not (Iraq). If that turns out to be Mr. Obama's foreign policy, it will be a worthy one. It does come oddly close to the Bush Doctrine.
Politically Incorrect Domestic Violence
In the battle of the sexes, daddy isn't always to blame.
By Kathleen Parker
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The words “domestic violence” typically invite images of bruised women and children — and male perpetrators.
But the real picture of domestic violence isn’t so clear-cut. And the solution to family violence is far more complex than our current criminal-justice approach can handle.
For about 30 years now, we’ve been throwing money and punishment at domestic violence with not enough to show for it. Estimates are that more than 32 million Americans are affected by domestic violence each year, with many of those in need of help never reporting their abuse.
These are among the important findings of Linda Mills — attorney, social worker, survivor of a violent relationship, as well as professor and senior vice provost at New York University — whose new book, Violent Partners, tackles the myths of domestic violence and suggests new ways of dealing with the problem.
One of the primary myths — and the one that meets with the most resistance — is that only men are violent. As I point out in my own book, Save the Males, women and children indeed suffer the worst injuries and more often die as a result of those injuries. But women initiate violence as often as men.
Ignoring or downplaying that fact both obscures the real problem of intimate violence and makes solutions less likely. Yet even people who know better are afraid of speaking up lest they be accused of undermining feminist efforts to help women and children in danger.
Feminism deserves credit for putting domestic violence on the radar back when what happened in a “man’s castle” was considered no one else’s business. But we now know a great deal more about what happens behind closed doors, and progressive feminists such as Mills are trying to open America’s mind to new ideas and innovative approaches.
According to Mills, studies now confirm that women initiate violence in 24 percent of cases in which the husbands don’t fight back, while men initiate violence in 27 percent of cases in which women don’t fight back. In the other 49 percent of cases, both partners actively participate in the violence.
What this tells us is that violent partners frequently have a relationship problem that is never addressed under our system of arrest-and-punish. Moreover, says Mills, a majority of families with violence issues don’t want to shatter the family, as our criminal system often encourages. They just want the violence to stop.
Yet many states have a “must-arrest” policy if a call to police is made. Many also take a “primary aggressor” approach in determining who should be arrested. Even if the man calls the police, says Mills, he’s often the one hauled off and charged, based on the assumption that he, the physically stronger, is more dangerous.
Consequently, the underlying problem of violence isn’t addressed and people needing help won’t call police for fear of the draconian measures likely to follow. In fact, according to Mills, 75 percent of women and 86 percent of men don’t call the police when their partner is violent.
The solution to domestic violence, says Mills, begins with recognizing it as a cyclical, intergenerational family problem that usually begins in childhood. Mills provides some devastating statistics to highlight how early this cycle begins and how hard it is to break the trend once begun: 35 percent of parents hit their infants when they believe they’re misbehaving; 94 percent of parents spank their three- to four-year-olds for the same reason.
Research shows that children raised by violence are more likely to become violent or be the victim of violence in their own adult relationships — and so it goes from one generation to the next.
Allowing exceptions for the most violent abusers, Mills proposes a broad, systemic approach to domestic violence that includes counseling and at least the option of restorative, rather than punitive, justice. The current approach to “treatment” usually consists of sending men to classes on how to be less sexist.
Mills is testing an alternative program in Nogales, Ariz., that brings the whole family together to learn how the cycle of abuse works within families. Without blaming the victim, Mills insists that everyone has to take responsibility for his or her role in the dynamic that leads to violence.
It is brave of Mills to invite these challenges. But if we’re really serious about reducing domestic violence, we have to recognize that demonizing men isn’t the answer and that sexism isn’t the only question.
It’s at least time for a new conversation.
By Kathleen Parker
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The words “domestic violence” typically invite images of bruised women and children — and male perpetrators.
But the real picture of domestic violence isn’t so clear-cut. And the solution to family violence is far more complex than our current criminal-justice approach can handle.
For about 30 years now, we’ve been throwing money and punishment at domestic violence with not enough to show for it. Estimates are that more than 32 million Americans are affected by domestic violence each year, with many of those in need of help never reporting their abuse.
These are among the important findings of Linda Mills — attorney, social worker, survivor of a violent relationship, as well as professor and senior vice provost at New York University — whose new book, Violent Partners, tackles the myths of domestic violence and suggests new ways of dealing with the problem.
One of the primary myths — and the one that meets with the most resistance — is that only men are violent. As I point out in my own book, Save the Males, women and children indeed suffer the worst injuries and more often die as a result of those injuries. But women initiate violence as often as men.
Ignoring or downplaying that fact both obscures the real problem of intimate violence and makes solutions less likely. Yet even people who know better are afraid of speaking up lest they be accused of undermining feminist efforts to help women and children in danger.
Feminism deserves credit for putting domestic violence on the radar back when what happened in a “man’s castle” was considered no one else’s business. But we now know a great deal more about what happens behind closed doors, and progressive feminists such as Mills are trying to open America’s mind to new ideas and innovative approaches.
According to Mills, studies now confirm that women initiate violence in 24 percent of cases in which the husbands don’t fight back, while men initiate violence in 27 percent of cases in which women don’t fight back. In the other 49 percent of cases, both partners actively participate in the violence.
What this tells us is that violent partners frequently have a relationship problem that is never addressed under our system of arrest-and-punish. Moreover, says Mills, a majority of families with violence issues don’t want to shatter the family, as our criminal system often encourages. They just want the violence to stop.
Yet many states have a “must-arrest” policy if a call to police is made. Many also take a “primary aggressor” approach in determining who should be arrested. Even if the man calls the police, says Mills, he’s often the one hauled off and charged, based on the assumption that he, the physically stronger, is more dangerous.
Consequently, the underlying problem of violence isn’t addressed and people needing help won’t call police for fear of the draconian measures likely to follow. In fact, according to Mills, 75 percent of women and 86 percent of men don’t call the police when their partner is violent.
The solution to domestic violence, says Mills, begins with recognizing it as a cyclical, intergenerational family problem that usually begins in childhood. Mills provides some devastating statistics to highlight how early this cycle begins and how hard it is to break the trend once begun: 35 percent of parents hit their infants when they believe they’re misbehaving; 94 percent of parents spank their three- to four-year-olds for the same reason.
Research shows that children raised by violence are more likely to become violent or be the victim of violence in their own adult relationships — and so it goes from one generation to the next.
Allowing exceptions for the most violent abusers, Mills proposes a broad, systemic approach to domestic violence that includes counseling and at least the option of restorative, rather than punitive, justice. The current approach to “treatment” usually consists of sending men to classes on how to be less sexist.
Mills is testing an alternative program in Nogales, Ariz., that brings the whole family together to learn how the cycle of abuse works within families. Without blaming the victim, Mills insists that everyone has to take responsibility for his or her role in the dynamic that leads to violence.
It is brave of Mills to invite these challenges. But if we’re really serious about reducing domestic violence, we have to recognize that demonizing men isn’t the answer and that sexism isn’t the only question.
It’s at least time for a new conversation.
Asia ♥ America
Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
America bashing is good sport in Asia. From anti-U.S. beef protests in South Korea to anti-CNN campaigns in China this year, it sometimes seems like the world's most liberal democracy isn't wanted in the region.
Not so fast. A poll released last week by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the East Asia Institute in Seoul shows that Asians embrace America's presence. Of the five Asian countries where polling was conducted – China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia – a majority of respondents in four view U.S. influence in Asia as "positive" or "very positive." (Indonesia was the outlier.) The 6,000 respondents were polled between January and February.
America is also viewed positively for its economic influence. A majority of respondents said their country's economy was influenced "by American ideas on the benefits of free markets and open competition." In China, a whopping 71.2% of respondents said their country was somewhat or very influenced by these ideals. A full 66.5% of Chinese polled said an Asian free trade area should include the U.S.
But America's influence in Asia is being challenged by China's rise. A majority of respondents in all countries – save Indonesia – see China as the future "leader" of the region. (Even 68.2% of Americans agreed with that statement.) But most respondents in Japan, South Korea and Indonesia said they were somewhat or very uncomfortable with that scenario.
Polls aren't exact measures of public sentiment. But they do at least provide a barometer of which way the wind is blowing. On that measure, China has a long way to go before it unseats America's pre-eminence in the region.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
America bashing is good sport in Asia. From anti-U.S. beef protests in South Korea to anti-CNN campaigns in China this year, it sometimes seems like the world's most liberal democracy isn't wanted in the region.
Not so fast. A poll released last week by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the East Asia Institute in Seoul shows that Asians embrace America's presence. Of the five Asian countries where polling was conducted – China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia – a majority of respondents in four view U.S. influence in Asia as "positive" or "very positive." (Indonesia was the outlier.) The 6,000 respondents were polled between January and February.
America is also viewed positively for its economic influence. A majority of respondents said their country's economy was influenced "by American ideas on the benefits of free markets and open competition." In China, a whopping 71.2% of respondents said their country was somewhat or very influenced by these ideals. A full 66.5% of Chinese polled said an Asian free trade area should include the U.S.
But America's influence in Asia is being challenged by China's rise. A majority of respondents in all countries – save Indonesia – see China as the future "leader" of the region. (Even 68.2% of Americans agreed with that statement.) But most respondents in Japan, South Korea and Indonesia said they were somewhat or very uncomfortable with that scenario.
Polls aren't exact measures of public sentiment. But they do at least provide a barometer of which way the wind is blowing. On that measure, China has a long way to go before it unseats America's pre-eminence in the region.
The Democrats' Dilemma on Iraq
William Rusher
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Democrats now find themselves in a thoroughly uncomfortable dilemma over Iraq.
Back in the early days of the American invasion, when things were going relatively badly, Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that the war was "lost" and that America's only recourse was to pull out. (This, of course, would have been an absolute poitical disaster for the Bush administration, as Reid no doubt knew and hoped it would be.) In the subsequent months and years, when things there have gone substantially better, Reid has never retracted his highly premature conclusion, but it is safe to say that it is now "inoperative."
According to such sources as The New York Times, which can hardly be described as having been a cheerleader for the attack, the Al Qaeda forces in Iraq are now thoroughly on the defensive, and the Al Maliki government is strengthening its grip on the country. It seems likely that Bush will achieve his goal of stepping down as president with the Iraq problem well on its way to a solution.
That leaves the Democrats in a bit of a pickle. What, exactly, is their current policy in regard to Iraq? It would be out of the question to insist, in the teeth of the good news from Iraq, that the United States should adopt the former Democratic policy and simply bug out. And, in purely political terms, it would be equally difficult for the Democrats to admit they were wrong, reverse their position and endorse the administration policy.
Is there some middle road they could safely take? It's hard to envision what it might be. Either the United States must insist on prevailing, as it is currently doing, or substantially abandon the region altogether. And it's hard to imagine any more disastrous policy than the latter. The Middle East has for decades been both one of the most critical areas on Earth, thanks to its indispensable reserves of oil, and also one of the most volatile, by virtue of its ethnic and religious quarrels. To abandon it would verge on economic suicide.
It is not surprising, then, that at the moment there is no settled Democratic policy on Iraq. If the Democrats win in November, the cooler heads in the party will presumably prevail and endorse a policy not all that different from Bush's -- i.e., sustaining the current regimes in Iraq and elsewhere in the region that support U.S. policy. But between now and Election Day the Democrats need a Middle East policy different from Bush's yet not obviously suicidal -- and they just don't have one.
For the moment, the Democratic answer is silence. And it's hard not to feel that it is probably their best bet. After all, Election Day is just four and a half months away, and there are plenty of other issues the Democrats can seize on to emphasize their sharp differences with the Republicans.
But the American people are hardly unaware of the importance of the Middle East, and of America's stake in that area. And they will credit President Bush with the wisdom to recognize these and devise policies that take them into account. Painful as American losses -- any losses -- in the Middle East may be, they pale in comparison to those our country would suffer if it lost the capacity to influence events there.
We must never forget that there are individual despots, and whole nations, in the Middle East who despise the United States and would gladly drive it out of the region, and deprive us of its oil reserves, if only they could. Keeping that from happening must be a cardinal aim of U.S. foreign policy and ought to be a matter of bipartisan agreement. That is why, despite the understandable distaste partisan Democrats would feel at having to endorse a Republican policy, the happiest result for the United States, and the soundest long-run course for the Democratic Party, would be a Democratic decision to endorse President Bush's policy in Iraq.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Democrats now find themselves in a thoroughly uncomfortable dilemma over Iraq.
Back in the early days of the American invasion, when things were going relatively badly, Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that the war was "lost" and that America's only recourse was to pull out. (This, of course, would have been an absolute poitical disaster for the Bush administration, as Reid no doubt knew and hoped it would be.) In the subsequent months and years, when things there have gone substantially better, Reid has never retracted his highly premature conclusion, but it is safe to say that it is now "inoperative."
According to such sources as The New York Times, which can hardly be described as having been a cheerleader for the attack, the Al Qaeda forces in Iraq are now thoroughly on the defensive, and the Al Maliki government is strengthening its grip on the country. It seems likely that Bush will achieve his goal of stepping down as president with the Iraq problem well on its way to a solution.
That leaves the Democrats in a bit of a pickle. What, exactly, is their current policy in regard to Iraq? It would be out of the question to insist, in the teeth of the good news from Iraq, that the United States should adopt the former Democratic policy and simply bug out. And, in purely political terms, it would be equally difficult for the Democrats to admit they were wrong, reverse their position and endorse the administration policy.
Is there some middle road they could safely take? It's hard to envision what it might be. Either the United States must insist on prevailing, as it is currently doing, or substantially abandon the region altogether. And it's hard to imagine any more disastrous policy than the latter. The Middle East has for decades been both one of the most critical areas on Earth, thanks to its indispensable reserves of oil, and also one of the most volatile, by virtue of its ethnic and religious quarrels. To abandon it would verge on economic suicide.
It is not surprising, then, that at the moment there is no settled Democratic policy on Iraq. If the Democrats win in November, the cooler heads in the party will presumably prevail and endorse a policy not all that different from Bush's -- i.e., sustaining the current regimes in Iraq and elsewhere in the region that support U.S. policy. But between now and Election Day the Democrats need a Middle East policy different from Bush's yet not obviously suicidal -- and they just don't have one.
For the moment, the Democratic answer is silence. And it's hard not to feel that it is probably their best bet. After all, Election Day is just four and a half months away, and there are plenty of other issues the Democrats can seize on to emphasize their sharp differences with the Republicans.
But the American people are hardly unaware of the importance of the Middle East, and of America's stake in that area. And they will credit President Bush with the wisdom to recognize these and devise policies that take them into account. Painful as American losses -- any losses -- in the Middle East may be, they pale in comparison to those our country would suffer if it lost the capacity to influence events there.
We must never forget that there are individual despots, and whole nations, in the Middle East who despise the United States and would gladly drive it out of the region, and deprive us of its oil reserves, if only they could. Keeping that from happening must be a cardinal aim of U.S. foreign policy and ought to be a matter of bipartisan agreement. That is why, despite the understandable distaste partisan Democrats would feel at having to endorse a Republican policy, the happiest result for the United States, and the soundest long-run course for the Democratic Party, would be a Democratic decision to endorse President Bush's policy in Iraq.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Anti-Americanism Is Mostly Hype
By Fouad Ajami
Monday, June 23, 2008
So America is unloved in Istanbul and Cairo and Karachi: It is an annual ritual, the June release of the Pew global attitudes survey and the laments over the erosion of America's standing in foreign lands.
We were once loved in Anatolia, but now a mere 12% of Turks have a "favorable view" of the U.S. Only 22% of Egyptians think well of us. Pakistan is crucial to the war on terror, but we can only count on the goodwill of 19% of Pakistanis.
American liberalism is heavily invested in this narrative of U.S. isolation. The Shiites have their annual ritual of 10 days of self-flagellation and penance, but this liberal narrative is ceaseless: The world once loved us, and all Parisians were Americans after 9/11, but thanks to President Bush we have squandered that sympathy.
It is an old trick, the use of foreign narrators and witnesses to speak of one's home. Montesquieu gave the genre its timeless rendition in his Persian Letters, published in 1721. No one was fooled, these were Parisian letters, and the Persian travelers, Rica and Usbek, mere stand-ins for an author taking stock of his homeland after the death of Louis XIV and the coming of an age of enlightenment and skepticism.
"This King is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants," Rica writes from Paris. "You must not be amazed at what I tell you about this prince: there is another magician, stronger than he. This magician is called the Pope. He will make the King believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind." Handy witnesses, these Persians.
The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.
The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).
I grew up in the Arab world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and anti-Americanism was the standard political language – even for those pining for American visas and green cards. Precious few took this seriously. The attraction to the glamorous, distant society was too strong in the Beirut of my boyhood.
It is no different today in Egypt or Pakistan. And what people tell pollsters who turn up in their midst with their clipboards? In Hosni Mubarak's tyranny, anti-Americanism is the permissible safety valve for Egyptians unable to speak of their despot. We stand between Pharaoh and his frustrated people, and the Egyptians railing against America are giving voice to the disappointment that runs through their life and culture. Scapegoating and anti-Americanism are a substitute for a sober assessment of what ails that old, burdened country.
Nor should we listen too closely to the anti-American hysteria that now grips Turkey. That country was once a serious, earnest land. It knew its place in the world as a bridge between Europe and Islam. But of late it has become the "torn country" that the celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington said it was, its very identity fought over between the old Kemalist elites and the new Islamists.
No Turkish malady is caused by America, and no cure can come courtesy of the Americans. The Turks giving vent to anti-Americanism are doing a parody of Europe: They were led to believe that the Europe spurning them, and turning down their membership in its club, is given to anti-Americanism, so they took to the same fad. Turkish anti-Americanism is no doubt fueled by the resentment within Turkey of the American war in Iraq that gave protection and liberty to the Kurds. No apology is owed the Turks; indeed, it is they who must reconsider their intolerance of minorities. If the Turks were comfortable with the abnormality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it is they who have a problem.
And if there is enthusiasm for Barack Obama on foreign shores, his rise to fame and power must be a tribute to the land that has made this possible. Where else would a boy of marginality and relative poverty find his way to the peak of political life? Certainly not in his father's Kenya, where the tribal origins of the Obamas would have determined young Barack's life-chances. In an Arab world hemmed in by pedigree, where rulers bequeath power to their sons and the lot of the sons is invariably that of the fathers, the tale of Obama is fantasy.
There are lines, and barriers, of race which bedevil Arab lands, and they will be there awaiting a President Obama should he prevail in November. Consider a recent speech by Libya's erratic ruler, Moammar Gadhafi, to his countrymen.
He said he feared that Mr. Obama, as a "black man," might succumb to an "inferiority complex" if he were to come to power. "This is a great menace because Obama might turn out to be more white than the whites, exaggerating his persecution and disdain of blacks. The statements of our Kenyan brother with an American nationality about Jerusalem, and his support for Israelis, and his slighting of the Palestinian people is either a measure of his ignorance of international politics or a lie perpetrated on the Jews in the course of an election campaign."
There is no need to roam distant lands in search of indictments of America's ways. Tales of our demise appear every day in our media. Yes, it is not perfect, this republic of ours. But the possibilities for emancipation and self-improvement it affords are unmatched in other lands.
Meanwhile, a maligned American president now returns from a Europe at peace with American leadership. In France, Germany and Italy, center-right governments are eager to proclaim their identification with American power. Jacques Chirac is gone. Now there is Nicolas Sarkozy, who offered a poetic tribute last November to the American soldiers who fell on French soil, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. "The children of my generation," he said, "understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children."
The great battle over the Iraq war has subsided, and Europeans who ponder the burning grounds of the Islamic world know the distinction between fashionable anti-Americanism and the international order underpinned by American power. George W. Bush may have been indifferent to political protocol, but he held the line when it truly mattered, and the Europeans have come to understand that appeasement of dictators and brigands begets its own troubles.
It is one thing to rail against the Pax Americana. But after the pollsters are gone, the truth of our contemporary order of states endures. We live in a world held by American power – and benevolence. Nothing prettier, or more just, looms over the horizon.
Monday, June 23, 2008
So America is unloved in Istanbul and Cairo and Karachi: It is an annual ritual, the June release of the Pew global attitudes survey and the laments over the erosion of America's standing in foreign lands.
We were once loved in Anatolia, but now a mere 12% of Turks have a "favorable view" of the U.S. Only 22% of Egyptians think well of us. Pakistan is crucial to the war on terror, but we can only count on the goodwill of 19% of Pakistanis.
American liberalism is heavily invested in this narrative of U.S. isolation. The Shiites have their annual ritual of 10 days of self-flagellation and penance, but this liberal narrative is ceaseless: The world once loved us, and all Parisians were Americans after 9/11, but thanks to President Bush we have squandered that sympathy.
It is an old trick, the use of foreign narrators and witnesses to speak of one's home. Montesquieu gave the genre its timeless rendition in his Persian Letters, published in 1721. No one was fooled, these were Parisian letters, and the Persian travelers, Rica and Usbek, mere stand-ins for an author taking stock of his homeland after the death of Louis XIV and the coming of an age of enlightenment and skepticism.
"This King is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants," Rica writes from Paris. "You must not be amazed at what I tell you about this prince: there is another magician, stronger than he. This magician is called the Pope. He will make the King believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind." Handy witnesses, these Persians.
The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.
The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).
I grew up in the Arab world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and anti-Americanism was the standard political language – even for those pining for American visas and green cards. Precious few took this seriously. The attraction to the glamorous, distant society was too strong in the Beirut of my boyhood.
It is no different today in Egypt or Pakistan. And what people tell pollsters who turn up in their midst with their clipboards? In Hosni Mubarak's tyranny, anti-Americanism is the permissible safety valve for Egyptians unable to speak of their despot. We stand between Pharaoh and his frustrated people, and the Egyptians railing against America are giving voice to the disappointment that runs through their life and culture. Scapegoating and anti-Americanism are a substitute for a sober assessment of what ails that old, burdened country.
Nor should we listen too closely to the anti-American hysteria that now grips Turkey. That country was once a serious, earnest land. It knew its place in the world as a bridge between Europe and Islam. But of late it has become the "torn country" that the celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington said it was, its very identity fought over between the old Kemalist elites and the new Islamists.
No Turkish malady is caused by America, and no cure can come courtesy of the Americans. The Turks giving vent to anti-Americanism are doing a parody of Europe: They were led to believe that the Europe spurning them, and turning down their membership in its club, is given to anti-Americanism, so they took to the same fad. Turkish anti-Americanism is no doubt fueled by the resentment within Turkey of the American war in Iraq that gave protection and liberty to the Kurds. No apology is owed the Turks; indeed, it is they who must reconsider their intolerance of minorities. If the Turks were comfortable with the abnormality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it is they who have a problem.
And if there is enthusiasm for Barack Obama on foreign shores, his rise to fame and power must be a tribute to the land that has made this possible. Where else would a boy of marginality and relative poverty find his way to the peak of political life? Certainly not in his father's Kenya, where the tribal origins of the Obamas would have determined young Barack's life-chances. In an Arab world hemmed in by pedigree, where rulers bequeath power to their sons and the lot of the sons is invariably that of the fathers, the tale of Obama is fantasy.
There are lines, and barriers, of race which bedevil Arab lands, and they will be there awaiting a President Obama should he prevail in November. Consider a recent speech by Libya's erratic ruler, Moammar Gadhafi, to his countrymen.
He said he feared that Mr. Obama, as a "black man," might succumb to an "inferiority complex" if he were to come to power. "This is a great menace because Obama might turn out to be more white than the whites, exaggerating his persecution and disdain of blacks. The statements of our Kenyan brother with an American nationality about Jerusalem, and his support for Israelis, and his slighting of the Palestinian people is either a measure of his ignorance of international politics or a lie perpetrated on the Jews in the course of an election campaign."
There is no need to roam distant lands in search of indictments of America's ways. Tales of our demise appear every day in our media. Yes, it is not perfect, this republic of ours. But the possibilities for emancipation and self-improvement it affords are unmatched in other lands.
Meanwhile, a maligned American president now returns from a Europe at peace with American leadership. In France, Germany and Italy, center-right governments are eager to proclaim their identification with American power. Jacques Chirac is gone. Now there is Nicolas Sarkozy, who offered a poetic tribute last November to the American soldiers who fell on French soil, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. "The children of my generation," he said, "understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children."
The great battle over the Iraq war has subsided, and Europeans who ponder the burning grounds of the Islamic world know the distinction between fashionable anti-Americanism and the international order underpinned by American power. George W. Bush may have been indifferent to political protocol, but he held the line when it truly mattered, and the Europeans have come to understand that appeasement of dictators and brigands begets its own troubles.
It is one thing to rail against the Pax Americana. But after the pollsters are gone, the truth of our contemporary order of states endures. We live in a world held by American power – and benevolence. Nothing prettier, or more just, looms over the horizon.
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