Phone service was restored today at my home (no power or phone yet at the Church) so I can blog, post, and do all the necessary things we cyber-types do. Yesterday was a good day especially when I heard of Mier’s withdrawal. By all appearances she was a good woman but out of her league. I’m glad she withdrew.
Someone sent me this quote from Ann Coulter. It hits the nail on the head.
[Read more…]
Wilma unleashed its fury Monday night cutting a swath through southern Florida leaving a considerable amount of damage in its wake. Naples got hit hard, particularly downtown as well as points south. The forecasts were relatively accurate and most people were prepared before it arrived. The winds blew all night long and well into the next day. They started abating around noon. Then the temperature dropped (a gift given that all the power was out; after Charlie we sweltered for days), and the sky cleared. No rains.
I sustained little damage on my house, mostly because it was built after Andrew hit Florida causing a massive revamp in building codes. Trees are uprooted all over the place but by today all roads are clear except in the hardest hit areas. Stop lights were ripped from their posts but everyone is a bit more civilized in the hardship and traffic moved smoothly overall. Some of the major intersections still have police officers but other areas are already fixed. Power is being restored except in the hardest hit areas (mine came back this morning), but phone service except for cell phones is still down in many areas. (I’m writing this at a coffee and sandwich place with free wi-fi.)
[Read more…]
Wall Street Journal John Fund Monday, October 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
I have changed my mind about Harriet Miers. Last Thursday, I wrote in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary that “while skepticism of Ms. Miers is justified, the time is fast approaching when such expressions should be muted until the Senate hearings begin. At that point, Ms. Miers will finally be able to speak for herself.”
But that was before I interviewed more than a dozen of her friends and colleagues along with political players in Texas. I came away convinced that questions about Ms. Miers should be raised now–and loudly–because she has spent her entire life avoiding giving a clear picture of herself. “She is unrevealing to the point that it’s an obsession,” says one of her close colleagues at her law firm.
White House aides who have worked with her for five years report she zealously advocated the president’s views, but never gave any hint of her own. Indeed, when the Dallas Morning News once asked Ms. Miers to finish the sentence, “Behind my back, people say . . .,” she responded, “. . . they can’t figure me out.”
Wall Street Journal October 11, 2005; Page A16
The world will learn a lot more about Harriet Miers in coming weeks, so we’re not going to join the pack already chasing her back to Texas. But one strategy that the White House would be wise to drop is its not-too-subtle promotion of both her religion and her personal views on abortion.
In case you haven’t heard, Ms. Miers is an evangelical Christian who is personally opposed to abortion. A main White House talking point is that she fought to reverse the American Bar Association’s position supporting abortion rights. We are supposed to believe — wink, wink — that this means Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative who would oppose the likes of Roe v. Wade. The National Right to Life Committee has already endorsed Ms. Miers. And James Dobson of Focus on the Family has endorsed her because, he says, “I know the individual who brought her to the Lord” and because “I do know things that I am not prepared to talk about here [on TV].”
We’ll concede that Mr. Dobson’s sources upstairs are better than ours. But whatever he knows, if it concerns Ms. Miers’s religion it doesn’t tell us anything about how she’ll rule on the Supreme Court. Allow us to recall the case of Anthony Kennedy.
Murray Soupcoff
When will the “caring” activists of the left ever learn? Never have so few individuals with so many good intentions created so much miseryfor so many people whom they wanted to help. As the social-engineering debacles of the last half century in the United States have demonstrated, carelessness in “caring” for thedisadvantaged in our society only leads to a glaringly uncaring result.
After all, it was pioneering liberal-left social engineers in the 1940’s and 50’s who came up with the not-so-creative idea of fighting poverty in American slums by ripping down existing for-profitrental housing and replacing the existing rental stock with the cold, massive, impersonal concrete human stockyards we now know as public housing projects — the equivalent of urban hell for severalgenerations of the poor in North America. Not only was poverty not checked by this urban “reform,” but the absence of cheap rooming houses and other lodgings for society’s marginalizedcitizens ultimately created the phenomenon of urban homelessness. And of course, we all know the many wonderful benefits that came with living in comfy, government-subsidized “projects” –rampant drug addiction, vandalism, family breakup, gang wars, killings and social decay.
Oh, and did we mention an even more ingrained “cycle of poverty”?
White culpability for black poverty.
London Times Online John McWhorter
Black poverty is the result of 30 years of misguided welfare rather than racism, says John McWhorter
As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America.
The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now.
The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black. The civics lesson, we are to think, is that the civil rights revolution left a job undone in an America still hostile to black advancement.
In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.
Read the entire article on the London Times Online website.
Maria Khoury, resident of Taybeh, wrote of this below.
Daniel Pipes FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2005
What some observers are calling a pogrom took place near Ramallah, West Bank, on the night of Sep. 3-4. That’s when fifteen Muslim youths from one village, Dair Jarir, rampaged against Taybeh, a neighboring all-Christian village of 1,500 people.
The reason for the assault? A Muslim woman from Dair Jarir, Hiyam Ajaj, 23, fell in love with her Christian boss, Mehdi Khouriyye, owner of a tailor shop in Taybeh. The couple maintained a clandestine two-year affair and she became pregnant in about March 2005. When her family learned of her condition, it murdered her. That was on about Sep. 1; unsatisfied even with this “honor killing” – for Islamic law strictly forbids non-Muslim males to have sexual relations with Muslim females – the Ajaj men sought vengeance against Khouriyye and his family.
They took it two days later in an assault on Taybeh. The Ajajs and their friends broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry, and electrical appliances. They threw Molotov cocktails at some buildings and poured kerosene on others, then torched them. The damage included at least 16 houses, some stores, a farm, and a gas station. The assailants vandalized cars, looted extensively, and destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.
[Read more…]
Human Events Rabbi Aryeh Spero
In New Orleans, beginning Tuesday morning, August 30, I saw men in helicopters risking their lives to save stranded flood victims from rooftops. The rescuers were White, the stranded Black. I saw Caucasians navigating their small, private boats in violent, swirling, toxic floodwaters to find fellow citizens trapped in their houses. Those they saved were Black.
I saw Brotherhood. New York Congressman Charlie Rangel saw Racism.
Yes, there are Two Americas. One is the real America, where virtually every White person I know sends money, food or clothes to those in need — now and in other crises — regardless of color. This America is colorblind.
The other is the America fantasized and manufactured by Charlie Rangel, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who constantly cry “racism!” even in situations where it does not exist, even when undeniable images illustrate love, compassion and concern. These three men, together with today’s NAACP, want to continue the notion of Racist America. It is their Mantra, their calling card. Their power, money, and continued media appearances depend on it.
Go to Human Events for more.
The author overstates some things and is too harsh in places, but his central thesis that collapse of New Orleans was a moral failure spanning decades is on target.
The Intellectual Activist
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
[Read more…]
