Archive for August 2009

Under Discussion: Critchlow, Donald T, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, Harvard University Press (2007), 368 pages.

In his new history of the conservative movement, Donald Critchlow retells a story that should be quite familiar by now: Modern American conservatism, from its inception in the 1950s, was an intellectual synthesis of the classical liberal tradition, emphasizing individualism and free enterprise, and older European traditions expressing skepticism of liberal modernity. This intellectual framework found its expression in a fiercely anti-Communist outlook that resulted in the abandonment of the traditional foreign-policy isolationism of the American Right in favor of Cold War militarism. Regarding domestic policy, these new conservatives followed the Old Right in professing their intention to roll back the welfare state apparatus that emerged from the New Deal. This program and its accompanying ideology were sold to activists and the public at large with an emphasis on patriotism, hawkish foreign policy views, social conservatism and traditional values.

According to Critchlow, the conservatives were nearly relegated to irrelevance on the American political scene on several occasions, only to make a surprising comeback at a later point. The key events Critchlow points to are the defeat of Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, the perceived betrayal of conservatives by President Nixon and the subsequent scandals surrounding his administration, and the revitalization of the Democratic Party symbolized by the election of President Clinton in 1992. In each of these situations, Critchlow argues, conservatives seemed to be “down for the count” only to reemerge at a future point in defiance of the predictions of analysts and pundits.

Following the Goldwater defeat, conservatives were able to rebound by exploiting the emerging cultural divide concerning matters of patriotism, race, gender, sex, culture, and religion that continues to figure prominently in American politics at present. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” (a term not mentioned by Critchlow) was successful in breaking the Democrats’ hold on the South and allowing the Republicans to take the White House in 1968.
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A Huntington Beach man was arrested after he allegedly kidnapped a 7-year-old autistic girl and then sodomized and raped her, police said Saturday.

Daniel Blas Flores, 27, was arrested Wednesday at his apartment and booked for “several sexual assault related charges,” according to a news release from the Huntington Beach Police Department.

Flores’ apartment is near a Sycamore Boulevard complex where the girl was playing outside with friends, the release said. Flores allegedly kidnapped the girl and then took her back to his apartment where he committed the sexual assaults, police said.

Huntington Beach Lt. Mike Reynolds said Flores’ bail was set at $1 million.

Aaron Turpeau, an Atlanta political activist and strategist, has dropped a little bomb into the middle of the city’s mayoral race in the form of a memo to unknown black leaders in Atlanta. The document, intended to be private, calls on black Atlanta to unite behind a single black candidate to keep the mayor’s office in black hands, allowing the city to pursue what Turpeau calls a “black agenda.”

(Full text available here)

The memo, which came to light Thursday, makes at least two egregious, offensive and dangerous assumptions:

First, it treats the mayor’s office as a black possession, a trophy of sorts that could be surrendered to white Atlantans for the first time in 35 years. That is a cartoonish, archaic approach to politics that, among other things, ignores the humanity of individual mayoral candidates, with all their strengths and weaknesses, and tries to reduce them to mere representatives of their respective races.

That mindset has had its day, and that day is, or ought to be, over. But as the memo reminds us, it isn’t quite. There are those in the black and white communities who still see opportunity, profit and power in extending that day beyond its normal lifespan, and the Turpeau memo lays out one way it might be done.

In fact, the memo is valuable because it brings to the surface a sentiment that is more widely held among black voters than many local leaders, black and white, would care to publicly acknowledge. Many black voters — older voters in particular — take pride in the idea that Atlanta is a black-run city, and for some that sense of pride would be diminished if a white person were elected to lead it.
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Václav Klaus

Thank you for the invitation to come to Aix, for giving me a chance to address this reputable audience where I see many friends and, above all, thank you for continuing to organize the Summer University. I only don’t understand why you call it Summer University of the New Economics. Which one is the old one? We have only one, good, old economic theory and it is our adversaries who use the term “new economics” as an attack on our views. This year’s main topic of your gathering is “Markets and Morality.” I only hope that by choosing this title you wanted to say that there is no morality, at least in the public arena, without markets. It is an important and, again, a very old message. In our early post-communist years, I was being often patronized that what we needed then was morality, whereas I stubbornly repeated that what we needed were markets. My critics argued that a strong, ex-ante infusion of morality is necessary – with the implicit expectation that it would be them, who’d be supplying it. It was the substance of my disputes with my predecessor in office, President Václav Havel. I hope the speakers at the Summer University will be on my side.

I am here already for the third time in this decade. It demonstrates – at least I wish it does – my respect for what you’re doing. I was here in August 2002 when we, at the beginning of the second post-communist decade, started to reassess our journey from communism to a free society. The title of my speech then was “Post-Communist Era: Atmosphere of Victory or of Lost Illusions?” We had a mixed feeling at that time. We had quite rapidly liquidated the formal structures and mechanisms of the communist society and successfully established parliamentary democracy and market economy. The question was whether we were building free society based on classical liberal principles or whether we – instead – had fallen into another blind alley of regulated society, of unproductive welfare state, of brave new world of European socialdemocratism and of empty and artificial Europeanism. My answer to that question was that the winner of the transition decade was democracy, not freedom or classical liberalism. Our original slogan: “deregulate, liberalize, privatize” was gradually transformed into a different one: “regulate, adjust to all kinds of standards of the most developed and richest countries, listen to the partial interests of the NGOs and follow them, get rid of your sovereignty and put it into the hands of international institutions and organizations.”

This year we celebrate already the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism and we are again in a reassessment mood. The situation has not changed for the better.
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Three students were arrested Friday and eight were cited Thursday as deputies attempted to quash fights at at a high school in northern Mendocino County’s remote Round Valley, law officials said.

There had been outbreaks of violence at the school for three days, beginning Wednesday, said Mendocino County Sheriff’s Capt. Kurt Smallcomb.

Some of the fighting began on the Round Valley High School campus and later moved off campus, he said.

Boys and girls were involved in the incidents. The three arrested Friday were girls, Smallcomb said.
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Ted Kennedy’s death on Wednesday–in essence the passing of a senator–produced a never-ending tsunami of retrospectives. Newscasts, from CNN to PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, devoted entire programs to Ted Kennedy’s passing. The funeral on Saturday is likely to trigger another wave of retrospectives by the MSM.

The enshrinement of the deceased exposes the unfiltered liberal biases of the Mainstream Media elite. On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, the gestures of John King and Gloria Borger–tilting the head, raising the eyebrows, batting the eyelashes–reflected a typical display of awestruck sentiment. Historian Douglas Brinkley summarized Kennedy’s legacy as if his political contributions ranked with the Founding Fathers.

Thursday’s Washington Post contains three front-page articles, four columns on the op/ed page (with six mini-retrospectives), a timeline with photographs that stretch across the span of two pages, five pages in the national section, and a “Style section” piece by Lois Romano. Friday’s Post contains two front page articles, multiple pages of coverage in the national section, and another column on the op/ed page.

The coverage is what one would expect from the death of a former president. Why all the attention over the death of this U.S. senator?

Part of the explanation is the Kennedy mystique–the death of the last prince of “Camelot”. Post columnist Eugene Robinson noted that Kennedy was “a prince fated never to be king”.

Another major factor is that Kennedy epitomized everything the MSM embraces: unrestricted mass immigration; “civil rights” also known as quotas, preferential treatment, and set-asides; public school desegregation via forced busing; the Equal Rights Amendment; socialized medicine (or “universal health care” widely touted as the “public option”); and Barack Obama.

MSM journalists, editors, reporters, and commentators identify with Kennedy’s political and social outlook–one defined by a rabid egalitarian liberal ideology.
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Tommy Poindexter, center, stands in Palm Beach County court Monday, Aug. 24, 2009, on the first day of his trial for the assault and rape of a Dunbar Village resident and her son. Behind him are Nathan Walker, Jr., left, and Walker’s attorney Robert Gershman.

WEST PALM BEACH — A woman told a jury on Wednesday that she prayed for her life and cried in pain as she was repeatedly raped in her bedroom and beaten with guns — all while she listened to her son scream as he was assaulted down the hall.

Speaking softly, pausing occasionally for heavy breaths, the woman recounted the terrifying events the night of June 18, 2007, in her apartment at a public housing complex a few miles from downtown West Palm Beach.

“I was crying and telling them that hurts,” she said during the trial of two men accused in the case.

Nathan Walker, 18, and Tommy Lee Poindexter, 20, are facing 14 counts, including sexual battery, burglary, kidnapping, grand theft and promoting sexual performance of a child. Avion Lawson, a 14-year-old middle schooler at the time of the crime, pleaded guilty in the case and testified against Poindexter and Walker. A fourth defendant, now 17-year-old Jakaris Taylor, is set for trial next month.

All defendants were teens at the time, but are charged as adults. They could spend life in prison if convicted.

The woman testified she and her son, then 12, had returned to the Dunbar Village housing project that evening from delivering telephone books, and soon heard a knock on the door.

A young boy said her car had two flat tires. The woman said she went outside with her son, but the vehicle was fine.

“I said, `How come you told me I had two flat tires,’ and he told me, `I’m sorry ma’am,’ ” she said.

FROM THE SHADOWS

[...]

Soon, she was taken into her bedroom and beaten and sodomized by one masked person with a rifle. Then the other two came in and raped her.

“I was crying and praying at the same time,” she said.

Three more masked people then came into her room and raped her, she said. Then four more. In all, she said, 10 people raped, sodomized and beat her.

“Was anybody laughing?” prosecutor Aleathea McRoberts asked. “Yes . . . all of them were laughing,” the woman said.

Video available at original article:
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DENVER – A map painted by Mexican Indians in the mid-16th century has become a key document for understanding the migration of Mesoamerican peoples from their land of origin in what is now the U.S. Southwest, according to a scholar at Harvard University Divinity School.

[...]

That sacred city and the original land of Aztlan would have been in what is today the Southwestern United States.

MC2 (the map) remained in Cuauhtinchan until 1933, the year it was sent to a regional museum and later came into the possession of an architect.

In 2001, philanthropist Espinosa Yglesias acquired the map and shortly afterwards contacted Harvard’s Center of Latin American Studies to ask who could analyze the map. Harvard chose Carrasco.

The result of five years of interdisciplinary studies was the publication of the 479-page book “Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey Through the Map of Cuauhtinchan No. 2.”

Carrasco said that in 2010 the University of New Mexico, which published the original version, will edit the version in Spanish.

“This map and the book we published to decipher it have changed our understanding of the Mesoamerican codices and of the sacred lands of that region,” Carrasco said.

That new understanding has political and social significance today.

“This map links the identity and politics of Mexican-Americans, that is, the Chicano people, with the art, rituals and philosophical practices of pre-Colombian Mexicans,” he said.

“The insistence of Mexican-American scholars and activists on using Aztlan as their symbol is strengthened by the history recounted by this map, since it places Mexicans in the United States within a wider history of migration, ethnic interactions, religions and rituals,” the academic said.

MC2, according to Carrasco, links Chicanos “with the lands where the struggle for their freedom and rights took place before the oppression.”
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Jack Hunter

Does this sound familiar? “Children born to foreign parents in Dublin maternity hospitals accounted for 25 per cent of total births this year,” according to Declan Keane, Master of the National Maternity Hospital. “This number is causing major problems.”

“We were stretched last year and the situation is even worse this year,” Dr. Keane said. “We have more and more patients and no resources to hire extra staff to look after them. That means cutting corners. If you cut corners then safety is an issue.”

“It is worth noting that very few immigrant parents are actually refugees or asylum-seekers and the majority are people who have come over here to have an Irish baby and Irish citizen,” said Dr Keane.

A member of Fianna Fail, Ireland’s Republican Party, appearing on television stating that “60% of all female asylum-seekers over the age of 16 arrive here pregnant.”

Ireland is experiencing the same abuse of their immigration laws as the U.S. The difference is they choose to do something about it. In January 2003 the Irish Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision by a 5-2 verdict that immigrant parents of an Irish born child could be deported. This was the first reversal of Ireland’s liberal policy of granting residency and possibly citizenship to anyone who had a baby on the island, including illegal aliens. Deputy Prime Minister Mary Harney was encouraged by the courts decision, saying, “It will prevent others from coming to Ireland to abuse our asylum process on the basis that they are pregnant.”

It was common practice for non EU member nationals, mostly from Nigeria, to come to Ireland claiming political asylum. Many came pregnant. AP writer Shawn Pogatchnik writes, “While asylum applications frequently take years to complete, until now the birth of a child has resolved matters conclusively–with Irish citizenship for the infant and residency rights for the mother, usually followed by arrivals of more relatives.”

Are you getting the picture? We are not alone in this fight. This is happening to every First World nation. Ireland has become a destination country, just like America. The difference is they recognized their liberal immigration laws were being trashed and put a stop to it.
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