Archive for June 2010

Elena Kagan

In The New York Times’ profile on the family of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, her aunt was quoted as saying: “There was thinking, always thinking” at the family’s dinner table. “Nothing was sacrosanct.”

Really? Nothing was sacrosanct? Because in my experience, on a scale of 1-to-infinity, the range of acceptable opinion among New York liberals goes from 1-to-1.001.

How would the following remarks fare at a dinner table on the Upper West Side where “nothing was sacrosanct”: Hey, maybe that Joe McCarthy was onto something. What would prayer in the schools really hurt? How do we know gays are born that way? Is it possible that union demands have gone too far? Does it make sense to have three recycling bins in these microscopic Manhattan apartments? Say, has anyone read Charles Murray’s latest book?

Those comments, considered “conversation starters” in most of the country, would get you banned from polite society in New York. And unless you want the whole room slowly backing away from you, also avoid: May I smoke? I heard it on Fox News and Merry Christmas!

Even members of survivalist Christian cults in Idaho at least know people who hold opposing views. New York liberals don’t.

As Kagan herself described it, on the Upper West Side of New York where she grew up, “Nobody ever admitted to voting Republican.” So, I guess you could say being a Democrat was “sacrosanct.”

Even within the teeny-tiny range of approved liberal opinion in New York, disagreement will get you banned from the premises.

When, as dean of the Harvard Law School, Kagan disagreed with the Bill Clinton policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” for gays in the military, she open-mindedly banned military recruiters from the law school, denouncing Clinton’s policy as “discriminatory,” “deeply wrong,” “unwise and unjust.”

From this, I conclude that having gays serving openly in the military is “sacrosanct” for liberals.
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Jeremiah Wright

President Barack Obama’s former mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, compared the United States with apartheid South Africa during a seminar in Chicago last week and claimed the civil rights movement was about “becoming white.”

The comments were part of a five-day class Obama’s former pastor taught at the Chicago Theological Seminary, according to Fox News and The New York Post.

In the seminar, Wright reportedly told those in the class they will never “be a brother to white folk,” describing racial divisions in the country as entrenched — as he did as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.

The civil rights movement “was always about becoming white,” Wright said at the seminar.

At another point, he said: “White folk done took this country. You’re in their home and they’re going to let you know it.”

Wright also alleged that the American education system is built to poorly educate black students “by malignant intent” and criticized civil rights leader Martin Luther King for advocating nonviolence, the Post reported.

“We probably have more African-Americans who’ve been brainwashed than we have South Africans who’ve been brainwashed,” he said.
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The owner of the Casa Fiesta Mexican restaurant chain charged with eight counts of harboring and concealing illegal aliens, three counts of mail fraud, and seven counts of subscribing to a false tax return was sentenced to one year and one day in prison yesterday, according to court documents.

Ramon Ornelas, of Norwalk, was sentenced in the United States Ninth District Court by Judge Jack Zouhary. He and his attorney David Bauer asked for probation or house arrest due to the unusual family circumstances, but the judge ordered him to prison instead, court documents state.

Federal agents searched the restaurants owned by Ornelas in July 2008 and found 58 undocumented Mexican nationals working.
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Congressman Pete Stark

Gunmen assassinated the front-running candidate for governor of a Mexican border state Monday in what President Felipe Calderón called an attempt by drug gangs to sway local and state elections this weekend.

The assailants ambushed Rodolfo Torre’s vehicle as he headed to the airport in Ciudad Victoria, capital of Tamaulipas, a state torn by a turf battle between two rival drug cartels. At least four other people traveling with him were killed.

“Today has proven that organized crime is a permanent threat and that we should close ranks to confront it and avoid more actions like the cowardly assassination that today has shaken the country,” Calderón said in a televised speech. “We cannot and should not permit crime to impose its will or its perverse rules.”

He warned that organized crime “wants to interfere in the decisions of citizens and in electoral processes.”

Torre, 46, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is the first gubernatorial candidate assassinated in Mexico in recent memory. He is the highest-ranking candidate killed since Luis Donaldo Colosio, also of the PRI, was gunned down while running for president in 1994.

The attack was the biggest setback yet for Sunday’s elections in 12 states. Corruption scandals, threats and attacks on politicians have raised fears for months that Mexico’s powerful drug cartels are buying off candidates they support and intimidating those they oppose.
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The 5-4 ruling could ultimately make it easier for individuals to own handguns in a country that already has the world’s highest civilian gun ownership rate. Some 90 million Americans own an estimated 200 million guns.

Splitting along conservative and liberal lines, the nation’s highest court extended its landmark 2008 ruling — that individual Americans have a constitutional right to own guns — to all cities and states for the first time.

The decision extending gun rights, one of the country’s most divisive social, political and legal issues, was a setback for Chicago’s 28-year-old ban on handguns, which now faces new judicial review and is likely to be eventually overturned.

Legal challenges to existing laws restricting gun use in other states and cities are also expected.

Investors saw the ruling as a win for gun makers, pushing shares of Smith & Wesson Holding Corp up 5.6 percent and Sturm Ruger & Co up 2.2 percent on Monday.

The right to bear arms, under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, previously applied only to federal laws and federal enclaves, like Washington D.C., where the court struck down a similar handgun ban in its 2008 ruling.

The ruling, issued on the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, was a victory for four Chicago-area residents, two gun rights groups and the powerful National Rifle Association.

“This decision makes absolutely clear that the Second Amendment protects the God-given right of self-defense for all law-abiding Americans, period,” said Chris Cox, the rifle association’s chief lobbyist.
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The pundits don’t get it – and neither does the Republican Party. When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, it was no more a “Republican victory” than it was “Ted Kennedy’s” seat. It was the people’s seat – and it was the people’s victory.

The Tea Party is not part of the Republican Party, though it is much closer to them ideologically than to Democrats. It is not – nor should it be - a separate political party, though it has a gathering presence that could be more influential than either major party.

It could be a great incubator of ideas and motivator to action if it is embraced … or a terrible divider, if it is misunderstood.

So what IS the Tea Party?

First, it is not pro-Republican – it is anti-establishment… it is in opposition to entrenched, self-serving political interests run amuck on both sides of the aisle, and for far too long.

Second, it’s not so much Conservative, but rather Constitutional.

Third, It is not agenda driven, but principle inspired – founding principles.

Fourth, it is not an outgrowth of the current political system but an evolving ideology of its own based on the principles it serves.

Lastly, it is the expression of the people’s ultimate power expressed in our Declaration of Independence:

“…That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”…

The 2010 elections have a surprisingly nostalgic feel.

Six sons of governors have launched bids for the jobs their fathers once held. A handful of congressional scions have also sought high office for the first time this year. Then there are the two dozen or so House and Senate incumbents whose parents also served in Congress, who will be on the ballot in November.

Yet, while the proliferation of legacy candidates is a familiar and recurring theme in American politics, this year’s version of it isn’t — in a break with custom and in a nod to the current anti-establishment climate, the dynasty candidates aren’t faring so well.

The most recent example comes from South Carolina, where not one, but two congressional offspring failed in recent bids to capture the GOP nomination in an open Charleston-based House seat.

These were no ordinary legacy candidates. One, Paul Thurmond, was the son of the famed former Gov. and Sen. Strom Thurmond, a former presidential candidate whose statue can be found on the grounds of the state Capitol.
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The British government has announced a temporary cap on the number of skilled non-EU immigrants who are allowed to enter Britain, ahead of a permanent cap on numbers to be introduced next April.

The temporary curb will take effect next month, and is to limit the number of non-EU immigrants to just over 24,000 before April 2011, a fall of five percent on last year.

Prime Minister David Cameron took a tough line on immigration during his election campaign last month, promising reductions.

Home Secretary Theresa May said net immigration had been too high under the previous Labour government, and that if left uncontrolled, immigration “was not a good thing” due to the pressure it placed on public services.

“What we have as an aim is indeed to bring immigration down from the hundreds of thousands that it became under Labour to the tens of thousands that it used to be. There are various ways in which we can do that,” she told BBC Radio.

“This government believes that Britain can benefit from migration but not uncontrolled migration,” she said.
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Germany’s conservatives have never been terribly coherent when it comes to immigration. Despite a stubbornly low birth rate and what many consider to be a developing need for skilled foreign labor, members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have long been unwilling to roll out the welcome mat.

On Monday, the party once again made a less-than-fortunate foray into the immigration debate. Peter Trapp, a domestic policy expert with the CDU in Berlin, demanded in an interview with the mass-circulation tabloid Bild that would-be immigrants to Germany be given intelligence tests before they are allowed in.

“We have to establish criteria for immigration that really benefit our country,” Trapp said. “In addition to adequate education and job qualifications, one benchmark should be intelligence. I am in favor of intelligence tests for immigrants. We cannot continue to make this issue taboo.”

Trapp received support from Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament for the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party. Ferber said: “We need a unified policy for Europe. Canada is much further along on the issue and requires that children of immigrants have a higher IQ than those born in Canada.”
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