Words Mean Things

As if I needed more proof that Senator Harry Reid is terribly misguided, he recently referred to illegal aliens as "undocumented Americans" on the Senate floor. "UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS"?

Yesterday's Flower Children

... are today's blooming idiots. The comments by former hippies turned gentrified home owners in Haight-Ashbury about an invasion of young, dirty, smelly street people are truly priceless.

"Barbara Libasci's home sits near a rock 'n' roll landmark: the house at 710 Ashbury St. where Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead once lived.

She has a front-row seat at a daily alternative music event she'd rather not attend. She often finds homeless kids sleeping on the lawn of the former Dead house. They climb the picket fence to peer inside the front windows and pick flowers from the garden.

"They camp right in the driveway," said the retired nurse, who lives in the former Haight-Ashbury headquarters of the Hells Angels. "I have to tell them to move so the owners don't back out over them. They're degrading the property."

Even some of those who try to help are getting fed up.

John Grima, a program director at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, founded in the 1960s, says his agency provides "nonjudgmental" services for homeless youths. "Still, there's this assumption of a free ride," he said.

Grima said a teen asked him for change on Haight Street. Grima offered him slices of pepperoni pizza. The young man refused, saying he was vegetarian.

"I said, 'OK, then don't eat it,' then I got mad," Grima said. "I said, 'Wait a minute, I don't owe you anything. I'm happy to help you, but I don't owe you a thing.'

"Recently, the stance against the homeless has hardened. Residents last year resurrected the Haight Ashbury Improvement Assn. to push the city to crack down on loitering. They have started a "court watch" program to monitor cases and push judges to sentence offenders to community service and order them into treatment.

Police have also cracked down. The department has sent teens home on its own dime and maintains two full-time outreach officers to coax youths into seeking help. But now officers ticket for "quality of life" offenses, including illegal camping and drinking in public.

At a recent public meeting, Homeless Youth Alliance director Mary Howe's plan for a center with beds and showers was greeted with anger.

"We're setting ourselves up as the last stop on the help train," fumed Carolyn McKenna, 54, a substitute teacher who moved to the area in 2003.

"Like, if we don't help these kids, they're going to be forever subjected to a life of misery and agony," she added.

McKenna said she was tired of being criticized for the "crime" of owning a home. "Haight-Ashbury is not synonymous with anarchy," she said. "It's not fair to homeowners with their entire net worth tied up here. I'd be disingenuous if I said I wasn't worried about property values."

Lessons, Lessons, Lessons....

More brilliance from Mark Steyn.

Walking the walk

Rod Dreher, Captain Crunchy, has been musing on Peggy Noonan's break with Bush:

I've got no strong objection to Noonan's analysis, and indeed I'm thrilled to see it. But it seems to me that we conservatives need to avoid falling into a historical revisionism that allows us to portray ourselves as passive victims of a feckless president. Not saying she does this, but I think as the last wheel comes off this presidency, and the GOP comes to grips with what this presidency has meant for the Republican Party and the conservative movement, there will be a strong temptation to resist owning up to our own complicity.

Just to clarify my own position, I disagree with the President on illegal immigration but I can't honestly say that he "betrayed" me. Most of the stuff the base is mad about are things he openly championed in the 2000 race. He ran the most pro-Mexican, pro-federalization-of-education, pro-prescription-drugs-for-seniors campaign of any Republican Presidential candidate ever. The convention in Philadelphia was a non-stop riot of mariachi bands playing the Cucaracha alternating with cucaracha bands playing the Mariachi. I bumped into my own Senator, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, in downtown Philly and asked him how he was enjoying it. He said he'd tried to get in but he'd been denied entry. That's how multicultural and diversity-celebrating it was: guys with suspicious names like "Bob Smith" couldn't even get past security.

President Bush has, broadly speaking, governed as he said he would seven years ago. Unfortunately, a big bunch of sophisticated types in the Republican base told themselves, "Hey, don't worry. This 'compassionate conservative' mumbo-jumbo is just a cunning feint to sucker the media and the swing voters." Au contraire, he meant it.

There's a lesson there for Republicans.

On the other hand, I had to go to a toy store today to get something for my kid. Next to the cash register were "Impeachmints" bearing Bush's visage and "Axis of Evil" finger puppets of Bush, Cheney and Rice. I parked next to a guy with an "American Terrorist" bumper sticker showing guess-who. As I said a year or two back, it requires a kind of perverse genius to get damned as a right-wing madman when 90% of the time you're Tony Blair with a ranch.
06/02 04:43 PM

Honey Bee Update

Here is a reasonable update on what we know and don't know about CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) provided by Straight Dope:

"... it's never a good idea to trust what the media are telling you. At least once in the present case the media got something completely wrong and created a huge mess: The story about cell phones was basically a misrepresentation of what one pair of reporters wrote about a study that they misinterpreted. In a nutshell, the original research didn't involve cell phones, and the researchers never said their research was related to honey bee colony die-offs. Even details like the alleged Einstein quote are dubious. No one has yet found proof that Einstein said anything about bees dying off – the earliest documented appearance of the "quote" is 1994 and, yes, Albert was dead at the time.

The bottom line? No one is certain what's going on, but a lot of the theories can't – by themselves – explain everything we're seeing. More important, the situation hasn't yet risen to the level of a catastrophe (except, sadly, for some of the affected beekeepers). If the same thing keeps happening every winter for another decade or so, then we might really start worrying. But for now, classifying this as a "problem with potentially severe economic impact should it persist" would be a more realistic assessment."

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds

To All The Women I Have Loved

Too Bad, Indeed.

Peggy Noonan has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about how the Conservative movement is being destroyed by the Bush Administrations stand on the immigration bill. Noonan’s article prompted Ed Morrissey to add:

“I'm a little surprised by Noonan with this piece. I see nothing all that unusual with the way the Bush administration has attacked its critics over immigration. If she was to honestly look at the last six years, she will see that this is the normal mode of operation for the White House -- to always stay on the attack. In fact, they've followed the James Carville model from their first days in the White House.

What's the difference? They've not had to answer substantial conservative criticism very often. When they have, though, they've been consistent. When the Right objected to the poor choice of Harriet Miers as a Supreme Court nominee, they were accused of being sexist. When the Dubai Ports deal came to light -- which the administration failed to properly support -- they accused critics of bigotry and xenophobia. Those same accusations have arisen from Bush himself in this debate, with his accusation that opponents of the compromise bill "do not want what's right for America".

Welcome to the hardball of the Bush administration. We loved it when they used it on Democrats and the war, and it seems just a little hypocritical to start whining about it now that we're getting a taste of it ourselves.

However, Noonan does get the main point correct, which is that the GOP needs to start working on defining itself for the post-Bush era. We support him on the war and on taxes, but on most other domestic issues, we have a lot of daylight between Bush and the party. Discretionary spending went out of control on his watch, and the government grew faster than during the Clinton administration. That's not just Bush, either, but also the Congressional Republican leadership prior to the last mid-terms. We allowed lobbyist influence to increase, and we exploded the use of earmarks.

Republicans used to stand for smaller government, federalism, and strong national defense. Not all of that conflicts with the Bush legacy, but enough of it does that we need to start publicly demanding a return to those core concepts. Rather than repudiating Bush over his insulting attacks on the base, the better path is to generate a positive agenda that demonstrates our dissatisfaction with the previous six years -- and give Republicans something to vote for, rather than something to vote against.”

I might add that the base got its way with regards to Harriet Miers and the Dubai Ports deal; and we will get our way with amnesty too. I also think that Conservatives stand for “for smaller government, federalism, and strong national defense” not necessarily Republicans. Where some of the “movement” disaffection with Bush comes from is they thought he was one of them. Bush is not a conservative and never was, so none of this should come as a huge surprise. But the point of both writers is accurate – the conservative base needs to re-organize, re-energize and re-take the Republican Party.

Quote Of The Day

"No man is enitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."
- General Douglas MacArthur

The Smoking Gun - 2004 Edition

I was reading Daily Kos this morning (I know, it's hard to believe - but I assure you it's true) when I came upon an article which claimed that the final vote count in the 2004 presidential election could not have been correct based on exit polling data. I was surprised by the sophisticated level of mathematics the writer employed to convince us the election was rigged/stolen by the Republicans without out taking into consideration the largest variable in the equation; ALL HIS ASSUMPTIONS WERE BASED ON AN EXIT POLL. And the exit poll was given more credibility than the actual election results! While the writer obviously has strong mathematical skills, he is seriously lacking in the critical reasoning department.

And if the original post wasn’t bad enough, the first comment went completely around the bend (emphasis added):

“I'm tired of people worried about tin foil hats and what not. Knowing what I know about the character and past behavior of the people in office - I'm sure they stole these elections. The machines were rigged, the votes weren't counted. Democracy in the US has basically been in shambles, ripe for a revolution, if you ask me, since a certain 5-4 decision in late 2000.”

All of this left me wondering exactly how successful we will be reasoning with one another, as a nation, and how we will be able to make the often difficult decisions that lie ahead. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but as Soren Kierkergaard pointed out:

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

So, if you follow this "logic":

• The election must have been stolen because the results didn't match the exit polling.
• We should have a revolution because the election was stolen.
• We should discard centuries of representative government all because the election did not come out the way you wanted.

After all, just exactly how "representative" can this government be if the candidate you voted for did not get elected? If the tin foil hat fits....

QED

Quote Of The Day

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Memorial Day "Remembering"

Here is an article written yesterday by Fred Thompson that illustrates a point I have made repeatedly and which has a profound impact on our nation; Americans don't know their own history:

Remembering
By Fred Thompson

I remember when I was a kid; one thing was clear to me. The more I learned about the rest of the world, the luckier I felt just having been born in America. The more I learned about America, the more I appreciated what those who came before us built; and how exceptional they were.

Not that there aren’t other great places to live, but America is unique. It’s not just that we are the freest and most prosperous county the world has ever seen. America has also freed more people than any other nation in history.

A lot of people have done their part to see that we are blessed with the advantages we enjoy — from hardworking pioneer mothers to the Framers of the Constitution. Memorial Day is coming up, though, and I’m thinking more about American soldiers who have made the ultimate sacrifice — those who died to protect our way of life and make the world safe for democracy.

There are some people, though, who don’t think that’s such a good idea. Some people even want to use Memorial Day to protest our military’s presence in Iraq. The irony is that their right to protest was paid for by people willing to risk everything to keep the forces of tyranny at bay — here as well as Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, the Philippines, and dozens of other countries.

Over the years, a lot of people have tried to talk us out of feeling about America the way we do. Instead of pride in what America has done, they want us to feel guilty — generally because we have so much more than rest of the world. Of course, it wouldn’t help the rest of the world one whit if we had less — either of freedom or of prosperity. On the contrary, it’s our liberties that have made us prosperous and there’s no reason the rest of the world couldn’t be just as well-off — if they embraced freedom as well.

Almost always, when I talk to people who see America as the problem, their arguments are based on ignorance or an outright tangling of history. What they thought they knew about America and the world came second- and third-hand through people with axes to grind.

That’s why I was troubled recently when I came across a report by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The report’s conclusion was that American colleges and universities are failing to increase their students’ knowledge of America’s history and institutions.

Students polled in a wide range of colleges and universities showed no real improvement in their historical knowledge. Some actually forgot part of what they’d learned in high school by the time they graduated — and I’m talking about some of our best-known Ivy League schools.

Less than half of college seniors knew that, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” is from the Declaration of Independence. Less than half knew basic facts about the First Amendment. Half didn’t know that the Federalist Papers were written in support of the Constitution’s ratification. Only a quarter of seniors knew the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine.

This is our quandary. Memorial Day is about remembering. It’s about remembering those who died for our country; but it’s also about remembering why they believed it was worth dying for. Too many Americans, though, have never been taught our own history and heritage. How can you remember something that you’ve never learned?

Our Latest Addition

Meet the Eastern Painted Turtle who is the latest creature to take up residence in our pond. The young squire and I rescued him from the middle of a high speed road and decided that the friendly confines of our pond would be much more peaceful.

And with a face only a mother could love!

Daily Fred Thompson Fact

IMAO provides us with their lastest factoid:
"Fred Thompson has enough strength to throw Rosie O'Donnell ten feet."

Professor Stephen Smith

Powerline recently posted this article about Professor Stephen Smith. This is what our country is all about.

Professor Smith goes to Hanover

University of Virginia Law Professor Stephen Smith has been elected by alumni to the Dartmouth board of trustees. Professor Smith is the fourth petition candidate in a row to be elected to the board. The great Bill Buckley took note of Professor Smith's candidacy in his column here, as did the New Criterion in an editorial here, and Instapundit proprietor Glenn Reynolds in his New York Post column here.

Professor Smith told his story in his own words:

The path that took me to Hanover almost a quarter of a century ago was anything but ordinary. I grew up in the inner city of Washington, D.C. My mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, raised my three siblings and me on her own, relying on public assistance. A black kid growing up on welfare in a broken home—my future, any sociologist would have told you, wouldn’t have included an Ivy League degree or a tenured position at a Top Ten law school.

My mother, however, refused to tolerate self-pity. “You’re a welfare recipient,” she would tell me, “but be the best anyway.” Throughout my youth, my mother repeated that lesson, insisting that I remain in school, taking my education seriously. Be the best. Because I worked hard—and listened to my mother instead of accepting the low expectations of my environment—I had many fine options for college. I chose the best. I chose Dartmouth.

When I learned that I couldn’t use my ROTC scholarship at Dartmouth, I was inclined to attend a different institution so that I could graduate free of debt. Then the Admitted Minority Student Overnight Program offered to pay my airfare to Hanover. The trip was my first to Dartmouth—and only the second time I had ever set foot on a college campus. When I got home, I knew. I had to go to Dartmouth. I had fallen in love with the College.

During my four years in Hanover, my love of Dartmouth grew still deeper. Studying History and Philosophy, my majors; playing freshman football and, for a time, basketball; making friends at my freshman dorm, Richardson Hall, and my fraternity, Sigma Nu: These experiences enabled a shy sixteen year old black kid from a poor neighborhood to acquire a trained mind, self-confidence, and friendships that endure to this day.

Since graduating from the College, I have clerked at the United States Supreme Court, practiced law at leading firms in Washington, D.C., and become a full professor of law at the University of Virginia—all as my wife and I raised our five boys. All that I have achieved—all that I am—the College made possible.

Now I would like to repay my debt to Dartmouth.

Now Professor Smith will indeed repay his debt to Dartmouth. He will bring great intellect and strength of character to the Dartmouth board. We salute him and our alma mater.

The View

I am greatly concerned about TV shows like this. Unfortunately, this has to be seen to be believed.



I will follow this up with a more comprehensive post shortly. Though I will say that this buttresses my argument for rescinding women's suffrage.

Also, please see The Anchoress' take on Joyce Behar's ridiculous list of President Bush's impeachable offenses. The woman is a moron. Especially, if it's true because Al Gore and Jimmy Carter say so!

And, yes Rosie, we do think you think the troops are terrorists - along with all of your wing nut friends. You support the troops, my ass.

Don't Know Much About History Redux

Another map - this time of all the wars we have fought, where they were, how many soldiers we lost and which party was in office at the time.

CWCID: Tigerhawk - again.