Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

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STUART, Fla. -- Martin County pet owners may soon have the option of identifying their animals with an electronic microchip under their skin instead of buying license tags when they register their pets with the county.

Friday, February 07, 2003 - An east Denver family has taken their 13-year-old daughter, an amputee, out of Hill Middle School because of fear for her safety after escalating harassment and threats from other students.

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Lacey, who lost her right leg to synovial carcinoma four years ago, has been teased about that during the three years she's been at Hill, she said.

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But Lacey and her mom insist their problem isn't with the teachers or school, but with an “underground” group of eight to 10 girls that seems to be trying to make Lacey miserable.

This sounds like an example of female bullying. What kind of people would raise their daughters to be so cruel?

The American defence chief Donald Rumsfeld has been disowned by his anti-war relatives in north Germany, reports Tony Paterson

The Rumsfelds of Weyhe-Sudweyhe, an unremarkable red-brick suburb of Bremen, were once proud of their long-lost cousin, America's secretary of state for defence - but no longer.

Like many Germans, they are appalled by Donald Rumsfeld's hawkish attitude to military action against Saddam Hussein. About 18,000 anti-war demonstrators marched through Munich yesterday to protest at his presence at an international security conference - chanting slogans such as “No room for Rumsfeld!”

BERLIN, Feb 9 (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that it was wrong to compare opposition to a war on Iraq with anti-American sentiment, after talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Just because he said it doesn’t make it so.

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Weasel Watch

France and Germany are engaging in increasingly aggressive diplomacy on Saddam Hussein's behalf. …

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The weasels' policy seems to be Saddam at any price--including a rupture in the Atlantic alliance. This morning, as CNN notes, France and Germany (along with Europe's toy poodle, Belgium) blocked NATO from making plans to defend Turkey in the event that Iraq attacks it.

Taranto speculates that Germany and France are in to their eyeballs sellling Saddam technologies to produce weapons of mass destruction and that a US occupations would expose the truth. We may found out very soon.

Levin: Let France Run Our Foreign Policy

Pot and Kettle

“A majority of Germans believe the United States is a nation of warmongers,” Reuters reports. Coming next: Poll finds a majority of Frenchmen think America is a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The Reuters dispatch also jaw-droppingly describes support for leaving Saddam in power as "a position that has widespread backing in Germany where six million people were killed during World War II." Is one man's Nazi another's freedom-fighter?

Reminding one of the 1980s song “99 Baloons” in which a German band lectures America about starting a World War. Given that Germany started the two most destructive wars in human history, this is hypocrisy to the max.

France and Germany continued this weekend to gamble with the institutions that have kept something called the Western alliance united for half a century. The question to contemplate now is whether that alliance, formally known as NATO, continues to serve the interests of the United States.

Typical Left-wing hypocrisy. When France and Germany needed protection from the Soviets they were glad to get it from us, but when we need a little help they refuse to lift a finger.

There is a fine distinction between reverse discrimination and affirmative action that isn’t recognized in common usage. Reverse discrimination is contradictory to the Fourteenth Amendment, pure and simple.

Court precedents suggest that only a "compelling state interest" can justify racial classifications. Usually this means remedying past discrimination, which is not at issue in the Michigan cases. But in the landmark Bakke case, Justice Lewis Powell said that seeking a diverse student body met the compelling interest test, at least so long as race was only a “plus” in competition. With other justices split 4-4, his opinion decided the case.

Yet no other justice joined the part of the Powell opinion finding diversity a compelling interest, and the actual decision was to overturn racial quotas at the University of California Davis. The Sixth Circuit judges argue over whether Powell's comment is the law of the land or mere dicta that can be ignored. Other appeals courts are split; most notably, the Fifth Circuit found in Hopwood that mere diversity did not justify the use of racial classifications.

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The Michigan law school argues that it doesn't have a quota as outlawed by Bakke. It merely ensures that each class include a “critical mass” of minorities; in practice this is a quota employing a small range rather than a single number. The undergraduate college once used a similar system, but now assigns minorities an extra 20 points in the admission process. The district judge decided that the old system was a quota but the new one is not; the Bush brief argues that it's still a de facto quota, that the change was in “the mechanics, not the substance.”

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The reality here is that the academic community is determined to credential blacks, whatever the Constitution says. Elite educational institutions can hand out prizes because they typically have 100 openings and 1,000 applicants who can do the work. The value of their credential, though, is based less on providing better education than on admitting bright students. As the Sixth Circuit's Judge Danny Boggs noted in his heated dissent, they could always achieve racially neutral diversity by conducting a lottery among all applicants meeting the minimum standards now applied to minorities

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… The strategy is known as the Bush Doctrine, and was adopted in September of last year (it is available on the White House website). In my view, this is the most important strategy statement made by our government since the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Its salient features are a recognition that the nation's present war crisis is caused by the fact that we have arrived at a historical crossroads where radical ideologies and modern technologies of mass destruction meet, and that this requires us to 1) maintain a military supremacy that cannot be challenged; 2) pre-empt terrorist revolutionaries both fascist and Communist, like Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, who will strike us without warning; and 3) reserve the right to act unilaterally in our self-defense, i.e., be the masters of our political fate.

… Since the Times and the mass media generally have been critical of the President's war policy, and the allegedly "unilateralist" nature of official United States policy, one has to conclude that these leftists with their deep pockets are so radical and so unhappy with the loyal critics of the war, that they are willing to squander prodigious amounts of cash to gain a platform for their extreme screeds.

Like his political peers, Wendell Berry is wildly unhappy with American democracy and with the American people because they have ratified through two congresses, presidential requests to go to war with Iraq. (I am speaking here of the Clinton request for war powers in 1998 and the Bush request last year.) Of course he does not say this in so many words. Like his peers Berry ignores these ratifications and pretends instead to speak in behalf of the allegedly silent people, and in the fatuous phrase favored by radicals “speak truth to power,” as though the power in this country were illegitimate and did not flow from the people themselves.

Radicals with this perspective are what I call the “secessionists” over the war. They want to make a separate peace as though the terrorists have not condemned all Americans regardless of race, gender, age or political viewpoint for that matter. They want to disown the courageous acts of their own government in defending the world’s peoples against tyrants like Saddam Hussein. They have a loathing -- which is really a self-loathing -- for their own country. In the end, their secessionism is really a form of anti-Americanism, because they are self-declared revolutionaries against the America we all inhabit, and therefore share an agenda with our enemies, which is the destruction of the American system as we know it.

Why is it that those of us who remember World War II and the calls of the international peace movement in the decades before it started seem to see so much of that sordid past repeating itself? In his historic speech to the United Nations Security Council, Secretary of State Powell became the equivalent of Winston Churchill, eloquently making the call for international action to disarm a murderous dictator before it is too late to stop him from attaining the worst of available modern arms.

During the 1930s the appeasers called Churchill a “war monger.”

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While Mr. Powell laid out the case against Saddam in striking detail, in Europe some of the would-be peacemakers are groveling at the dictator's feet, trying to make him appear as the victim of an unfair and imperial Western intransigence. …

The Europeans continue the tradition of appeasement they began in the 1930s. It was a losing strategy then and it’s a losing strategy now.

In conducting this interview, Mr. Benn stood in a long line of British left-wing appeasers from the fellow-travelers of Communism like Beatrice and Sydney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, whose famous audiences with Soviet dictator Stalin led them to sing his praises as a benevolent and peace-loving world leader, to Hewlett Johnson, the “Red” Dean of Canterbury, who reported after a 1942 visit to Stalin that “there was nothing cruel or dramatic” about the dictator; he just “wanted a square deal for the masses.”

The reality was that circa 1929 Stalin decided to raise the capital to industrialize the Soviet Union by ruthlessly exploiting the workers.

Mr. Benn's interview is also reminiscent of the various trips taken by Charles Lindbergh to Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s. The aviator's aversion to war and good impressions of Germany ingenuity led him to oppose those British friends who saw the only rational response to Adolf Hitler as all-out war. Lindbergh received a medal from Herman Goering; …

Radosh ignores the fact that the American military attaché in Berlin wanted to learn about Göring’s Luftwaffe and knew Lindberg’s prestige as an aviator would get him better access. Lindberg had a high regard for the Luftwaffe, but he didn’t know about the British radar. He also failed to note the Luftwaffe’s lack of four-engined bombers.

Radosh betrays the Leftist sentiment that destroying the Third Reich was imperative. The isolationists contended that even if the West could defeat Nazi Germany Stalin would be the biggest victor. History has shown that this assessment was correct. This raises the question of whether America would be better off if we had allowed Hitler to defeat Stalin.

Are the people running these corporations really leaders? Instead of standing up for what is right, they have enthusiastically adopted political correctness. This is a form of corporate fascism, with fascism defined as unprincipled industrialists and financiers working hand-in-hand with a totalitarian socialist political party. Shouldn’t the shareholders have a say in this?

These are among more than 40 Fortune 500 companies that have taken a position openly supporting racial discrimination against Asian-Americans, Caucasians and Jews.

Their racism and anti-Semitism is not articulated this nakedly, of course. It is cloaked in disguise, but their discrimination is no less real for its camouflage.

These companies have all filed friend-of-the-court legal briefs in support of the University of Michigan’s policies of giving huge racial preference to applicants who are African-American, Hispanic or Native American.

President George W. Bush has come down firmly against the "flawed" affirmative action of the University of Michigan, calling its discrimination "impossible to square with the Constitution" and its requirement of equal treatment by government institutions regardless of race.

President Bush’s position is supported overwhelmingly, two to one by Americans asked in a February Los Angeles Times poll. Even this liberal newspaper’s pollsters found that Democrats supported Bush 44 percent to 39 percent, while Republicans supported the President by a seven to one margin. Even those identified as "racial minorities" by the poll supported President Bush by 46 percent to 41 percent.

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Some refreshing facts on “affirmative action”

Yet, despite all these murky words, the sunlight of truth still breaks through now and then. A recently published book titled Increasing Faculty Diversity represents such a breakthrough, though it too could stand an English translation.

Using massive amounts of data released by Ivy League colleges and others, authors Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber test many of the beliefs behind affirmative action against the facts -- and find that most of those beliefs do not fit the facts.

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Some supporters of affirmative action claim that test scores do not measure the “real” ability of minority students, who will perform better than their SATs indicate, so colleges should admit minority students with lower scores than white or Asian students. These authors point out, however, that “in every study done on the topic, just the opposite was found” -- that is, black students “with the same SAT scores as white students get lower grades in college.”

The so-called anti-war types have always been dishonest and dishonorable. It’s the nature of the Leftist--they put “progressive causes” above all else, including the truth.

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But McGrory's explanation reveals how dishonest and even dishonorable many anti-war liberals have been.

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This is a woman who writes a regular column for The Washington Post, and not one of her reasons has anything to do with the actual facts at issue. She doesn’t like Bush. She doesn't like his advisers. Comments about Bush’s intelligence seem to be the lynchpins of her opposition to war. When she says that “among the people” she knows, “nobody was for the war,” she sounds like Pauline Kael, the New Yorker writer who famously said in 1972 that Nixon couldn’t have won because, “I don’t know a single person who voted for him!”

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Insight on the News Magazine

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Police believe Jeff Peasley visited the home of an acquaintance Wednesday and for some unknown reason attacked the 7-pound cat named Princess (pictured, left).

One hopes that Peasley will be charged for cruelty to animals for this despicable act.

Recent years have seen a slight rebirth of interest in Robeson, one of the true renaissance men of the first half of the 20th century. A touring exhibit, “Paul Robeson: Spirit of a Culture,” was featured at the National Civil Rights Museum about a year ago, but if you missed that, Here I Stand serves as a solid primer.

Paul Robeson was a notorious Communist fellow traveler when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union. David Horowitz calls Robeson a “party stalwart” in his autobiography, Radical Son. This raises the question of exactly what the National Civil Rights Museum thinks “freedom” is.

David Horowitz was raised as a Communist and says that “We Shall Overcome” was a popular song in Communist meetings.

The fact that Robeson was a “major influence” on Belafonte explains why Belafonte is pro-Saddam.

Of the major influences in his life, Belafonte singled out famed vocalist Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, black intellectual and first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. Belafonte reiterated the advice Robeson gave him surrounding the importance of music: “Get you to sing their song, and then they'll know who you are.” Music became Belafonte's medium for communicating his civil rights message to the population at large. He mentioned he had heard “We Shall Overcome” sung in every language of the world.

Come join us for The Poetry Slam on Tuesday, March 28, 2000 at 7:00 p.m. at Heritage Hall in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center. …

Yes, Stalin made such wonderful contributions to the arts.

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