Black Shards, In Your Eyes, Blinding

Here’s one more reason not to vote for Barack Obama, as any more were needed.  According to his campaign, Mr. Obama, if elected to the presidency, has every intention of seating liberal, activist judges.

"Barack Obama," explained spokesman Tommy Vietor, "has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice, and what’s truly elitist is to appoint judges who will protect the powerful and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  A judge’s responsibility is to interpret the law as established by the legislature as fairly and impartially as humanly possible.  It is not to make new law, to right current or historical inequities, or to promote any ideological agenda, whether left or right.

David Harsanyi again:

"Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, knows full well that the Supreme Court isn’t charged with upholding subjective world views"

Barack Obama believes otherwise and demonstrates the true meaning of elitism:  an unquestioning assumption that one’s ideological agenda is superior to that of others, particularly the status quo, which has society’s de facto approval.

Vote McCain, save yourself 4 years of pain - to say nothing of the 2 decades of Supreme Court follies that would follow Obama’s appointment of another John Paul Stevens.

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The horrifying murder of Jenny Ertman and Elizabeth Pena was my welcome home to Houston after living in Oregon for several years.  I remember the case like it was yesterday because their brutal, gang-related rape and strangulation happened only a short distance from where I worked at the time.  Now, after nearly 15 years of legal wrangling and international intrigue, justice will finally be served on the illegal immigrant who, along with the other animals in the Black and White gang, brutalized these two beautiful young girls.

On a summer night in 1993, Jennifer Ertman and her friend Elizabeth Pena, both students at Houston’s Waltrip High School, took a shortcut home through a park from another friend’s house when they encountered Medellin and seven other members of the Black and Whites gang.

Raul Villareal, 17, was being initiated into the gang, which required him to fight other gang members for several minutes. Following the ritual, the teens sat in the park drinking beer.

Around 11:30 p.m., as Ertman and Pena passed the young men, Medellin grabbed Pena and dragged her down a hill.

According to court testimony, Ertman was able to run away but heard Pena’s cries and returned to help. The other boys grabbed Ertman, and for the next hour proceeded to rape, sodomize and beat the girls before strangling them.

The final act of brutality came when the girl’s bodies were stomped on to make sure they were dead, court testimony shows.

The boys’ were so brazen about their actions that one of them, Derrick Sean O’Brien, even turned up smiling on videotape taken by local news crews reporting at the scene.

Happily O’Brien has already been executed for his crimes.  Now Medellin, who is no longer able to hide behind his status as an illegal immigrant and therefore, some said, not subject to the death penalty, will follow.

Medellin, who was born in Mexico but lived most of his life in Houston, had exhausted his appeals, but a legal struggle over international law had kept his case on appeal to the Supreme Court.

Even President Bush had said Texas should reconsider the case, based on the 1963 Vienna Convention. That international agreement established ground rules under which countries must treat the citizens of other nations that signed it, including contacting the embassies of foreign nationals without delay.

But the high court ruled in March that President Bush had overstepped his bounds in 2005 when he ordered Texas and other states to conduct hearings for 51 Mexican nationals on death row, including Medellin, who claimed their rights were violated when local consulates were not notified of their arrests.

Susan Gzesh, director of the human rights program at the University of Chicago believes that President Bush was obligated to follow international law:

If the U.S. is going to disobey the obligations we’ve undertaken under the Vienna Convention, then other countries could retaliate," Gzesh said.

Jennifer Ertman’s father disagreed, saying that then-Governor Bush shook his hand and promised to keep his daughter’s killers on death row, only to later wrote the memo that might have spared Medellin’s life.

But that injustice was not to be as the U.S. Supreme Court thought otherwise.

By a 6-3 vote, the court said that a memo by Bush instructing states to comply with the World Court decision for new hearings was not sufficient to require states to act.

Another defendant in the case is on death row pending an execution date while two more had their sentences reduced to life in prison because of a Supreme Court ban on executing those who were juveniles at the time of their crime.

Now, having been held in prison for nearly the entire length of Jenny Ertman and Elizabeth Pena’s too-short lives, Medellin’s will make this world a better place by leaving it, courtesy of the state of Texas.

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There’s one aspect to the rise and possible election of Barack Obama that I have not read a lot about:  the form and function of a First Ladyship filled by one Michelle Obama.  What exactly are we going to get from her if Mr. Obama is elected to the presidency?  Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes at The Moderate Voice gave voice to what I find, considering Mrs. Obama’s politics, a disturbing thought: 

First Ladies of our times are going to be more like that; an updated version of ‘iron fist/velvet glove’ way of thinking and acting publicly.

…

The difference in First Ladies in these times is going to only be this: the iron fist will no longer hidden.

We haven’t been given a lot to go on in this regard.  The focus of the Obama campaign has been, for the most part, squarely fixed on Barack and the issues surrounding the possible election of a liberal, black man as President of the United States.  This is as it should be; we’re electing, or not electing, him.

But would we also be electing a shadow (vice-)president in Michelle Obama just as we would if Hillary Clinton dragged Bill back into the White House?

Judging from a recent MSNBC segment in which Mrs. Obama sat fuming silently while her husband uncharacteristically bumbled his way through a Keith Olbermann interview by fumbling an easy question from K.O. about Hillary’s "Big State" argument, the answer is yes.

When Barack finally ran down, Michelle immediately leapt into action, angrily and articulately talking about how her husband has empowered a new, youth-powered demographic that shouldn’t be ignored.

Because we also don‘t want to discount the new people that are engaged because they don‘t fit into the old paradigm of how polls and pundits sort of review these states.

So it’s polls and pundits that are discriminating against Barack Obama, making his ascension to the presidency more difficult than it should be? 

Reading the transcript is not the same as seeing the segment live; the sharpness of Michelle Obama’s anger has been sterilized as a result of her words being distilled to print.  But it was unmistakable and I can only speculate as to its cause, but I suspect it was at least partly based on the fact that she’d had to remain silent while Barack stammered through his reply.  Missouri is a big state now?  Please.

This is quite a bit of extrapolation but I think it galls Michelle Obama to be muzzled as she’s been through the campaign to-date.  Herein lies Estes’ assertion, that if elected the velvet glove Michelle has worn so far will come off and we’ll be treated to the rough side of her tongue and her rather suspect political ideology.

Michelle Obama says things like this:

"We know where we’re living, this is where we are right now, and this has been the case for my entire lifetime: that trajectory of hope has gotten more difficult for regular folks."

This statement, and much of the rest of her rhetoric about the failure of American society to empower the lower classes, makes little sense to me.  It’s as though the Obamas live in a different country than I do. 

They do, of course, exist on an entirely different plane than I do.  But the privileged lifestyle they lead has only served to make them more pessimistic than is warranted.

Of all times and places to be alive and living in America, the 21st century is the best of all, our present difficulties in Iraq notwithstanding.  Yes, it would be better if our military had been spared that debacle, but the fact is that there is more equality, more hope, more opportunity abounding in today’s America than ever before.  Indeed, more blessings have been given to this generation of Americans than to people in any other country in the world.

Michelle Obama doesn’t see things that way.  Yuval Levin quotes her thusly:

What happens in that nation is that people do become isolated, they do live in a level of division, because see when you’re that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and I know are, see you don’t have time to get to know your neighbors, you don’t have time to reach out and have conversations to share stories, in fact you feel very alone in your struggle because you feel somehow it must be your fault that you’re struggling that hard, everybody else must be doing ok, I must be doing something wrong, so you hide…What happens in that kind of nation is that people are afraid. Because when your world’s not right no matter how hard you work, then you become afraid of everyone and everything, because you don’t know whose fault it is, why you can’t get a handle on life, why you can’t secure a better future for your kids.

…

Our fear is helping us to raise a nation of young doubters, young people who are insular and they’re timid, and they don’t try because they already heard us tell them why they can’t succeed.

This last paragraph is, frankly, unbelievable given the massive amounts of financial resources that are spent empowering the nation’s youth.  Today’s young people have to opportunity to reach heights that their grandparents could only dream of.  That’s not indicative of a nation built on fear; rather, it’s one that hasn’t yet discovered that it has definitive limitations of any kind. 

To the extent young Americans doubt their society it’s largely because of a bloated, unresponsive, overreaching federal government that places too many artificial constraints on freedom, competition, and achievement.  They know that they could do better if they weren’t being held back by the homogenizing policies that intrude into much of American life without providing compensatory value in return.

Barack Obama has done a great job of tapping into that feeling, one he calls hopelessness.  But what he hasn’t defined yet is what it is that causes that feeling to well up in the hearts of his countrymen - frustration at the constant presence of an over-large government that constantly taxes, robs, and limits the best and brightest the nation has to offer, stifling the very people who the Obamas are courting.

An angry, iron-fisted Michelle Obama is someone to be feared by conservative voters.  She is, of course, free to do exactly as she pleases with her life and reform the office of First Lady as she sees fit, should her husband triumph at the polls. 

However, voters should be aware that they will be electing Michelle Obama into office along with her husband and what that might mean for all of us.

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This may come as a bit of a traumatic shock to readers of the this blog, but it’s become known to the Houston Chronicle that the vast majority of political donations made by Texas’ college professors go to left-wing candidates.  Texas faculty member’s candidate of choice for president?  Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Faculty members have contributed $406,384 to Democratic candidates or committees in the 2008 campaign season — 71 percent of their political donations. Republicans have received $135,216, or 24 percent, of donations through the end of March. University personnel gave $27,915 to nonpartisan political action committees or third party candidates.

The professors’ top pick was Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. She received $129,721 in contributions, ahead of fellow Democrat Barack Obama with $104,911. Republican nominee-presumptive John McCain lagged far behind, in third place with $25,130 in college contributions.

The professors favored Democratic organizations, such as the Democratic National Committee, over Republican groups by more than a 3-to-1 margin.

Shocker.  Some profs are willing to go on the record with their beliefs, which is admirable, almost:

…many professors are quick to admit that their profession leans to the left politically.

"Like most law professors, I call myself a Yellow Dog Democrat," said Mark Gergen of the University of Texas at Austin. "I think I voted for two Republicans in my life, and that’s talking about every possible (office)."

Others see a profound disconnect between the values taught and exemplified by instructors at our state’s universities.

"These people are as far away from middle America and its values as Amarillo is from Islamabad," said conservative strategist Keith Appell. "In many cases, today’s professors were yesteryear’s anti-American protesters — some of them violent, as in the case of Senator Obama’s association with (former Weather Underground bomber) Bill Ayers, who is a college professor in Illinois."

Methinks Appell doth protest too much.  Yet there’s more than a grain of truth at the center of this pearl of a study.  Universities that spend considerable effort at attempting to make their student bodies reflect the demographic makeup of American society would be well-advised to consider doing much more with their faculty to ensure the same degree of ideological fairness is present among instructors.

Perhaps a little more vetting would keep professors like Ayers and Priya Venkatesan from ruining young minds.

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment.

Ah, the old "Disagree with me and I’ll sue you for being a facist anti-intellectual" trick.  I guess defending the ideas that she expected to imprint on her students was too much for the good instructor.

Pithy quote from Venkatesan that says it all:

"Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

Hilarious.  More from the WSJ:

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor’s best efforts, there’s life in American colleges yet.

Indeed.  Perhaps the new anti-intellectualism that the would-be elites fear so much is simply a generation of people who are willing and able to think for themselves.

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John McCain has joined with 23 other Senate Republicans to call for ethanol production mandates to be eased in light of rising grain prices.  McCain did not vote on the 2007 energy bill that contains President Bush’s new bio-fuel requirements.

Food prices have increased substantially worldwide and CNN reports that riots have occurred in Egypt, Haiti, Yemen, Bangladesh and other nations. Johnny-on-the-spot, the United Nations formed a task force to discuss the problem, a definitive move that’s sure to put a chicken in every pot.  Or not.

"Although many factors may contribute to high food costs, food-to-fuel mandates are the only factors that can be reconsidered in light of current circumstances," they wrote. "American families are feeling the strain of these food-to-fuel mandates in the grocery aisle and are growing concerned about the emerging environmental concerns of growing corn-based ethanol."

The GOP senators, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, said up to 30 percent of the U.S. corn crop could be diverted to fuel production this year. One of those who opposed the bill — and a co-signer of Monday’s letter — said the ethanol mandates are now widely considered a "policy blunder" that Congress should roll back.

"People are now starving to death because of this transfer from food to fuel," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

In the strictest sense Inhofe’s statements are undoubtedly true.  Regardless of the price of food there will always be those on the edge of starvation; ergo, any price increase will cause someone, somewhere to perish.  But did Inhofe make a drastic overstatement?

Presidential spokesman spokesman Scott Stanzel thinks so, saying that the bill’s biofuel requirements have are responsible for only about 1.5 percent of the increase in food prices.

To me it seems inevitable that continued reliance on grain-sourced ethanol will lead to steady increases in food prices.  Burning food is a uniquely inefficient way to move people and goods around.  As I quoted C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer previously:

Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn…

That much corn equates to enough calories to feed a person for an entire year, albeit at a subsistence level.  Inhofe’s over-the-top reaction is that only for the time being, should the price run-up continue.

Of course, this begs the question:  If Egyptians, et al, know that they are dependent on food imports and that the price might increase dramatically, what are they doing to protect themselves?

The answer, I suspect, is the same as Americans ought to be asking about our dependence on foreign oil.  Not only is the parallel a close one, but our half-hearted efforts to mitigate that dependence are a significant contributing factor in grain price increases.

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Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, today posted an intense condemnation of the western practice of censoring itself in regards to Islam and the terrorists who operate with its theocratic permission.  What’s most interesting about Harris’ article are his personal anecdotes about censorship by the mainstream American press.  Highly recommended reading.

Harris writes:

As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith, almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of (probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did publish the book, was widely seen as taking a risk–one probably attenuated by the fact that I am an equal-opportunity offender critical of all religious faith. However, when it came time to make final edits to the galleys of The End of Faith, many of the people I had thanked by name in my acknowledgments (including my agent at the time and my editor at Norton) independently asked to have their names removed from the book. Their concerns were explicitly for their personal safety.

…

Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be "intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational religion’s current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I understood the editors’ concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain’s suffocating libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at all.

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders’ film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.

I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam.

There is a reason for this, of course, which Harris identifies quite clearly - physical safety.  Those who view the world with open eyes will not be surprised by his words.

Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying violence which are unique to Islam.

There are those who disagree, of course.  Some point out episodes in the Jewish and Christian religions as evidence of a general religious hypocrisy.  Others parrot the "Islam is Peace" line while desperately wishing it were so.  Still others claim that Harris is racist and that I, by writing this post, am as well.  Untrue.  And yet…

And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative action" at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture. Hirsi Ali has also observed that there is a quasi-racist double-think on display whenever western powers trumpet that "Islam is peace," all the while taking heroic measures to guard against the next occasion when the barbarians run amok in response to a film, cartoon, opera, novel, beauty pageant–or the mere naming of a teddy bear.

What is true is that actions speak louder than words.  When western government and media institutions capitulate to terrorists by censoring the press and the citizenry, western societies are in effect admitting that they have neither the will nor the ability to counter Islamic terrorism’s corrosive effect on freedom and liberty.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."  As unpleasant as this may be to bear it is the truth.  As such it must be written about and repeated, regardless of who claims to be injured by the words.  Denial, after all, is a personal choice.

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Robert Reich, a former Clinton Secretary of Labor who now favors Barack Obama, says that the gas tax holiday Ms. Clinton supports - as does John McCain - is "economically stupid" and would increase demand for gas while costing the government $9B to finance.  And he’s not alone.

…when economists tell a president or a presidential candidate that his or her idea is dumb – and when all respectable economists around America agree that it’s a dumb idea – it’s probably wise for the president or presidential candidate to listen.

…

Even though the summer gas tax holiday is pure hokum, it polls well, which is why HRC and John McCain are pushing it. That Barack Obama is not in favor of it despite its positive polling numbers speaks volumes about the kind of president he’ll be – and the kind of president we’d otherwise get from McCain and HRC.

It is interesting to note that on the previous Congressional giveaway - the so-called Stimulus Act - neither Obama or Clinton cast a vote.  Presumedly this was because of their respective campaign schedules and the fact that the compromise bill was going to pass with or without their support. 

But both Democratic candidates took great pains in order to vote for a more substantial Democratic version of the bill.

Like the gas tax holiday, the economic stimulus package is a bad idea.  Obama’s support for one such plan indicates that he isn’t above voting for feel-good legislation when it suits his purposes.

As far as his negative view of the gas tax holiday, I’m convinced that Mr. Obama has done the right thing by aligning himself with the country’s economists.  Moreover, the best thing about his position against the gas tax moratorium is that it’s politically dangerous to resist a giveaway that’s being championed by an incredibly desperate rival.

That’s why Reich thinks he would make a better president than Hillary Clinton.  I don’t agree, yet.  But one more inane attempt to deceive and/or bribe Americans into voting for here could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in regard to many people’s support for the former First Lady.

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A new Rasmussen telephone poll shows that only 30% of Americans believe that Barack Obama broke with Jeremiah Wright because of his disgust with the former pastor’s racially-charged statements.

Most—58%–say he denounced the Pastor for political convenience.

…

Fifty-six percent (56%) say it’s at least somewhat likely that Obama “shares some of Pastor Wright’s controversial views about the United States.” That figure includes 26% who say it’s Very Likely Obama holds such views.

Mike Huckabee recently took a different perspective:

"His (Obama’s) campaign is not being derailed by his race, it’s being derailed by a person who doesn’t want him to prove that we have made great advances in this country," Huckabee told reporters.

…

"Jeremiah Wright needs for Obama to lose so he can justify his anger, his hostile bitterness against the United States of America," Huckabee said.

The new poll seems to indicate that Huckabee was correct.  Tellingly, 64% of African-American voters disagree with Wright’s view of the United States, evidence that his views are, at best, only marginally representative of the people he claims to speak for.

It’s clear to me that Obama should have broken with Wright long before the issue became an issue in the presidential campaign.  Obama’s claim to have not known about Wright’s anti-American sermons and publications is simply not believable.  Most American’s seem to agree.

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Texas Congressman Chet Edwards (D) wants to use the U.S.’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices at the gas pump.  Needless to say, I think this is a bad idea, for reasons I list below.

He says the increased supply would help halt rising gas prices which are predicted to hit $4 per gallon by summer.

"At a time when costs for groceries, gas, health care, and education keep rising, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a common sense first step that will help ease the burden for working families and businesses struggling to make ends meet in today’s economy," said Edwards.

First, the purpose of a "strategic" reserve is not to manipulate the price of consumer-oriented petroleum products, it’s to have - full - when and if an emergency occurs.

Second, lower prices encourage consumption and discourage conservation, which is the exact opposite of what we want to do.

Third, Congressional mandates for lower fuel prices actively discourage investment in alternate energy sources that require significant capital to bring to market. 

While draining the reserve is by definition only a short-term ploy, it nonetheless sends a message to energy investors that their "Congressional risk" is higher than it ought to be.

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