South Dakota Politics

Dan Rather Cries Out: Please Sir, Can I Have Another?

Dan Rather had a very big career in TV journalism, but he ended it in embarrassment and disgrace.  It is clear to any reasonable observer that Rather himself was to blame.  That is the conclusion that CBS came to.  But now he is back, suing CBS for $70 million smackers for making him a fall guy.  We find out that he is doing it all for us.

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather is vowing an aggressive pursuit of his $70-million lawsuit against the network, saying he's determined to get his former bosses under oath and prove that they caved to government pressure in forcing his ouster.

S0 it's all about Dan standing up for democracy against corporations, and government pressure?  Maybe, but it's sure all about Dan.   Here is someone with a wounded ego that few mortals can imagine, and a capacity for self-deception to match. 

The bottom fell out for him when it was revealed that a Sixty Minutes II story in 2004, clearly intended to embarrass President Bush on the eve of the election, was based on fraudulent documents produced by two bit political hack.  Here is what I wrote at the time in the American News. 

The documents that Dan Rather relied on were in fact forgeries, produced not on a typewriter but on a personal computer, using Microsoft Word. Two days after the broadcast everyone with an internet connection knew this. It would take CBS another agonizing week to not quite come clean. They tried to pass off as experts a man who analyzed the spiritual content of handwriting and a typewriter repairman. But Rather now admits that the memos “cannot be authenticated.” That’s like saying that the papier mache goblin under glass at the county fair might not really be the Devil.

This was one of the biggest stories of the year, but not because of the content.  It was big because it the new media (the blogosphere) first demonstrated its power by rapidly exposing the CBS story as a canard.  Powerline, the Twin Cities based conservative blog, broke the story and so achieved national stature. 

The fact that Mr. Rather wants to relive all of this suggests what he has been brooding on since Powerline pulled his shorts down.  It also reminds us some interesting things about the human soul.  In my column I indulged in a little amateur psychoanalysis. 

Its not hard to see why Rather and his news crew hung on so long. The victims of con jobs will often insist for years afterward that their mysterious partners were really honest men, and that they will show up any day now with the prize money. Having invested himself in the story, and CBS its prestige, they were loath to admit they’d been suckered. Nor is it difficult to see why they were easy marks in the first place. People get conned because they are greedy. CBS News, struggling in the ratings game, was greedy for a big story. But they were greedy for something else.

Rather and his news team were virtually coordinating their work with the Kerry campaign.  They were greedy for a Kerry victory, and the problem with that is not so much its partisanship as the fact that it corrupted their professional judgment. 

Jonah Goldberg at the National Review has this:

In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why ... why ... why?  “There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”  Well, God has not forsaken us.

I will leave God's decency and justice to rest on the merits, but God has surely been good to Goldberg, and to me, for inviting us to revisit this delicious chapter in political history. 

Daschle Team Failing Obama?

Slate excerpt:

While he's been improving, Hillary Clinton has been improving faster. He was once the Democratic Party phenomenon, but she's the one with the momentum in the polls. She now leads the national polls by 20 points. In the crucial states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, she's way ahead, too. Obama, by contrast, is doing no better in national polls than he was in February, despite vast and largely approving press coverage. He has fallen sharply in New Hampshire and South Carolina since late summer. And the betting money is moving to Clinton, too: She is crushing Obama by 68 to 16 in the political futures markets. The only decent news for Obama comes from Iowa, where he is third in the polls, but very close to Clinton and John Edwards.

Is it time for Obama to panic?

Expressing Opinions vs. Killing Homosexuals

In the incoherent world of today's college campus, the former can disqualify someone from speaking to an audience; the latter apparently cannot.  Conservatives have been noting the rather odd standards for being invited to the campus of Columbia University.  The Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) has been banned from Columbia's campus since 1969.  The original ban was no doubt an act of protest against the Vietnam war, but when Columbia President Lee Bollinger helped defeat the ROTC's return in 2003, the chief reason offered was the military's unfriendly policy toward homosexuals. 

Strange then that Bollinger defends the invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  The policy of Iran toward homosexuals is not exactly "don't ask, don't tell."  The Washington Post has the story:

Not since they confronted snapshots of a slightly built young man named Matthew Shepard and the fence where he was left for dead in 1998 by two drug-addled no-hopers in Laramie, Wyo., have gay people been so agitated by a set of photographic images. Protesters brought black-and-white reproductions of the pictures -- which show the public execution last year of two teenage boys in Iran -- to a rally in Dupont Circle yesterday afternoon...

Here is how The Nation put it:

On July 19 in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Iran, two teenagers, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, were put to death for a crime involving homosexual intercourse. Asgari, at least, was underage at the time of the offense. Before the execution Marhoni and Asgari were detained for approximately fourteen months and received 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft.

President Bollinger justified the invitation by appeal to Columbia's "tradition of robust debate."  Maybe robust debate with murderous barbarians is good idea.  But when you invite a Holocaust denier who represents a government that has strangled to death countless young men and women for sexual immorality, not to mention the many women stoned to death, and you reject the ROTC because the military isn't sufficiently welcoming to gay people, one has to wonder if being an enemy of the United States is not the virtue that wipes away all sins. 

President Bollinger heroically resisted those who called for him to cancel President Ahmadinejad's invitation.  Which raises the question: what exactly does it take to have one's invitation to speak canceled?  Fortunately for us, Professor Schaff has already answered that question. 

The latest news from the world of academia is the dis-invitation to Lawrence Summers at UC Davis due to the protests of several faculty.  Summers, you might remember, was forced out as president of Harvard because he made some politically incorrect remarks attempting to explain the dearth of women in the hard sciences.

Lawrence Summers lost his position at Harvard because he dared to say something for which there is ample scientific support: that men and women think differently by nature, and that this psychological dimorphism has something to do with the distribution of the sexes among the scientific disciplines.  He was not excusing the latter.  In fact, his point was that if we want to change the latter, we need to be aware of the biological influences.  But because he dared to challenge the leftist/feminist orthodoxy, he is so tainted he cannot even be allowed to speak in public.   See my post here for the original story.

This is the world of today's academic left.  A respected academic who says something unfashionable is silenced.  A man whose government actually murders homosexuals, he is allowed to speak. 

Local Connection To "Into The Wild"

Read this story about some Faulkton guys who found themselves, to their surprise, in the new film Into the Wild. 

Ahmadinejad

Lee Bollinger of Columbia University, who has tried to keep ROTC off campus, will welcome the president of Iran to his school.  The Wall Street Journal writes:

In Mr. Bollinger's view, "the university has an obligation, deeply rooted in the core values of an academic institution and in First Amendment principles, to protect its students from improper discrimination and humiliation."

Mr. Bollinger's position might at least be coherent were he not now invoking the same principles to justify his invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose offenses to gay rights and any other form of human dignity considerably exceed the Pentagon's. After promising that he would introduce the president "with a series of sharp challenges" — including Iran's "reported support" for international terrorism — he went on to say that "it is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their expression."

We're all for free speech and the vigorous exchange of intellectual differences, though we don't see how Mr. Bollinger can be, given his decision to discriminate against young men and women who seek to make careers in the military. We also don't quite see how the right to free speech — a freedom Mr. Ahmadinejad conspicuously denies his own people — is tantamount to the right to an illustrious pedestal. Columbia is a selective institution in its choice of students as well as speakers; its choices confer distinction on those whom it selects. Were it otherwise, Mr. Ahmadinejad would surely have better uses for his time.

We will say this for Mr. Bollinger: The tough-guy act he promises for Monday's introduction will be something to watch. This time the irrepressible Mr. Ahmadinejad, we're sure, will bow his head in awe.

WaPo: Soviets Died for Liberty

Sometimes the fact-checkers, those paragons of virtue and truth, need some of their own fact-checking.  Case in point:  the Washington Post attempted to fact-check Fred Thompson's historical reference that Americans "have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world," and they completely missed:

The number of overall U.S. military casualties, while high, is still relatively low in comparison to those of its World War I and World War II allies. In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine." It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies.

Even if the Soviet Union is not included in the calculation, U.S. military casualties in all wars combined remain lower than those of the British Commonwealth ("a combination of nations," in Thompson's phrase) in World War I and World War II. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the British Commonwealth lost 1.7 million troops in the two world wars.

For beginners, Thompson said that we shed blood for "other people's liberty," not our own.  This excludes the Soviet Union, who fought to defend its territory, and not to mention the Soviets had an alliance with the Nazis right up until June 1941.  Their fighting the Nazis had nothing to do with the love of liberty.  Sure, the Soviets helped secure victory on the Western Front, but the last thing on Stalin's mind was anyone's liberty.  Just ask Eastern Europe.

The Post also uses the British as a counterclaim, but you'd have to believe Britain defended North Africa to bring liberty there.  Apparently the Post can't distinguish between fighting for empire and fighting for liberty.  Had Britain lost North Africa, they would've lost an important trade route to their southern empire.  As for Poland, nothing was done until Britain and France were attacked nine months later.  This is in no way to denigrate the service that Britain performed, but they fought for their own survival and for their empire, not for the liberation of people.  The WaPo's argument about Macedonians and Napoleon follow the same fallacy; they were fighting for empire, not liberty.

Can the Post indicate where the United States demanded territory in Europe or Africa after World War II?  Throughout the twentieth century, America mobilized its military to free captive peoples, including a sixty-year long effort to tackle communism and liberate Eastern Europe from the grasp of liberty-loving Soviet domination.

The lost distinction between liberty and empire says a lot about what appears in the pages of the WaPo.  The bloody bean counting the WaPo conducted in no way reflects Thompson's remarks.  The United States has led the world, albeit sometimes reluctantly, in offering its youth for the liberation of others.   We've entered with the intention of freeing nations, leaving as soon as we can, and leaving democracies in our wake.  We did so in Europe twice, in Asia several times since 1941, and now in the Middle East.  The world is a better place because of our purposeful actions and the sacrifice of our soldiers to that end.

H/T to Captain's Quarters.

UPDATE:  Props for the WaPo where due.

Big Stone, Energy, and Cross Cutting Cleavages (Not That Kind)

PP's frustration over the problems of the Big Stone II electrical plant presents a fine example of the difficulties in developing a sound energy policy.  There are competing interests, what political science geeks sometimes call "cross cutting cleavages," that make it impossible to please everyone, or even most people, when it comes to energy.  We want our energy to be both clean and cheap.  The problem is the cheap energy, such as that produced from coal, tends to be dirtier, or, put another way, the clean energy, such as solar or wind, tends to be expensive on a per-megawatt basis.  Similarly, we want to subsidize ethanol so we are less dependent on foreign oil and to provide an economic boost to rural America, but that creates an incentive to turn land from conservation to corn production, bad for our hunters and bad for our tourist economy.

Frustratingly, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot have cheap energy and clean energy, at least not for the foreseeable future.  Just like we can't complain about the size of government, and then go to Washington begging for money for our pet projects. Yesterday I offered a bunch of Harry Jaffa quotes on Lincoln and statesmanship.  Jaffa notes that one of the seminal lessons one learns from Lincoln is that the statesman's role is to say "no" to the people. For example, "No, you cannot have slaves, even if the majority of you really want them."  We 21st Century Americans have a hard time saying "no" to ourselves, and there is no statesman asking us to. 

New York Times Select Finally Dies

About a year ago or so, the New York Times came up with a brilliant idea for its online edition: put their most popular columnists behind a wall and charge for access.  They called it TimesSelect, which was an unintentionally appropriate name, as it very rapidly became a victim of natural selection.  I responded to the Times' policy by doing the most reasonable thing: I stopped reading the NYTimes altogether.  Yeah, it was still an important newspaper, but I just didn't bother regularly checking out an online paper that held its own people for ransom.  I expected that TimesSelect would prove an embarrassing failure, but no one I know spent more time predicting its demise, or following the course of it, than Slate's Mickey Kaus.  Here is Kaus indulging in some well deserved gloating. 

Late Hits: Here's NPR's Laura Sydell citing Ken Doctor for the proposition that the cancellation of TimesSelect is a "sign that we have reached a tipping point with online advertising" where charging for content loses you more in ad dollars than it gains in subscription revenue. "Sign"? "Reached"? "Tipping Point?" It's been obvious for years that this was the case. Slate learned this lesson in 1999. ... The NYT is attempting to get away with the Pinch-saving spin that the online environment "changed" in a way that "wasn't anticipated" after TimesSelect was launched. But the failure ot TimesSelect was completely anticipated at the time by many bloggers (e.g., Jay Rosen) notes Rachel Sklar. Alternative, more sophisticated explanation: Pinch is a fool. ... If he declared he was going to fly and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would it be a "sign" that mankind had reached a "tipping point" at which individuals were unable to fly? ...

The technology of the internet makes it possible to deliver almost any computer file--text, image, sound clip--very cheaply. One consequence of this is that when you try to charge for content, someone else will immediately figure out how to make the same content available for free.  That was one of the problems with TimesSelect: anyone who really wanted to read one of the sequestered columnists could find the piece somewhere else.  The other problem was that, frankly, the New York Times prized columnists just weren't really that valuable a commodity.  I am willing to pay $10 bucks a month to get thirty downloads of classical jazz that I can listen to over and over, but I ain't willing to shell out to read a David Brooks column once. 

While I am gratified to see the end of TimesSelect, I admit that there is cause for concern about the state of traditional newspapers.  The New York Times Corporation is going belly up.  While that is no great loss in the short run, it is America's classic newspaper.  I remember reading New York Times columns when I was doing grad school research on the Civil War.  As my blogosphere colleagues like to point out, we bloggers are heavily dependent on the mainstream media.  Newspapers have got to figure out how to survive in current environment, but that will take imagination and genius.  The New York Times hasn't had either in a long time. 

Hsu Bomber

This is what I call entertainment.  From the New York Times:

Norman Hsu, the Democratic fund-raiser with a habit of fleeing the law, confessed to FBI agents last week that he had pressured investors in what he now admits were phony business deals to contribute to political campaigns, prosecutors said in an indictment that was unsealed today.

The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accused Mr. Hsu of bilking at least $60 million from hundreds of investors in a nationwide Ponzi scheme, and using some of that money to illegally reimburse at least two people who made a total of $60,000 in campaign donations at his request.

While the complaint did not specify which candidates received the illegal or coerced contributions, federal authorities confirmed that one of them was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her presidential campaign has said it intends to return $850,000 to more than 200 people whose donations were bundled by Mr. Hsu.

Now I should say at this point that I do not think Senator Clinton is likely to be implicated in any wrong doing, or that this scandal is the fault of her campaign.  It is the fault of campaign finance reform, which virtually guarantees employment for people with Mr. Hsu's unique set of skills. 

Is This The Beginning Of A Democrat Implosion?

Via Powerline:

The Senate has passed an amendment sponsored by Senator Cornyn that condemns the recent "General Betray-Us" ad by MoveOn.org. The vote was 72-25.

The amendment was to:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

The following Senators, all Democrats, voted against condemning such attacks on General Petraeus and our troops:

Akaka, Bingaman, Boxer, Brown, Byrd, Clinton, Dodd, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin, Inouye, Kennedy, Kerry, Lautenberg, Levin, Menendez, Murray, Reed, Reid, Rockefeller, Sanders, Schumer, Stabenow, Whitehouse, Wyden

Obama and Biden didn't vote.  Of those Democrats who did, a majority voted against Cornyn's amendment.   

Update: Badlands Blue, aka The Democrat Talking Points Site, asks why John Thune would vote against the Boxer Amendment.  Clearly the Boxer Amendment was designed to take attention off of the despicable MoveOn.org ad calling Gen. Petraeus, in essence, a traitor. I would have voted for both Amendments, but I certainly don't fault a Senator for preferring the language with greater clarity. Further, it seems to me that both Badlands Blue and Powerline deserve condemnation for keeping knowledge of the existence of alternative amendments away from their readers.

Update II: Perhaps it'd be useful to post the language of the Boxer Amendment:

To reaffirm strong support for all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces and to strongly condemn attacks on the honor, integrity, and patriotism of any individual who is serving or has served honorably in the United States Armed Forces, by any person or organization.

The objection seems to be, as I get from the comments at Captain's Quarters, that the Boxer Amendment, by casting its view into the past ("or has served honorably"), was trying to fight the "Swift Boat" battle over again.  This was directly referred to on the floor of the Senate by Democratic Whip Dick Durbin.  Of course the import of the amendment is that once one has served honorably in the military one becomes immune from criticism. By the logic of the amendment, at the height of Watergate one could not have questioned Richard Nixon's integrity, as he had served honorably in the U.S. Navy. 

Clearly this is a case of the parties playing politics with the troops. The Republicans want to specifically condemn the MoveOn.org ad and give explicit support to those currently serving in Iraq.  Democrats (or some of them), equate the actions of the Swift Boat Vets to those of MoveOn and will not single out MoveOn for condemnation.  I'll leave it to the reader to decide if the actions of the "Swifties" and MoveOn are actually equal.   
   

Nobility and Leadership Of A Free People

A re-reading Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided has proven thought provoking. Jaffa has much to teach about the conflict between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln and even more to teach us about politics in general. 

Take a look at how the Democrats are currently handling the war.  I don't just mean Iraq, although that is paramount, but the entire war on terrorism.  The Wall Street Journal takes them to task for their shameful treatment of Gen. Petraeus as he appeared before Congress last week.  The Journal lists a number of Democrats who questioned the general's intergrity and the almost total silence on the part of Democrats regarding the Moveon.Org ad that essentially called Gen. Petraeus a traitor.  The Journal concludes:

Can this really be the new standard of political rhetoric across the Democratic Party? There was a time when the party's institutional elites, such as the Times, would have pulled it back from reducing politics to all or nothing. They would have blown the whistle on such accusations. Now they are leading the charge.

Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

Richard Cohen, liberal in good standing, has particularly harsh words for Hillary Clinton.  If she desires to rise above political hack, if she aspires to statesmanship, she needs to denounce MoveOn, something she has been slow to do.  Cohen criticizes Clinton for trotting out "politics of personal destruction" only when she wants to claim victim status. 

The MoveOn.org ad was the moment for Clinton to rise above hackdom. It was a moment for her to insist that the business of politics, not to mention governing, is made even uglier and more difficult when people who merely differ with one another resort to insult. It was a moment for her to say that an Army general, under orders and attempting to fulfill a mission, should not be so casually trashed -- especially since she herself has been on the other side of the Iraq war issue and said things she must now regret. And it was a moment for her to trot out her favorite phrase and use it, not in her own defense for once but in defense of someone else. That moment is gone -- maybe because for Hillary Clinton it never arrived in the first place.

Two items from Jaffa are worth considering.  First is this:

Today it is almost inconceivable that we should be involved in a foreign war in which the President would be denounced as the aggressor and the foreign enemy referred to as the victim by leading members of the political opposition. 

Jaffa wrote this in the 1950s, before Vietnam.  I doubt he'd find such a thing "inconceivable" today as he must see it at every turn.  Of course Jaffa's point is that this is very nearly what Lincoln did regarding Lincoln's opposition to James Polk and the Mexican-American War.  And Lincoln paid a heavy political price, his vocal denunciations of Polk being one of a handful of reasons Lincoln's Whig party refused to run him for re-election to Congress.  But we can see some going beyond even this opposition.  I noted the other day that Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has actually traveled to enemy soil (Syria), denounced the American President on state-run (i.e., official government) television, and praised our enemy, a state sponsor of terrorism, as being more dedicated to peace than the American President.   The reaction from his party: silence. True, there has largely been silence from all quarters.  Where are the Republicans on this?  I will wait until the next Democratic debate.  We will see if anyone bothers to challenge Kucinich on this most disgusting of acts. I suppose one could say that Kucinich, as a fringe candidate, is not worth wasting time on.  But one could just as easily say that this makes it so much the easier politically to denounce him, as he represents so few actual votes. 

Another statement from Jaffa:

But a man who makes enemies and aliens of friends and fellow citizens corrupts the soul of the body politic.  To create strife where there was none, or where there need have been none, as a means to one's own fame, is to make honor the reward not of virtue or public benefit but of baseness and mischief-making.  If the order of talents of the man who does this is high, so much the more reprehensible this action.

It is claimed by some that "we oppose the war but support the troops."  An honorable position, to be sure.  Indeed one could say that was Lincoln's position during the Mexican War.  But then what if one questions the loyalty of the leading general?  Is he not a "troop"? What if Lincoln questioned the integrity not only of James Polk, but of, say, Winfield Scott?  Lincoln's political career would have been over.  But in stating that Gen. Petraeus is the willing tool of the Bush administration in spreading falsehoods about Iraq, isn't Hillary Clinton calling Gen. Petraeus a liar?  Isn't her silence in the wake of the MoveOn ad, run in a newspaper in her home state, deafening? Hillary Clinton wishes to be president, to be Gen. Petraeus's boss.  It speaks volumes that in the pursuit of high office she would trash anyone who gets in her way.  Hackdom, indeed. 

One last Jaffa, describing Lincoln's conception of political leadership:

That conception calls for mollifying, never antagonizing, the feelings of those whom he would lead.  So to do was for Lincoln more than an act of prudence, it partook of a moral imperative: for if the cause of free government was noble, then a necessary condition of leadership in such a government could not be ignoble.

A certain amount of demagoguery is inevitable in a democracy.  But throughout the coming campaign, let's look at who appeals to the best in us, mollifying rather than antagonizing our worst instincts.  That, more than what position candidates take on this or that issue, will indicate each one's capacity for high office.  So far things are not looking good for Mrs. Clinton.

God Save The Queen

Looks like Rudy has the London vote sewn up.  Not sure how many delegates this bags him. 

Permanent Disater Aid For Farmers

Some in the United States Senate, including John Thune, believe there should be a permanent disaster fund for farmers rather than dealing with each calamitous episode separately:

“Farmers need help when they suffer disasters, it's that simple,” Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said at a news conference surrounded by a half dozen of his Senate colleagues, including Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which is responsible for writing the 2007 Farm Bill. “We should not have to wait to piggy back onto some other national disaster that gets perhaps a little bit more prominence than we get,” said Baucus.

Congress now passes disaster aid for farmers on a case-by-case basis. Since 1998, Congress has approved 23 disaster assistance bills totaling more than $47 billion. But National Farmers Union president Tom Buis said it's unfair to make farmers face uncertainty over whether Congress will help them from year to year. He called lack of a permanent aid plan “the most serious flaw in the safety net of American agriculture.”
(snip)
Resistance: The idea of establishing a permanent disaster fund has met resistance from Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who has said he believes the money could be better spent on other programs like conservation and nutrition.

A House Seat for D.C.?

The District of Columbia has more people than  Wyoming, our emptiest state (over 500,000 each), so why shouldn't the former half a million have all the privileges of the latter?  As a political scientist and concerned citizen, I can think of no good reason.  As a Republican, I can think of a very good reason: D.C. would be solidly Democratic.  I suppose that the first two perspectives have authority over the third. 

The question is how to get those privileges for D.C.  The Senate narrowly failed to close debate on a bill (57 yes to 42 no) that would have given D.C. a vote in the House in exchange for another seat for heavily Republican Utah.  The Washington Post is miffed.

THE U.S. SENATE had a chance yesterday to make history. It chose instead to add another unconscionable chapter to that well-worn volume that could be titled "The Second-Class Status of the People of the District of Columbia." A few Republicans showed enough gumption to vote for principle and against party interest. Most Republicans, led by their leaders and egged on by President Bush -- who talks about democracy from Burma to Zimbabwe but not for his own neighbors -- did the reverse.

As for those Republicans who voted for "principle," well there is Orin Hatch, Senator from, you guessed it, Utah. 

In remarks before the vote, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) made an impassioned plea to his colleagues to, at the very least, engage in a real debate. "My gosh," he said, "when has the United States Senate been afraid to debate a constitutional issue as important as this one?"

Well, gosh darn it, those Republicans who voted against the bill may have been voting party interest, but they also happened to be supporting the Constitution.  Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they ain't out to get you, and just because you have a base motive doesn't mean you're wrong.  Here is the Constitution itself, which might be allowed to have a say.  From EPublius!, the work of your favorite political scientists, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 1:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

I hope you didn't miss the words "the people of the several states." The text of the Constitution is as unambiguous on this point as it is on the number of senate seats alloted to each state.  Only the people of a state can chose a member of the House of Representatives.  The bill was unconstitutional on its face, and the shame goes to those whose "principles" include contempt for the fundamental law.

If Congress wants D.C. to have a vote in the House, they should admit it to statehood.  If the Republicans were really shrewd, they would push for that.  Of course, the State of Columbia would give the Democrats two senators to go with their shiny new Congressperson, but it would also show the Republicans as the party that cares about the Constitution.  That might not do them ill right now.  It is perfectly clear that neither the Democrats nor the Washington Post give a rat's ass for the old piece of parchment. 

Webb's Bill Fails

The Democrats have tried on several occasions to pass measures intended to get us out of Iraq.  Their highest hopes rested on Jim Webb's proposal to mandate all troops spend at least as much time at home, training with their units, as deployed overseas.  However, this would have made it impossible to staff our current effort in Iraq, something the proposal fully intended.  Today, Webb's bill failed to achieve cloture in the Senate on a 56-44 vote.  The roll call is here.  Joe Lieberman was the only Democrat to vote against the bill.

UPDATE:  See this from the Washington Post:

Unable to garner enough Republican support, Senate Democratic leaders said yesterday that they are abandoning a bipartisan effort to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq by next spring.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said that Democrats had been willing to make the troop withdrawal a "goal" in order to attract GOP support, but it never materialized. Instead, Reid will again push for a firm deadline, this time June 2008, along with a stronger effort at cutting off war funding.

Reid won't be getting any more votes than what he's getting today, and the closer we get to Election Day, the less likely it will be that Republicans will side with the Democrats for fear of looking like flip-floppers.  Those Republicans who are holding firm on a pullout date have already declared so.  So, Reid moves on, and the antiwar movement gets the back seat.

Universal Health Scare

Hillary Clinton is again proposing a universal heath care system for the United States.  I am optimistic.  The last time she tried it, the result was no change in the health care system, and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.  Liberals who favor socialized medicine seem to think that it works well in the many developed nations where it is practiced.  John Stossel informs us as to how it really does work.

One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply. Governments deal with that by limiting what's available.

 

That's why the British National Health Service recently made the pathetic promise to reduce wait times for hospital care to four months.

            The wait to see dentists is so long that some Brits pull their own teeth. Dental tools: pliers and vodka.

            One hospital tried to save money by not changing bed sheets every day. British papers report that instead of washing them, nurses were encouraged to just turn them over.

Government rationing of health care in Canada is why when Karen Jepp was about to give birth to quadruplets last month, she was told that all the neonatal units she could go to in Canada were too crowded. She flew to Montana to have the babies.

            "People line up for care; some of them die. That's what happens," Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of The Cure, told "20/20". Gratzer thought the Canadian system was great until he started treating patients. "The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting. ... You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! You just have to wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! You just gotta wait six months."

Are We Civic Illiterates?

This report from Intercollegiate Studies Institute purports to show that American college seniors are illiterate when it comes to knowledge of our history and system of government.  On ISI's grading scale, no college does better than a D+, as no school averaged better than 70% correct.  You can take the test here.  I took the test and scored 58/60.  In order to avoid giving away answers to potential test takers, I'll just note that I got #22 wrong, but I am quite sure that my answer (B) is actually the best answer and the claimed correct answer is vague.  I also got #27 wrong, mostly because after reading the question multiple times I still have no idea how any of the answers relate to the question. 

Frankly, after taking the test, I conclude that 70% is a pretty good score for the typical college graduate.  I found many of the questions poorly written or dealing with matters of secondary importance to civic education.  I'd really like ISI to release what the average score was on each question.  If such a report reveals that college graduates are confused as to when Abraham Lincoln was president (question #11), we have something to worry about.  But I am less concerned if college seniors struggle with "What is a major effect of a purchase of bonds by the Federal Reserve?" (question #58).  Don't get me wrong, it's good to know the answer to that question, but it is hardly at the heart of being an educated citizen. 

I don't doubt that our colleges largely fail our students when it comes to educating them on the principles of free government.  But the "civics quiz" created by ISI seems to have been designed to get the desired result.

For other thoughts, see Joe Knippenberg.

Update: Hot dang, ISI does have question by question analysis.  OK, the fact that only 45% can correctly identify the sourse of "We hold these truths to be self-evident" is a bit worrying.  And the fact that so little knowledge is gained between freshman and senior year also speaks volumes about the poverty of "higher" education. 

Abourezk and Kucinich: Dangerous Fools

Radio Active Chief passes along a link to this video of former South Dakota Senator James Abourezk appearing on Hizbullah television granting support to terrorists and spouting, once again, standard anti-semitic cant.  For example, here is Abourezk calling terrorists who purposely target the innocent "resistance fighters" and blaming Israeli pressure for having them labeled terrorists:

Interviewer: "You also called Hizbullah and Hamas 'resistance fighters.'"

James Abourezk: "They are."

Interviewer: "While the U.S. administration brands them as 'terrorist organizations'..."

James Abourezk: "That was done at the request of Israel. That name was done at the request of Israel - that the United States calls them terrorist organizations."

We at SDP have followed Abourezk's repeated verbal support of terrorist organization and his repeated appeals to standard anti-semitic claims (e.g., there is a conspiracy of rich Jews who manipulate American foreign policy to the interest of Israel).  You can see previous reporting here and here and here. As noted in the last link, Abourezk has also appeared on Iranian state radio denouncing the United States government.

It is time for South Dakota to disown Jim Abourezk.  His repeated apologies for terrorist organizations like Hizbullah and his toying with anti-semitic language put him beyond the pale of decent political rhetoric.  This is now the second time, at least, Abourezk has denounced the American government and repeated anti-semitic fables on a media source of a known terrorist organization.  Note that Abourezk was present at Tim Johnson's recent "return home" event.  The whole South Dakota delegation, and then some, was present with Abourezk.  They should be ashamed to treat this man as someone who is welcome in polite political company. 

Hizbullah is funded by the terrorist states of Syria and Iran.  Democratic Presidential candidate and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich has also recently given an interview, this time to Syrian television, denouncing the American government and naively giving support to Bashar Assad's Syrian dictatorship as a potential partner in peace.  Kucinich's actions are beyond the pale.  He reveals himself as a fool and a useful idiot to the enemies of the United States.  He should be denounced by the members of his party if they want to be taken seriously regarding American foreign policy. 

At the risk of giving too much video for you to watch, go to Second Draft, which is a website dedicated to showing how doctored video of the death of Palestinian child Muhamed Al Durah in 2000 has become the iconography of an Islamic death cult that pervades the Middle East.  Various videos on the site show how Arab and French television showed an video edited in such a way as to suggest Israeli soldiers targeted this child and his father, killing the child as he cowered behind his father.  If you have seventeen minutes, go here and click on the first video, Icon of Hatred, to see how images have been used to incite the death cult.  Kucinich and Abourezk are fools who play into this mindset by giving more video for our enemies to use to stoke the fires of hatred against the United States.  That makes them not just fools, but dangerous ones at that. 

And the New Attorney General is . . .

Michael B. Mukasey looks to be a very good pick.  Here is Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post:

His selection would be an enormous relief to anyone who cares about the Justice Department and wants to see it recover from the multiple injuries sustained during Gonzales's tenure. He has the independence, stature, intellect and experience to help rehabilitate a battered agency.

In case this praise injures Mukasey's prospects, let me hasten to add: He's no lefty squish. He would not be attorney general in the Marcus administration. But if a Michael Mukasey had been attorney general for the past six years, not only would the Justice Department be in far better shape but the war on terrorism would probably be on a stronger and therefore more sustainable legal footing.

It's nice to see Ms. Marcus admit what is true of most of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary: what they want is a "lefty squish."  But she makes an even handed case.  Here is the National Review:

Questions have also arisen over some of Mukasey’s rulings in areas other than national security — for example, his denial of asylum to Chinese émigrés who had fled forced abortions. It will be important to study the judge’s record. It will be equally important to bear in mind that a conservative jurist is one who shows restraint — it being no more proper for the judiciary to impose a conservative policy than to impose a liberal one. Mukasey’s 1994 decision in a case called Dong v. Slattery appears to indicate appropriate deference to the asylum policies of the U.S., not an endorsement of China’s noxious one-child policy.

That is what conservatives are looking for, and NR seems to think they might find it in Mukasey.  Alberto Gonzales was a disaster.  It can't be a hard act to follow. 

The Governor's Hunt & Hysterical Bloggers

This story has some of my Keloland colleagues' beanie caps twirling.  From Terry Wooster at the Argus Leader:

Gov. Mike Rounds' administration may keep secret the list of people invited to an annual pheasant hunt, a unanimous South Dakota Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

It was a sort of Supreme Court, anyway:

All five Supreme Court justices took themselves off the case. No reason is necessary for such an action. Five circuit judges ... replaced the justices to hear and decide the case. Bastian wrote the decision.

May we infer that the five justices get to bag their quota of birds, from time to time?  This seems to be the basis of the decision:

The Argus Leader first took its case to Hughes County Circuit Court, seeking an order to force Hagen to open the list. Judge Max Gors, ... ruled for Hagen, saying the secretary has discretion not to release the list.  State law generally says if an officer or agency is required to keep a document, the document must be open to the public. Gors said no law specifically requires Hagen to keep the invitation list, so no law requires it to be available for public inspection.

Now I am in favor of open government as a rule, and the arguments offered for keeping the Governor's hunt list secret look weak.  On the other hand, there are many good reasons why the Governor should not be required to name everyone he meets with in his official capacity.  Sometimes people will only speak freely or at all if it is not generally known that they are meeting with you.  In this case it was the role of the courts to decide whether, in fact, South Dakota law requires that this list be turned over to the Argus Leader.  It was not their role to decide whether government in South Dakota ought to be more open or not.

Professor David Newquist doesn't seem to be aware of this distinction. 

[T]he Supreme Court keeps in effect the long tradition of feudalism in the state in which the serfs have no business knowing  what the privileged classes are contriving for them. It is the job of no one in South Dakota to see to it  that those idiot voters out there have a clue as to what transpires in the royal halls of the kingdom.

Now I am not sure what all this had to do with feudalism, a system "having as its basis the relation of lord to vassal with all land held in fee and as chief characteristics homage, the service of tenants under arms and in court, wardship, and forfeiture."  And if you are going to wax poetic, maybe you should aim at more precise poetry.  It's not the "royal halls" but the royal fields where the action is. 

If Professor Newquist's rhetoric is, as usual, full of hyperbole, Todd Epp goes hysterical. 

Fellow Democrat and KELOLAND blogger Dr. David Newquist rightly calls it feudalism.  However, I think it is more akin to the combined might of Nazi Germany statism and its corporate supporters like Krups during the 1930s and 40s.  Throw in a good dose of conservative "Christianity" for good measure and you have people in government and ties to that government who attempt to control the government, industry, and the social agenda of our state.  Basically, they want to try and control every aspect of our lives.

Good heavens, "the combined might of Nazi Germany statism"?  That must be some pheasant hunt!  Can you picture the brown shirts and swastikas, collared clergymen and Supreme Court judges, all out to bag a few ring necks?  Probably this crowd has to hunt at night, as some of them would burst into flame at the first rays of the morning sun. 

And while I am at it, how can the Rushmore State be both Feudal and Nazi, as the one is a decentralized social and political system, and the other a highly centralized totalitarian state?  I like and admire Governor Rounds, but does he have the genius to pull that off?   

A good case can be made that South Dakota's laws ought to be amended in the direction of open government.  If it is, I suspect that what we will find out about the Governor's pheasant hunt will be utterly boring.  It will bear no resemblance to the fevered imagination of our Keloland alarmists. And maybe calling people Nazis is more fun than a barrel of winged monkeys, but isn't always the best way to persuade reasonable people.   

Totten

Michael Totten:

Some in the United States are unconvinced that Al Qaeda was really at the center of the conflict in Anbar. So I asked Colonel John Charlton how the Army knows Al Qaeda is really who they have been dealing with. He was supremely annoyed by the question.

"We know it's Al Qaeda," he said. There is no controversy whatsoever about this in Iraq. My question seemed to him as if it had come from another planet. "They self-identify as Al Qaeda. We didn't give them that name. That's what they call themselves. We have their propaganda CDs which have Al Qaeda written all over them."

UPDATE:  In a related item, one of our goals in our counterinsurgency strategy is to get the local population to support reconstruction efforts and to feel that it has a stake in the success and future of the nation.  The United States may be taking a big step in fulfilling that goal:

American commanders in southern Iraq say Shiite sheiks are showing interest in joining forces with the U.S. military against extremists, in much the same way that Sunni clansmen in the western part of the country have worked with American forces against al-Qaida.

Sheik Majid Tahir al-Magsousi, the leader of the Migasees tribe here in Wasit province, acknowledged tribal leaders have discussed creating a brigade of young men trained by the Americans to bolster local security as well as help patrol the border with Iran.

He also said last week's assassination of Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who spearheaded the Sunni uprising against al-Qaida in Anbar province, only made the Shiite tribal leaders more resolute.

"The death of Sheik Abu Risha will not thwart us," he said. "What matters to us is Iraq and its safety."

We'll see what happens, but if the sheikhs keep their word, the effect will be enormously positive.

Giuliani Runs First Online Ad

Rudy Giuliani is going after Hillary Clinton in his first Internet ad:

Note that Giuliani's name never comes up during the ad, which I can't help but think is smart and effective.  Also, it seems as if Rudy is running like a general election candidate and going after the Democrats rather than his fellow Republicans.  That's also smart.

Rudy had a good week.  In Atlanta, he went after critics of the President and General David Petraeus.  He attacked MoveOn.org's advertisement in the New York Times asking "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" (in a side note, Red State has a spoof of the ad and wonders, "What if MoveOn.org existed 65 years ago?")  Giuliani blasted the Times for giving MoveOn.org a discount rate, and blasted Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for questioning Petraeus's credibility.  He upped the ante by asking the Times to sell him ad space at MoveOn's discount rate, which would allow him to run an ad of similar size in the paper praising Petraeus's efforts.  In a week that could've been rough for the former New York City mayor, with the media attention thrust upon Fred Thompson's official entry into the nomination, John McCain's resurgent campaign, and new polls showing both candidates gaining ground (PDF alert), things turned out well.  I would suggest the trifecta he aggressively went after -- Hillary Clinton, MoveOn.org, and the New York Times -- should serve as a boost in Rudy's standing among conservatives.

Diversity in Academia

The latest news from the world of academia is the dis-invitation to Lawrence Summers at UC Davis due to the protests of several faculty.  Summers, you might remember, was forced out as president of Harvard because he made some politically incorrect remarks attempting to explain the dearth of women in the hard sciences. 

The decision to dump Summers as the speaker at the dinner was abrupt. His name was on the dinner invitation that went out Aug. 31, along with other information about the three-day meeting at UC Davis, Davis said.

"The dinner is an informal, social occasion, with more of a conversation with the speaker than a formal talk," he added. Blum, who is the husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, made the original decision to invite Summers.

Susan Kennedy, chief of staff for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will replace Summers as speaker at the dinner.

While delighted that the regents have decided to replace Summers, [Maureen] Stanton [leader of the petition drive to disinvite Summers] now hopes the dispute will be quickly forgotten.

"Frankly, we'd like to see the story just die at this point," she said.

Citizens, especially parents of college age or soon-to-be college age children, should be aware that all to often this is what passes for diversity in academia.  Despite the constant hymns of praise to "diversity" by academics, a disturbing number of them are like Maureen Stanton, willing to organize and complain to shut down ideas that make them uncomfortable.  Asserting a desire for "diversity" they really are attempting to clear the marketplace of ideas of any idea that threatens the leftist orthodoxy on campus. 

If we really wanted to challenge the assumptions of the typical college student, what we'd do is immerse them in ancient and medieval thought, as nothing challenges modern assumptions like ancient Greek thought or the Thomist Scholastics.   Instead students educated in "diversity" often get nothing but warmed over modernism in the form of cultural Marxism.

Update: See Stanley Kurtz on Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.  Kurtz reproduces this quote from a reader of Bloom's book. 

I love this book because it was the first one that really ever humiliated me the first time I read it, and because it signaled to me just how little I actually knew — but not because I identified with it. I remember reading it and thinking how little I really knew about anything important discussed in the book. All I had to counter Bloom with was a collection of pop-culture platitudes.

And the truth is that I didn't know anything, and that was a good lesson to learn: because there are times in this life that you might have to "press the reset button" for yourself and return to Square One. If you ever have to do that, I can think of a lot of people much worse than Allan Bloom to help you out.

 

Sermon On Church State Relations

By the kind permission of our friend Mark Malcolm, I link to a sermon of Mark's on Romans 13: 1-7. Click on the following link (you will need Real Audio) Download 070610.ra .  The Reverend Malcolm is a minister in the Church of Scotland, and you get to hear what Mark calls his "authentic nasally Glasgow accent."  If you liked Pippen's accent in the Lord of the Rings movies, you'll love Mark's.  I add that Mark's permission to link to his sermon here by no means suggests he endorses anything on this site, certainly not Ken Blanchard's taste in music.  Here are the verses in question from Romans:

Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God.

 

Therefore, whoever resists authority opposes what God has appointed, and those who oppose it will bring judgment upon themselves.

 

For rulers are not a cause of fear to good conduct, but to evil. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good and you will receive approval from it,

 

for it is a servant of God for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer.

 

Therefore, it is necessary to be subject not only because of the wrath but also because of conscience.

 

This is why you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.

 

Pay to all their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, toll to whom toll is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.