Russia wants the United States and its European allies to provide convincing guarantees that a planned missile defence shield is not aimed against Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on Thursday.
…”We are open to serious negotiations (on the missile shield). If the United States and Poland are willing to guarantee that the European anti-missile base is not aimed at Russia, then we are ready to consider concrete proposals,” Lavrov told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily in an interview.
“But we should talk about guarantees, not of cosmetic political gestures,” he said.
Russia strongly opposes U.S. plans to establish an anti-missile shield in NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic, Moscow’s Soviet-era satellites, saying they upset the balance of power by undermining its own nuclear arsenal.
First of all, entirely defensive measures cannot be “aimed” at anyone. What Russia is really asking for is that, should they decide to start a nuclear war, we let their missiles pass by unmolested. This is a gross and deliberate perversion of the “balance of power” concept that Russia hopes to exploit to insure that it can continue to bully the caucuses. Defensive measures do upset the balance of power; they make aggression less likely.
Is there any doubt that the biggest collection of thieves can be found in government? There shouldn’t be. From Club For Growth:
I already wrote about 2007 legislation in Wisconsin that would have mandated that the value of unused gift cards go to the state treasury. Apparently, Wisconsin is not the only state interested in seizing private property. A number of states have proposed or adopted legislation that would require the value of an unused gift card to revert to the state.
In New Jersey, A.B. 2603, introduced this year, would require abandoned gift card balances to revert to the state. In Nevada, the governor signed A.B. 279 in 2007, requiring a certain portion of an unused gift certificate to revert to the state where the funds will be used for educational purposes. In Rhode Island, H.B. 5777 became law without the governor’s signature in 2005. The legislation allows the Division of Taxation to take funds paid for unredeemed gift certificates.
Statists do not like being forced to compete in the market place of ideas, and thus will always try to use government to silence their opponents.
At a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, I asked Pelosi if Pence failed to get the required signatures on a discharge petition to get his anti-Fairness Doctrine bill out of committee, would she permit the Pence measure to get a floor vote this year.
“No,” the Speaker replied, without hesitation. She added that “the interest in my caucus is the reverse” and that New York Democratic Rep. “Louise Slaughter has been active behind this [revival of the Fairness Doctrine] for a while now.”
Pelosi pointed out that, after it returns from its Fourth of July recess, the House will only meet for another three weeks in July and three weeks in the fall. There are a lot of bills it has to deal with before adjournment, she said, such as FISA and an energy bill.
“So I don’t see it [the Pence bill] coming to the floor,” Pelosi said.
“Do you personally support revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine?’” I asked.
“Yes,” the speaker replied, without hesitation.
I refuse to be a tool of statist doublethink by referring to this nonsense as the “Fairness Doctrine.” It is pure censorship. It seeks to make speech supported by the market unprofitable by encumbering it with speech the market rejects.
Rebounding from today’s failed effort to increase taxes on the “windfall profits” of U.S. oil companies, Senate Democrats quickly introduced a bill to tax “windfall campaign contributions”.
The move comes as Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama stands poised to raise $100 million in June, when just two months ago he raised only $31.3 million.
“Obama is taking advantage of the scarcity of Democrat presidential candidates to fatten his coffers,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV. “At a time when fuel and food prices are skyrocketing, Americans are rightly offended when a man can triple his earnings without working an extra hour.”
Following Senator Harkin’s baffling attempt at using McCain’s military service to disqualify him from the Presidency, I dispatched the following email:
Senator Harkin,
Your recent comments regarding Senator McCain’s military service, and the impact it has on his qualifications for the office of President of the United States, were disgraceful and unbecoming of your office. They reflect a tragically misguided and negative view of the men and women who serve in our armed forces.
According to your statements, you consider it “dangerous” that military personnel, having outlooks shaped by their service, might be elected President. This sentiment flies in the face of our nation’s history. To date, twenty-one Presidents have had combat experience, while many more served but saw no combat.
You further contended that volunteering for service, or coming from a family with a history of such, is a greater disqualification for office than having been drafted. I am having trouble apprehending the logic, and I use that term loosely, which leads you to conclude that volunteering to serve ones country suggests a character unfit for the Presidency. In my experience it is the career military personnel, and in particular those who come from a long line of such service, who exhibit the greatest willingness to place the welfare of others above their own. Perhaps to you and your party this is not a desirable characteristic; for the rest of us it is essential.
Your statements are all the more confusing when considered in the context of previous accusations. You once labeled the Vice President a coward for not serving in Vietnam, and then sanctimoniously declared that he and President Bush were “running scared because John Kerry has a war record and they don’t.”
Having a track record of distorting your own service, among numerous other things, for personal gain, it comes as no surprise to me that you would now contradict your previous positions and disparage fellow servicemen for partisan gain. If you had half as much honor as the average servicemen, you’d resign after disgracing yourself in such a manner. I’m not holding my breath.
In 2001, Democrats in the Legislature pounded Republican plans to start a private school voucher program for poor and predominantly minority kids. They said it was unconstitutional, a drain on public schools, even un-American. In the end, all but one Democrat voted against it.
Times have changed. This year, a bill to vastly expand the same program passed by large margins.
And this time, a third of the Democratic caucus was on board.
“I’m a strong advocate for public school education, and I’m not necessarily a strong advocate for vouchers,” said Rep. Bill Heller, D-St. Petersburg, one of four Tampa Bay-area Democrats to vote yes. But “the bottom line has to be the child. If good things are happening for the child, then you can justify it.”
But don’t you go thinking this means Democrats support freedom in education.
Most Democrats remain wary. Many continue to argue that vouchers hurt public schools —and that this year was the worst possible time for an expansion. Others fear poor and minority kids are being used as a Trojan horse for a more radical agenda: vouchers for all kids.
All students free to pursue a quality education? The horror!
While off making nice with Hamas, Jimmy Carter paid respects to dead terrorist Yasser Arafat by laying a wreath at his grave. The man Carter finds fit to mourn was directly tied to the assassination of two U.S. diplomats in the 70’s, and continued to obstruct peace efforts while encouraging terrorist activities against Israel throughout his political career. I have trouble imagining a more shameful and embarrassing former President than Jimmy Carter.
One of the themes we’re hearing about this year, ad nauseum, is the idea that the nation is presently besieged by extreme partisanship, and that little more than a timely dose of bipartisanship is needed to cure all our ills. This is pure hogwash.
The most alarming single danger to the American political system lies in the fact that an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties(under the sanction of such fatuous and unreasoned slogans as “national unity,” “middle-of-the-road,” “progressivism,” and “bipartisanship.”) Clever intriguers are reshaping both parties in the image of Babbitt, gone Social-Democrat. When and where this political issue arises, we are, without reservations, on the side of the traditional two-party system that fights its feuds in public and honestly; and we shall advocate the restoration of the two-party system at all costs.
Democracy is about choices. It functions best when people have real ones to make. If elected officials are just going to get together behind closed doors and pass out favors until a grand “compromise” is reached on every issue, why should we even bother with elections in the first place? If the people’s ideological preferences are irrelevant, let’s cut the charade and just appoint a permanent class of liberal experts (which is the objective behind this ‘bipartisanship’ claptrap).
It is important to remember that partisanship is not synonymous with dirty tricks or excessively negative campaigning, despite the conventional usage. That kind of partisanship, and “gotcha” game playing in Washington, is counterproductive. But partisanship as a whole is about having ideas and standing up for them. It’s about not betraying those who voted for you precisely because they believed in the views you campaigned on.
Americans are, as a matter of instinct, distrustful of government. Like Adam Smith said of business leaders who operate in the same industry, we know that when politicians of both parties get together it will inevitably end in a conspiracy against the public. We want our politicians competing against one another, not patting each other on the back. It helps keep them in line. We want to feel like it’s the will of the people that ultimately decides an issue and not what favor was promised to whom behind closed doors in Congress.
The Spanish Inquisition may be long gone, but a new intellectual and religious chill, exemplified by the attacks being lodged against Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine by a gaggle of Canadian “human rights commissions”, has descended upon Western civilization. In a paroxysm of multicultural self-flagellation, guilty white busy-bodies are tripping over themselves in a rush to bring Shari’a to Canada. This ongoing kangaroo proceeding, along with a similar inquisition launched against a publisher of the Muhammed cartoons, illustrates just how little the principles once magnanimously articulated by the West’s greatest classical liberal thinkers matter to those who worship at the alter of political correctness.
Following publication of Steyn’s book, America Alone, which warns against the rise of radical Islam and its infiltration of Western societies, a Canadian magazine ran an excerpt of one of the book’s chapters. In the article, entitled “The Future Belongs to Islam,” Steyn quotes a Muslim imam speaking about demographics:
“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”
Demonstrating their understanding that modern Western society, unlike liberal societies of old, places higher value on lawsuits and grievance-mongering than such quaint concepts as freedom of speech and press, four young Muslim law students, in conjunction with the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), ran to three separate “human rights commissions” and registered complaints against both Steyn and Macleans, the magazine that ran the article. Included in their litany of woe was a complaint that, no joke, Muslims were compared to mosquitoes. Never mind that the comparison under question came from a Muslim imam. Pointing this absurdity out, however, should not be taken as a legitimization of the idea that the ideas and thoughts of free citizens have to meet certain government standards. Rather, I point out the silliness of the merits of their complaint, as well as the fact that any such government mechanism exists in the first place, to highlight how far these groups will go to abuse our government to achieve their ends.
Another victim of the Canadian Inquisition has turned the tables on his inquisitors. Ezra Levant aroused the angry of the dhimmi’s by exercising his right to freedom of the press when he chose to publish the now-infamous Muhammed cartoons. In his opening statement, Mr. Levant lambastes the misnamed “human rights commission” for its role in subverting the rights recognized by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (watch the video below). The Charter clearly states:
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
The prosecution of Mark Steyn, Macleans, and Ezra Levant for what can only be described as thought-crime proves just how willing the multiculturalists are to toss aside the freedoms our societies were founded on, all in a misguided attempt to placate radical Islamists who take offense at any slight, real or imagined. We must not pretend that this can only happen in Canada. The ideological brethren of the Canadian “human rights commissions” are hard at work right here in America as well.
(More videos of the interrogation can be seen at Ezra Levant’s website)
A glass monument to revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara was shot up and destroyed less than two weeks after it was unveiled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government.
…Police said they had yet to identify those responsible. The Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional published a copy of what it said was a flier found by the monument signed by the previously unknown “Paramo Patriotic Front.”
“We don’t want any monument to Che, he isn’t an example for our children,” the flier read. It called Guevara a “cold-blooded killer” and said the government should raise a monument in Chavez’s hometown of Sabaneta, in the nearby lowland plains, if it wants to commemorate the Argentine-born revolutionary.
I serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.
I serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.