Another Candidate at Risk

Yesterday we talked of fears in some quarters for Barack Obama's safety. Here's another presidential candidate whose safety may be in jeopardy:

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, blamed by many Democrats for their loss of the White House in the 2000 election, said on Sunday he is launching another independent campaign for the White House.

Nader called Washington "corporate occupied territory" that turns the government against the interests of the people. "In that context, I have decided to run for president," he said.

If Nader pulls enough votes away from the Democratic candidate in one or two very closely contested states resulting in another Republican victory like 2000, the left will explode. This would be ironic since Nader would be their hero were he not a political cipher. As it is, he can only earn their hatred by costing them another election. If he does well enough in November to make a difference in the outcome he would be wise to add kevlar to his wardrobe.

RLC

William F. Buckley (1925-2008)

In November of 2005, on the occasion of William F. Buckley's 80th birthday, I wrote the post below as a way of honoring a man who was as influential in my life, especially during the decades of the 70s and 80s, as anyone I can think of. Bill Buckley passed away last night, and I think it appropriate to reprise what I wrote on his birthday:

Anyone who looks back on his life and seeks to identify the influences which led him to the place he presently finds himself will probably be able to point to a half dozen or so people, in addition to his parents, who exerted a strong push on his life in at least one of its aspects.

There are those who help shape one's character, one's ambitions, one's religious, philosophical, and political views, and so on. In my own life there have been several such men, some I knew personally and others whom I never formally met but whose influence I nevertheless soaked up through their written work like leaves soak up sunshine.

One example of the latter is William F. Buckley. When I was fresh out of college in 1969 I stumbled across Mr. Buckley's Firing Line television show. I was just beginning to develop an interest in political affairs, having somehow managed to scoot through college in the ideologically charged 60's with hardly a political thought in my head to show for it.

I was impressed with all the things about Buckley that impress everyone who watches him - his wit, his breadth of knowledge, his mastery of the language, his ability to articulate conservative ideas with an eloquence and charm that disarmed his opponents - but most of all I was impressed with his demeanor. He was never rude or overbearing. He never got nasty or raised his voice. His colloquies with his guests were always marked with courtesy, good humor, and unfailing graciousness (except in his famous debate with Gore Vidal). In those early years of my adulthood he was an exemplar of how political disagreements should be navigated and how discourse should be conducted.

Although I possessed none of his gifts, I subliminally decided that I wanted to be like him anyway, to the extent that I could. I read his books and National Review, the magazine he founded in the 1950s, and found myself wishing to learn all the things I should have learned in college but was too busy being a jock to trouble myself with. I regretted, having fallen under his sway, that I had squandered so many years and opportunities that could have been devoted to the cultivation of a fuller intellectual life.

Eventually, my interests evolved in various directions and followed channels not closely related to politics, but those other pursuits were always in some sense a product of the appetite he had stimulated in me for learning. He had given my appreciation for what Hannah Arendt calls "the life of the mind" a spark, a sturdy kick start, and I have always been grateful for the richness that that has added to my life.

I heard Bill Buckley give a lecture a few years back, and I wanted to tell him after his talk how much he has meant to me, but he was surrounded by adoring fans and besides, I thought, he probably hears stories similar to mine all the time anyway. I've regretted not taking the opportunity then, and I thought I'd write him and tell him what I wanted to tell him that night, but I somehow never got to it. I suppose I assumed that WFB has always been around and always will be. There'll be other opportunities.

Now I see that his 80th birthday is the 24th of this month, and I realize that if I don't do it soon it might never happen. That would be an omission I would deeply regret, so as Mr. Buckley approaches this milestone in his life I've resolved to contact him and tell him what he has meant in mine.

Happy birthday, Bill.

I did send him this post after I had written it, but I don't know if he ever saw it. I hope he did. The AP has an overview of the man and his accomplishments here.

We are deeply saddened at the loss of this great man, but heaven is rejoicing at their great gain.

UPDATE: See National Review Online for their farewell to Bill Buckley.

RLC

Government-Run Health Care

My friend Jason D. links us to this short video which should be required viewing for anyone who thinks that the health care proposals of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are a good idea:

This is an illustration of what happens when people turn enterprises like health care over to the government. We certainly need insurance reform and tort reform, but we don't need socialized medical care, not if we want to be able to get the care we need when we need it.

RLC

Dancer, Farmer, Bottle

Bilbo at Telic Thoughts has an interesting post on the nature of God's action in creation. Bilbo dislikes the idea that God intervenes at intervals throughout history to tinker with things. This seems to him to be inelegant and so he offers a couple of alternative analogies:

The idea of a God continuing to intervene in the universe in a nonsensical hodgepodge repels our sense of the way things should be. That is why in the past I offered an analogy that might help make aesthetic sense of God as designer: a duet. I proposed that we see it as a dance between God and Nature, where God is Fred Astaire, and Nature is Ginger Rogers. Most of the time, Ginger dances on her own two feet, and God merely leads her, invisible to the probing eyes of science. But just as occasionally Fred might pick up Ginger and twirl her around, so might God do the same with Nature, when designing organisms. It's an analogy that might help us make more aesthetic sense of what might be God's relationship with the universe.

But there may be another analogy that might make even more sense of God's action: the image of a farmer planting seeds. In this case, maybe only two or three seeds. The first seed would have been the universe itself, which we are told started out as a very small thing, much smaller than a mustard seed. Yet it has grown into a giant tree, that all the stars and planets can find shelter in. The second seed would be the first microorganisms planted on our planet, billions of years ago. If Mike Gene's hypothesis of front-loaded evolution turns out to be correct, this is all the direct design intervention that may have been necessary. And from this tiny seed grew the huge tree of life that we see around us today.

On the other hand, there may be ways to think of God's relationship with creation which illustrate a more continuous involvement of God in the world. Perhaps we can think of God as a vessel, a bottle, and the world as a liquid that gradually fills the bottle. As the liquid pours into the vessel it takes the shape the container imposes upon it. God, by virtue of His intimate contact with the creation, impresses upon the world the pattern of its development, or unfolding, continuously as the creation moves through time. The biological and physical "shape" or structure of the world, in other words, is a perpetual moment by moment expression of God's intention and immanence, not an episodic phenomenon or a once-and-done event. God, in this view, is the template upon which the world evolves.

RLC

Obama's Safety

The Associated Press, whether intentionally or not, perpetuates the notion that America is irredeemably racist by running an article publicizing the fear of some African Americans that Senator Obama's success has placed him in mortal jeopardy. Their concern is that a black man calling for "change" is going to be the target of an assassin's bullet just like Medgar Evans or Martin Luther King.

Perhaps the fear is legitimate, although we should note that we have to reach back forty years to find precedents. Even so, I don't recall similar articles expressing concern about George Bush's safety when he took on Islamic terrorism, nor was there a lot of concern about his father's safety despite his humiliation of Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the thwarted attempt on his life after he had left the presidency. Nor do we read of concerns for John McCain's safety even though he will undoubtedly continue, if elected, to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and target Muslim terrorists around the globe.

In our world, every president and presidential candidate has a bullseye on his chest, and for the AP to suggest that Obama's bullseye is bigger than others just because he's black is to accuse white America of a racism that is presumably, given their lack of concern about the safety of the Bushes and McCain, much more virulent, violent and dangerous than is Islamic terrorism.

Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings of the AP's article there may indeed be good reason to fear for Obama's safety. Consider the startling number of people associated with the Clintons who have came a cropper either by murder, "suicide", or mysterious accident. Of course, it may all be coincidence that the Clintons must spend half their waking hours attending viewings for acquaintances who have passed on prematurely, or maybe there's some kind of voodoo curse on the couple, but even so, if people are concerned about the Senator's safety they may try urging him to not ask Hillary to be his Veep. No sense tempting voodoo.

RLC

Prairie falcon

A western species of falcon, almost never found in the east, has turned up within an hour's drive of my home and thus made a trip to see it yesterday irresistable. The bird is a Prairie falcon, and it's been hanging around some fields and a quarry just north of Shippensburg, PA. The Prairie falcon is about the size of a crow and a much faster flier. There are more strikingly plumaged raptors than this one, but watching him in flight was quite a treat.

RLC

Vantage Point

Debbie Schlussel loves the new movie thriller Vantage Point:

Hollywood is finally giving us true terrorists who are unsympathetic. Hollywood is finally giving us good guys who are good and bad guys who are Islamic terrorists without an excuse or any redeeming value.

In "Vantage Point," out [last] Friday, the terrorists are Islamic, and they are evil, cold-blooded killers. Finally, Hollywood is giving us "truth-in-terrorism." And it's an exciting thriller.

Boy was I ever wrong about "Vantage Point." And boy am I glad I was. As readers will recall, I wrote on this site that the trailer for this movie made it look like this was, yet again, another movie in which Muslims were not actually the terrorists, but good and victimized people mistaken for terrorists--yet another movie in which the Westerners are the bad guys.

But it was the exact opposite. The President (William Hurt) and the U.S. Secret Service Agent (Dennis Quaid) who is the hero in this movie are, without reservation, the good guys. The terrorists are Muslim and they are the bad guys. There is nothing presented in this movie to justify the mass carnage they produce.

There's much more about the movie and its plot at the link. Schlussel criticizes it for taking too long to get going, but, like a roller coaster, once it climbs to the top the rest of the ride is an adrenalin rush. Here's the trailer:

Actually, this isn't the first good movie to treat terrorism in a realistic fashion. If you can't wait for Vantage Point try The Kingdom with Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, and Jason Bateman. It, too, is very good and very believable though it is R-rated so you might not want to sit down to it with the children.

But Schlussel's point is well-taken. So many movies and shows like 24 sacrifice credibility by adopting the politically correct but totally implausible story line that terrorists are disaffected Europeans, CIA renegades, or corporate megalomaniacs motivated by little more than revenge or greed. That may have worked in the 1970s when European terrorism was a serious problem, or in a movie about Ireland's "troubles", but the intelligent viewer simply loses interest in any movie today about global terrorism that features non-Muslims in the role of the terrorist.

It's as if we're being asked to ignore what everyone knows to be true and believe that the naked emperor is actually arrayed in fine raiment simply for the sake of not offending the very people who are trying to kill us. The Kingdom doesn't do this and neither, apparently, does Vantage Point.

RLC

Evolving Sex

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons and other species. Parthenogenesis occurs when an ovum produces offspring without benefit of male fertilization, making the offspring a genetic clone of the mother. In other words, it's a form of virgin birth.

Here's one passage of several from the article which caught my attention:

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Ah, so easy. Sexual reproduction is necessary to produce genetic diversity, diversity helps a species survive, therefore sexual reproduction evolved through the blind, purposeless processes of natural selection and genetic mutation. This is what some scientists and philosophers refer to as a wave of the wand explanation. It tells us why sexual reproduction evolved while glossing over the much more intractable question of how such a process evolved.

Think of all the changes that have to occur, most of them simultaneously, in order to produce two different sexes of the same species. The evolution of meiosis and the production of gametes in both males and females (before males and females ever evolved), the means of getting the gametes from the male to the female, the entire complex of reactions which occurs when a male gamete encounters the female ovum allowing the male's DNA to penetrate to the nucleus of the ovum, the synchronization of the two sets of chromosomes, the coordination of embryonic development and the entire panoply of anatomical structures and behaviors which need to evolve in order to facilitate the process, along with the physiological and biochemical adaptations which must also be in place. It's no wonder that evolutionary treatments of sex almost always focus on the advantage that sexual reproduction affords, they almost never address the problem of how sex evolved. The problems are staggeringly difficult.

Consider, too, how rare it is that mutations occur that are beneficial to an organism, much less simultaneous beneficial mutations occurring in the same populations of the proto-sexes. Each of these mutations had to confer a survival advantage even before sexual reproduction was possible. Moreover, since both plants and animals reproduce sexually we can assume that this ability evolved pretty early on in the evolutionary process, so it must have unfolded with comparative rapidity.

Well, maybe it all did happen, but the more one learns about the extremely complex series of events and the sheer number of adaptations that must have occured in order to produce fertilization in all sexual species the more skeptical one becomes that chance and nature could, with no conscious intention, produce such a breathtaking process.

The Darwinian, perhaps, can trace out a long, elaborate hypothetical scheme which results in the emergence of sexual reproduction among protists and conclude that, since it is logically possible that it could have happened that way, that therefore it's plausible that it did happen, and since it's plausible then it's probable that it indeed happened because, after all, here we are, and we're sexual creatures.

But logical possibility is hardly a sufficient condition for plausibility, much less probability. Whether evolution produced sexual reproduction, I don't know, but I am quite certain that if it did, it was not the blind, unguided evolution of the Darwinian materialists. Their story of the evolution of sex is a fairy tale of magic wands and pixie dust.

RLC

Global Swelling

The consensus among scientists today is that the earth's continents have drifted apart over the ages due to the spreading of the sea floor caused by the introduction into the crust of new rock from deep in the earth's mantle. This new rock, the theory goes, is exuded through crevices in the mid-ocean ridges and pushes the continents away from each other. The continents then slide under each other along contact faults in a process called subduction. This returns rock back to the mantle where it's melted.

There is a minority view, however, which holds that continental drift is not a result of sea-floor spreading and subduction but rather is caused by an expanding globe. According to this theory (see video) the earth is inflating like a balloon, and it's this expansion which pushes the tectonic plates(continents)apart. The earth's crust was originally a solid shell, the story goes, and over vast time the planet grew in size forcing the crust to fracture and spread. There are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory various hypotheses as to the causes of the expansion, but that it happened the narrator of the video, Neal Adams, is quite convinced:

Wait until the global warming people here about this. They'll be hurling themselves off of bridges.

HT: Jonah @ NRO

RLC

The Russian Bear Is Stirring

Recent statements and provocations by the Russian leadership and military suggest to some that Vladimir Putin wishes to initiate a new cold war with the United States by rebuilding Russia's military to a state of parity with American forces. Strategy Page thinks a rebuild of the Russian military is highly unlikely, however:

The government is making a lot of noise about rebuilding the armed forces, and another Cold War with the U.S., but this is all talk, to make the government appear like it's doing something. The military would need massive amounts of money (over $100 billion a year, for a decade or more) to restore any meaningful amount of military power. Nothing near that amount is forthcoming. The government is trying to get the population stirred up so there is less resistance to the purchase of many expensive warplanes and ships.

A lot of this is necessary because China is buying less and starting to offer their own stuff, often containing stolen Russian military technology, on the world market. China is threatening to offer its copy of the Su-27 (the J-11). Currently, half of Russian weapons export sales are Su-27s. The Chinese ignore Russian complaints about the stolen technology. To keep Russian weapons manufacturers in business, the Russian military has to buy more, to make up for the lost Chinese sales. Western firms are also going after the lucrative Indian arms market, which Russia has dominated for decades. Last year, Russia sold $7 billion worth of weapons overseas, and may have a hard time topping that this year.

In other words, the talk of a new military aggressiveness on the part of the Russians is all bluster. They haven't the resource base or the economic power to sustain the kind of program that would be necessary to catch up. The real problem they pose is that out of resentment toward western superiority they may provide assistance to those, like the Chinese and the Islamists who intend to,and can, hurt us.

RLC

Reforming Education

Sol Stern has an article in City Journal that should be read by everyone pursuing or contemplating a career in education or who cares about the issue of educating our children. Stern breaks education reformers into two camps, the incentivists who want to increase competition and rewards for success and the instructionists who believe that the best way to improve our schools is to impose rigorous curricula K-12.

Stern himself used to be an incentivist and acknowledges that they still dominate the reform movement, but he cites three reasons why he's moving away from it. First, alternatives to failing urban public schools are diminishing. Catholic schools, for example, are closing their doors. In Detroit only one Catholic school is still operating in the city. There's no place else for public school students to go even if they had vouchers and tax incentives to leave the schools they're in.

The second problem is that incentives like vouchers simply haven't won the allegiance of most voters and their proponents cannot compete in referenda into which the NEA can pump money and volunteers that choice advocates simply can't match.

The third reason he's reconsidering his position is Massachusetts:

...where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state's average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.

Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students' academic achievement."

In other words, those who have been advocating that schools teach what and how they did two generations ago are being vindicated in, of all places, Massachusetts. It remains now for courts and legislatures to wake up and facilitate the removal from middle and high schools those students whose behavior acts as a drag on the rest of the student population. Combine the academic rigor which our schools used to demand of our students along with the behavioral expectations that once prevailed in our schools and our educational crisis will be largely solved. And it won't cost a dime of taxpayer money.

Stern goes on to say that:

The Massachusetts miracle doesn't prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, children's lives are at stake.

Read the whole essay at the link. There's a lot of discussion on it at Tuesday's Corner blog at NRO.

RLC

Battling Cancer

Tony Snow, former press secretary to President Bush, talks about his battle with cancer. It's pretty inspirational:

He's an amazing guy.

RLC

Why Do People Believe?

According to a Fox News story Oxford University is going to spend $3.7 million to try to determine why it is that people believe in God. Is belief, the academics wonder, an evolutionary adaptation that conferred upon early man a survival advantage or is it something that we absorb from our environment:

Academics have been given a grant to try to find out whether belief in a deity is a matter of nature or nurture. They will not attempt to solve the question of whether God exists but they will examine evidence to try to prove whether belief in God conferred an evolutionary advantage to mankind.

They will also consider the possibility that faith developed as a by-product of other human characteristics, such as sociability.

I know it will sound presumptuous to suggest, but could it be that people believe in God because essentially there are only two options, belief or nihilism, and most people don't care much for nihilism. Now, it's true, I suppose, that the majority of people don't think this way, but it's really pretty hard to escape the conclusion that if God doesn't exist then life is a pointless exercise in futility and most people want to believe in something that makes their lives matter. Belief that there is a God, in other words, makes much more sense of our existential experience of the world than does belief that there is no God and most people intuitively recognize this even if they aren't able to articulate it.

I seek to defend this claim, by the way, in a paper that I've posted here. Maybe if the Oxford dons checked it out they could save themselves a considerable sum of money and use it instead to buy pints all around at the local pub.

RLC

That's a Problem

Even his supporters can't say what Senator Obama has actually done to qualify him for the presidency. Here's Texas state senator Kirk Watson being interviewed by Chris Matthews:

It matters not that Sen. Obama is all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. The ladies swoon at his campaign events, he inspires in the multitude "hope" of "change", and he promises, essentially, to convert a few loaves and fishes into food for everyone. What other qualifications does a president need?

Thanks to Jeff C. for the link.

RLC

Satellite Shootdown

Last night the U.S. Navy shot down an errant spy satellite about the size of a bus which threatened to dump toxic fuel in inhabited areas as it plummeted to earth. It also contained classified technology which the U.S. does not want to fall into the hands of people like the Chinese who have had difficulty obtaining American military technology secrets since the Clinton administration left office.

The shootdown is an impressive feat. The satellite and the kill vehicle collided at a combined speed of 22,000 mph about 130 miles above Earth's surface at 10:50 p.m. EST.

Hot Air has video.

No doubt this success has chagrined those around the world who would like to threaten us with nuclear missiles and also those here in the U.S. who have been for decades deriding the hope that we would one day be able to shoot down ICBMs with missiles. Hitting the satellite is not as difficult as hitting a missile but the fact that we were able to do it at all means we're well on the way to silencing those who say that ballistic missile defense is technologically out of reach.

RLC

Long Life

There's a lot of information in this NYT story, but the key graphs are these:

Living past 90, and living well, may be more than a matter of good genes and good luck. Five behaviors in elderly men are associated not only with living into extreme old age, a new study has found, but also with good health and independent functioning.

The behaviors are abstaining from smoking, weight management, blood pressure control, regular exercise and avoiding diabetes. The study reports that all are significantly correlated with healthy survival after 90.

While it is hardly astonishing that choices like not smoking are associated with longer life, it is significant that these behaviors in the early elderly years - all of them modifiable - so strongly predict survival into extreme old age.

Details can be found at the link. If only science could come up with an easy and painless way to do all of this.

RLC

Fourteen Challenges

This is strange. A BBC article lists fourteen challenges facing humanity in the next several decades, but omits the one challenge that must be met in order for any of the others to have a chance of being realized. Here are the fourteen:

• Make solar energy affordable
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Reverse engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Advance personalised learning
• Explore natural frontiers

Some of these don't strike me as particularly urgent (e.g. advancing personalized learning), but in any event, none of them will be possible at all unless the West neutralizes the menace posed by radical Islam. Islamic imperialism is the paramount threat to the Western world and it needs to be defeated in each of three domains: the military battlefield, cyberspace, and the realm of ideas. If this challenge is not met, and it doesn't seem as if we're even addressing the third domain, none of the others in the list is going to matter much.

It's curious that this paramount and crucial challenge would be omitted from consideration by the contributors to the BBC's list. Perhaps the reason is that were it included it would be seen as at least a partial affirmation of the worldview of George W. Bush and that would be unacceptable company for sophisticated people to place themselves in.

RLC

Religion of Peace

The Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, responsible for this cartoon was targeted for death by Danish Muslims.

Police have made five arrests in the case. No doubt Islamists around the world will be apoplectic that the Danish police prevented the execution of the infidel cartoonist.

These kinds of people know deep down that they cannot prevail in a contest of ideas so they resort to intimidation, fear, and terror to protect their religion. Maybe someday a light will go off in their head, and they'll realize that if their beliefs by themselves have no persuasive power then perhaps there's something terribly wrong with their beliefs.

Or maybe the light will never go off. After all, Muslims have been living like this since the 7th century, why should we think they'll change now?

RLC

No Pride

Hillary's campaign has been trying to make a mountain out of a molehill by accusing Obama of using words plagiarized from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick in his speeches. The charge, in my opinion, simply reveals the level of desperation of the Clinton campaign.

If they want to hit Obama for something legitimate, however, they could do well to chastise his wife Michelle for her fatuous remark yesterday that for the first time in her adult life she's proud of her country. It's hard to believe that any intelligent person not warped by left-wing bitterness could seriously make this remark, but it does tell us a lot about the Obamas and the left in general. Notice that when she utters this comment people applaud her. It's pretty depressing:

Obama
by krs601

Mrs. Obama has been an adult for almost thirty years. During that time the U.S. has brought an end to the cold war, catalyzed the fall of the Berlin wall, rescued Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from genocide, led the world in delivering aid to the victims of the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia two years ago (as well as many lesser disasters), worked persistently to maintain peace in Israel and Palestine, done more to help the world's poor in Africa than any nation in history, liberated 25 million Muslims from the terror of the Taliban in Afghanistan, undertaken to build Iraq into a modern nation and a haven from Islamic extremism, improved the lot of many of the poor in the Western hemisphere through free trade agreements with our southern neighbors, continued to provide more opportunity for African-Americans than any country in the world (Mrs. Obama has herself graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law school), and probably lots else that I can't think of at the moment.

Perhaps the Obamas don't take any pride in these national accomplishments, perhaps the only thing that makes them proud is that they have a shot at political power, but the rest of us surely can be proud of what this country has achieved, and we can show it by rejecting at the ballot box those like the Obamas who hold those accomplishments in contempt.

Here's some advice for the media: At the next opportunity somebody please ask Senator Obama if he feels as his wife does or if he disagrees with the implication of her remark that there's nothing about the America of the last twenty five years of which to be proud.

HT: Michelle Malkin

RLC

At Last

After 50 years of murderous, oppressive rule, 81 year-old Fidel Castro is finally relinquishing power in Cuba. His brother Raul, 76, is taking over, but he will probably not last more than a couple of years so maybe the long-suffering people of Cuba can finally catch a glimpse of shore after their long ordeal at sea.

During the course of his dictatorship Castro executed tens of thousands of political opponents and tortured and imprisoned thousands more. It's ironic that our "progressive" media have given him a pass on these crimes, but have been apoplectic over our imprisonment of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. There are thousands of prisoners in Cuba who would give anything to be transferred to that American facility, which they would doubtless regard as a tropical paradise compared to their current accomodations, but the plight of these wretched people is not something the liberal media troubles itself over. It makes one wonder about the sincerity of their concern for human rights.

To get an idea of what life has been like for political opponents of Castro read Jeff Jacoby's Boston Globe essay on Oscar Biscet or, if you have time, read Armando Valladares' horrifying account of his suffering in Castro's prisons in Against All Hope.

RLC