Bruce Bartlett examines just how much worse current legislation on health insurance and taxes is because of Republicans' refusal to engage the process at all.
Why Decapitating The Green Movement Won’t Help
Martin Fletcher explains:
Iranians are doing these things not because they are told to, but because they choose to. For a reviled regime that rules by diktat, that has to bus in supporters to fill its rallies, that must be a difficult concept to grasp.
Protests are now common not just in Tehran, but in conservative cities such as Mashad and Qom. The regime’s use of violence during the holy month of Muharram, its lack of respect for Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri after his recent death, and other sacriligious acts have eroded its support among the pious poor.
One activist said: “Do Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and the elite of the Revolutionary Guards really think that I, or anyone else, after being beaten by the police, witnessing the murder of Iranians on the streets, hearing stories of rape and murder in the prisons, and knowing of electoral cheating, will ever remain passive and quiet? None of us will ever accept the rule of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei after what they have done.”
Tis The Season For List Making
The View From Your Window
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 6 am
Cars Or Terrorists?
A reader writes:
I think Maher's point about how we aren't declaring war on cars in order to stop automobile deaths is an excellent one (and one I've been making for years now).
In 2008 there were 34,017 deaths (and nearly 100,000 major injuries) related to automobile accidents in the United States. Terrorists would have to blow up 113 Boeing 777-200s each year in order to kill that many people! That is, they'd have to blow up all but six of the 777-200's (which hold 301 people in a 3-tier international setup) currently owned by American Airlines, United Airlines and Continental Airlines (together they own 119 777-200s) and would have to do so every single year, which is probably faster than they can be built.
And yet there is hardly any talk of defending the American people from their Buick!
Shelby Steele’s Economic Arguments
Here they come:
Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?
This by way of saying that Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke know nothing about economics.
Posts Of The Year: It’s So Personal: A Round-Up, June 5, 2009
(Perhaps the best posts this year were penned by readers, and the most illuminating, gripping and emotional posts were related to late-term abortion, in the wake of the assassination of the abortion doctor George Tiller. I've never seen the power of this medium so clearly and up-close: one personal account caused a stream of others. How could old-school reporting have found all these women? How could any third-person account compete with the rawness and honesty and pain of these testimonials?
It was a revelation to me about what this medium could do. Like the Iranian revolution that followed this post, it made 2009 a very special year for this blog. – Andrew)
Many readers have asked us to compile the various late term abortion testimonials we published this week (which are only a fraction of the ones we've received). Here they are, in chronological order:
It's So Personal
It's So Personal, Ctd
The Catholic Mother
The Trauma
A Doctor's View (reader reaction)
A Target Of Terror
The Regret
Not Knowing For Sure
When Principle Meets Reality
Serial Abortions (reader reaction)
Preparing For The Worst
An Unforgiving Family (reader reaction)
The Guilt
Holding On
The Gay Fathers
What Guilt?
Ectopic "Miscarriage"
Still more to come. (And maybe a bound collection? We're actively thinking of it, prompted by many reader requests. But this should be a useful link for now.)
A War Crime In Afghanistan?
That's what Karzai is claiming:
“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took 10 people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” said a statement from the president’s office.
Mr. Karzai, the statement added, “was deeply grieved at the loss of civilians and assured the mourning families of his every effort for a serious and thorough investigation and said perpetrators would be legally dealt with.”
(Photo: Afghan demonstrators hold banners and placards while shouting anti US slogans during a protest rally in Kabul on December 30, 2009, against the alleged killing of 10 people including eight children in the easten province of Kunar. Afghan government investigators on December 30, have accused foreign troops of dragging 10 people, including eight children, from their homes and shooting them dead. Anti-US protests erupted in at least two cities over the alleged killings as President Hamid Karzai's office published its report, likely to inflame tensions between the Afghan government and its Western military backers. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images).
Ah, Conservatism
Just when you think it cannot get battier, National Review chooses this moment in time to defend the Crusades. Of course, murdering Muslims is fine and dandy, but, er …:
Of course there were attacks on several Jewish communities along the Rhine associated with the First Crusade. However, these were not committed by one of the main groups, but by several bands of German stragglers. It is significant that local bishops risked their lives to defend the Jews. These incidents are covered fully in God’s Battalions.
No, you cannot make this up. Then we get this classic archived gem from Derb:
If we are to have the Crusades thrown at us by the likes of Osama bin Laden, let us at least not abjure them.
It is true that we can barely recognize anything of ourselves in the Crusaders. They were coarse and unwashed. Most of them were illiterate. Of the physical world, they were ignorant beyond our imagining, believing the earth to be flat and the sky a crystal dome. Such medicine as they had was far more likely to kill than to heal — Richard Lionheart and Amalric, sixth king of Jerusalem, were both killed by the ministrations of their surgeons. Their honor was often truculent, their loyalty sometimes fickle, their piety was barnacled with the grossest kinds of superstition.
We turn in disgust from the spectacle of them wading through blood to the Holy Sepulchre of Christ, and wonder if we would not have found their enemies — the silk-clad viziers of Islam, or the suave, scented courtiers of Constantinople — more to our liking. Well, perhaps we would; but let us at least acknowledge that these rough soldiers carried with them to the East the germ-seeds of modern civil society. Palestine proved to be stony ground: but that is the East's loss, as the eventual flowering of those seeds elsewhere was all of humanity's immeasurable gain. In spirit and in values, though at an immense distance, the Crusaders were our kin. While not forgetting their many transgressions, we should weep for what they lost and remember with pride their few astonishing victories. Ville gagnée!
Marriage Equality In Argentina
Rex Wockner has the details.
The Dish 