ELSEWHERE

An absolutely amazing article here. A brilliant young black was refused a High School teaching job because he was too high an achiever. It was felt that he would set an "unrealistic" example for his students. Can you get a clearer message than that? Blacks are supposed to be dumb and not rise above their "station" in life and teachers of blacks are not expected to be very bright. The affirmative action era and the Jim Crow era have a lot in common!

An Australian Leftist leader who is more conservative than most conservatives? "A federal Labor government could ask courts to order parents to undergo parenting classes if they failed to adequately discipline their children, Opposition Leader Mark Latham said today. In his Australia Day address to a citizenship ceremony in his electoral base of Campbelltown, Mr Latham said a federal Labor government would support the introduction of 'parental responsibility' contracts and orders. Under the scheme, parents of troubled teenagers would be encouraged to sign voluntary contracts, obliging them to take stronger action and responsibility for their childrens' behaviour. The process would allow the local courts, when all else failed, to impose a 'parental responsibility order' on parents of children at risk." Latham is conservative in being business and free-market oriented too -- though some elements in his party are discontented over that one.

A nasty one for the Leftists: Poverty does NOT cause terrorism: "Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve of the Intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the economy got worse but as it got better."

Margaret Thatcher talks about religion and individual liberty. One excerpt: "Freedom is a moral quality. It comes from the Old Testament and the New. It's definitely a part of Judaism and Christianity. The talents that we have are God-given talents, therefore we have a right to use them. But, of course, you can only exercise that right under the rule of law of the state. But in the last analysis, each of us is accountable for the way in which we live our lives."

An oldie but goldie: There is a very feisty but anonymous collection of conservative attitudes here that make a lot more sense than most of the mealy-mouthed stuff we read in the media.

National Center for Public Policy Research has a good article here on pay equity for women. It points out that there already IS pay equity once everything is taken into account. See also their blog for further comment.

European Latino immigrants: A good email from a regular U.S. reader: "We are starting to see many more immigrants in the U.S. from the South of S. America. Most of them are white, which confounded a reporter in our local paper who went to interview one of these new immigrant families. She could not get over the fact that they were not little brown people! I informed her that there are millions of Europeans in S. America, and that Argentina, where this family that she interviewed came from, is 97% white. This reporter is typical of those on the Left who are always looking to talk to the downtrodden minorities, but she got a shocking lesson in population demographics, and the fact that things are not always as they seem after her visit with a poor, but well educated family of German descent!"

Not all immigrants are equal -- despite what the Leftists would like to think: Apparently the Indians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin who went to the UK are now one of the highest per capita income groups in the UK. They were entrepreneurial, with strong middle class ambitions and had received a traditional British-style education.

Rubbery Leftist "principles" again: "It goes without saying that the mantra of The New York Times Editorial Pages is 'All the Leftist Propaganda That's Fit to Print.' But sometimes the newspaper's transparent knee-jerk liberalism shocks even us. Take, for example, the Gray Lady's political hypocrisy when it comes to appointment of federal judges...." The Times previously said: "Clinton rightly moved to address _ the refusal by Congress to consider judicial nominees with reasonable dispatch." -- But Bush cannot do the same thing, apparently.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

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