ELSEWHERE

Jeff Jacoby has a good perspective on the infantile nature of Islam: "The *real* desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom.""

Amid economic decline, antisemitism and anti-capitalism is again rampant in Germany: "Franz Muentefering, the chairman of Mr Schr”der's Social Democratic Party (SPD), has managed to combine the three big As in a single campaign for the forthcoming state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's largest state. He compared foreign financial investors to 'locusts' - the kind of language that the Nazis used to describe Jews. This was no slip of the tongue. He repeated it. Even worse, he drew up a list, the 'locust list', of financiers of mostly Jewish-American origin, whom he accused of making exorbitant profits by asset-stripping German companies. Publishing lists of Jewish names was a hallmark of Nazism.... After his first 'locusts' remark, an opinion poll suggested that two thirds of Germans agree with him in principle. The latest polls put his support at 80 per cent". Shades of the 1930s!

An amusing survey of what others think of the French: "Language, history, cooking and support for rival football teams still divide Europe. But when everything else fails, one glue binds the continent together: hatred of the French".

Freakonomics have a very strong defence of their claim that legalized abortion reduces crime. Since American crime is so heavily black and black females are very heavy users of abortion it makes a lot of sense. If abortion is ever re-restricted, allowing an exception for single mothers would make considerable sense.

Uzbekistan: "If the Bush administration has failed to denounce the massacre in Uzbekistan, it is not because Bush and his advisors are hypocrites, but because the Uzbek uprising has offered a profound challenge to the administration's policy of bringing democracy to Muslim societies, such as Uzbekistan. The Uzbek uprising was, from all appearances, a spontaneous and popular one, a genuine manifestation of the people's will. Yet the Uzbek uprising was sparked off by a people whose sympathies lie not with the United States, but with Islamic extremists and militants. The uprising itself, according to reports, began with an attack on a prison where 23 Muslim businessmen were being held for trial as terrorists -- an attack that ended not only in freeing the 23 Muslim businessmen, but everyone else who was being held in the same prison".

A good comment from Sowell: "It was perhaps appropriate that Dan Rather received the prestigious Peabody award in journalism at the same time when Newsweek magazine was finally backing away from its false story about Americans flushing the Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo prison.... Abraham Lincoln said that you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. The steady erosion of the audience that watches CBS, ABC, and NBC television news, and the declining circulation of the leading newspapers, all indicate that more and more people are unwilling to be fooled. The swift rise of talk radio, Fox News and the bloggers all reinforce the conclusion of a growing disillusionment with the mainstream media that once had a monopoly and abused it. A reader recently suggested this formula: Monopoly plus discretion minus accountability equals corruption. That kind of corruption can be found not only in the mainstream media but also in two of our most important institutions, the public schools and the federal courts. Both the schools and the courts flatter themselves that their job is to change society. So does much of the media. But what qualifies these people to be world-changers? They are usually poorly informed about science, uninformed about history and misinformed about economics."

I have just received rather a good email about the French "No" vote in the forthcoming EU constitutuional referendum. I have posted it here. Excerpt: "The constitutional text, which occupies no less than 474 pages of the Official Newspaper of the Union, contains numerous contradictions and ambiguities, and therefore it is no surprise that vast sectors of the French center and the right give weighty reasons to vote for the "No.".... In administrative and economic matters, the Constitution establishes a gigantic supranational bureaucracy with headquarters in Brussels, a species of neo-totalitarianism with powers to intervene in all economic life, with regulations without end, of which not even the famous French Camembert and "foie gras" will be saved. An omnipotent Leviathan, capable of suffocating with its regulations all free initiative, but at the same time useless for promoting authentic economic progress". Media comment here.

The enviers lose in Maryland: "Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. vetoed a bill yesterday that would have forced Wal-Mart to pay a mandatory amount of employee health insurance or potentially cancel plans for a distribution center with 1,000 jobs."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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