ELSEWHERE

Maybe my being an Australian is responsible for my puzzlement but I CANNOT understand the uproar among conservatives (e.g. here) over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme court. She is not a famous legal brain but since when has the court been about the law at all? Were Thurgood Marshall or Ruth Bader Ginsburg appointed for anything but their rusted-on Leftism? Was the Grutter v. Bollinger decision a legal marvel or a defiance of the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment? Was Roe v. Wade anything to do with the constitution at all, considering that the constitution does not even mention the word abortion? SCOTUS has long been a political body rather than a legal one and GWB is appointing the most reliably conservative lawyer he knows. Conservatives should be applauding him for treating the court as the political joke it has long been and presumably always will be. Maybe my Australian bluntness prevents me from understanding the mythologies involved.

British government admits its welfare system is crazy: "Benefit cheats will face lie detector tests and have their shopping habits tracked under plans to tackle the massive abuse of a welfare system that David Blunkett last night conceded was "crackers". The Work and Pensions Secretary will unveil an anti-fraud strategy later this week which will include controversial measures such as cross-checking utility and credit card bills and voice recognition software to detect when callers are lying to government agencies. But as ministers prepared to tighten up the system, a damning report from a powerful Commons committee exposed how bureaucratic bungling and benefit fraudsters were costing taxpayers close to 3 billion pounds annually. Although the government's main focus is on tackling cheats, the report highlights how half the wastage is actually down to administrative errors. The new crackdown on incapacity benefits is being driven by Downing Street and Tony Blair is believed to have ordered ministers to slash benefits by as much as 40 pounds a week, as well as introducing American-style time limits for claims".

Think twice about buying at Target: "Target Corporation will continue to ban the Salvation Army from their 1,351 stores this Christmas season. The Army will not be allowed to place their red kettles in front of Target stores. Despite increased need caused by the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Target continues to bar the Salvation Army. Many observers feel that the ban by Target is a result of pressure put on the company by homosexual groups. Homosexual activists have targeted the Salvation Army for years because of the Army's refusal to recognize their lifestyle. Target is a supporter of various homosexual causes. While Target contributes to homosexual groups, the company publicly states that they will not contribute to any religious groups. For Target, homosexual organizations are worthy of financial support, Christian and Jewish organizations are not".

A good idea: "There's a simple solution to the North Korea problem: build a few nuclear power plants in SOUTH Korea - near ther border - and GIVE electricity to the NORTH Koreans FREE for as long as they need it; IN RETURN, the NORTH Koreans would have to abandon their own nuclear ambitions, and stop developing and selling ballistic missiles. The NORTH Koreans get a virtually unlimited supply of electricity - FREE, and the world gets safer as a result - AND: we can check the safety of the SOUTH Korean plants easily! BONUS: it makes the "two Koreas" more dependent and reduces the threat of war and instability.

A Leftist confronts reality: "I’d argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today’s world. Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed “left” in the London papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the cold war have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that “twilight conflict.” .... But theirs is also a truncated analysis. They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation. It misses the central point: that, unlike traditional “third-world” liberation movements looking for a bit of peace and quiet in which to nurture embryonic states, al-Qaida is classically imperialist, looking to subvert established social orders and to replace the cultural and institutional infrastructure of its enemies with a (divinely inspired) hierarchical autocracy of its own, looking to craft the next chapter of human history in its own image.... Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it".

There is a good comparison here of the Iraq campaign with various other events in recent history. The comparison of deaths in Iraq and deaths in Detroit is rather telling. See here for background on the John Glenn speech that is also included.

See here for a history of French fruitcake Foucault's love-affair with the Iranian revolution. (The Left's support for Islamists isn't new, any violent anti-Westerners will do!)

The latest Carnival of the Vanities is now up with the posts usefully categorized.

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

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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