This should be a humdinger, SecDef Gates to the Notre Dame grads. (Kidding. I love bureaucrats, just hate to listen to them.)
What, no peerless leader?
Tag: Politics
Red State magic
A little publicity is a dangerous thing, as Erick Erickson explains:
Late yesterday RedState broke a significant story, found in this morning’s Morning Briefing, which points to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nations premier public health organization, making a conscious decision to stop publishing the only federal report on abortion.
To briefly recap, for 40 years the CDC has published the Abortion Surveillance Report. For 40 years that report has appeared in the last November or first December issue of CDCs journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Report Weekly Report. This year it didnt. A RedState tradition has been to use this report for our annual retrospective on abortion. When it didnt appear in November or December or in January we decided to ask why.
That inquiry and its response led to our article yesterday.
The internet is an amazing thing. After weeks of checking and phone calls and emails no report. Then one blog post at RedState later, and suddenly the CDC is falling over themselves to produce something. Funny how that works. Two hours and six minutes after the post went live we had an official response from CDC.
What did Jefferson say, embedded in concrete at the entrance to the Chi Trib Tower on Boul Mich, about the relative importance of free government and a free press? (Help me here, someone.) Believe it, people.
Erickson:
According to the CDC we should move along because there is nothing to see here. Really? Were not so sure. It’s never the action, it’s the cover up.
They would prefer that, would they not?
says Erick E., who is editor at RedState.com
Danny Davis in Oak Park
Rep. Davis last April at Village Hall. Held off until he ran for county board president (he didn’t) and then until he ran for mayor (he’s not doing that), presented now to voters in the Illinois 7th as maybe something to keep in mind when redistricting comes around . . .
Presenting Danny Davis, once gearing up to be future mayor of Chicago but for several weeks now not, as he presented himself last spring, when he was running for Congress and in process of winning 80% of the vote on Chicago’s West Side and several western suburbs.
He is his regular folksy self, tossing off more or less relevant observations in answer to questions, leaving connections sometime to the listener’s imagination. . . . .
Read the rest of it here, at Blithe Spirit for longer items . . . (Scroll down a bit)
Tough guy will out
Crain’s Chicago Business likes Rahm, arguing persuasively. For openers:
What Chicago needs most from its first new mayor in 22 years is a clean break with the past.
While all the top contenders to succeed Richard M. Daley are political insiders of one sort or another, Rahm Emanuel is the most independent. He’s a product of Democratic politics but not of the City Hall machine.
Etc., including his being a mean s.o.b. (not quoting Crain’s) who will have to deal with others of his ilk. The public employees’ unions, for instance.
Meanwhile, Gery Chico unfortunately continues to pile up endorsements from those very unions, which is not a good sign.
Fighting Irish give up
From the Sycamore Trust, “an alarming recent study”:
[M]any students become pro-choice at Notre Dame. By the time they graduate, there are as many pro-choice students (42%) as in the general population. Among the reasons may be mixed signals from the faculty.
Though the University declared itself pro-life in the wake of the Obama episode, there is reason to think that a large proportion of the faculty is pro-choice, and prominent members of the Theology faculty have been outspoken in their dissent from Church teaching on abortion.
Indeed, the nation’s leading “Catholic” pro-choice advocate has welcomed the recent public dissent from Church teaching by one of Notre Dame’s most widely known ethicists.
Give Notre Dame a pro-lifer, get back a pro-choicer. Read about it here.
Don’t just stand there, buy something
The Florida judge who just shot down Obamacare, on the requirement to buy insurance:
If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain, Judge Vinson wrote.
It’s a you-buy-this-or-else proposition, a no-go.
Now if it were being ordered to buy a good dictionary, I could be more open-minded. On second thought, not even for such an important item as that.
The justice is a lady, so what?
Ouch and double ouch here, as Mrs. Burke plays the woman card:
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke today rejected the notion that she should recuse herself from deciding on the residency case involving mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel.
“Aren’t we beyond that? Women have minds of their own. We have spouses in every kind of business. Are we returning to the days of Myra Bradwell?” she said, referring to the Illinois suffragette who was initially denied the right to practice law because she was a woman. She went on to become the state’s first female lawyer.
She’s saying the husband would not be similarly advised if roles were reversed?
Hang down your head, Mike Madigan
Jimmy John is out of here, and his company will apparently be not far behind.
Goodbye, Champaign. Hello, Somewhere-in-Indiana?
Somehow I blame Democrats. And you?
They were trying to help
This seven-plus-minute film is a fable about what goes wrong when society goes wild. It’s a 1937 E.B. White story illustrated a la Popeye etc. (H/T Instapundit)
Two colors of tyranny
Reference to Yves Simon by Eugene Kennedy led me to this:
Communism and national socialism have come to resemble each other in so many respects that their historical diversity and their lasting opposition arouse wonder. In spite of common features that are profound and increasingly obvious, they prove altogether repugnant to effecting any kind of merger.
The task of fighting them would be greatly eased if followers, actual and potential, were led to believe that one system, i.e., the one which appeals to them, is substantially identical with the other, i.e., the one which they hate; but such identification never was very successful as a polemical instrument.
Conservatives in the 1930’s were given a fair chance to understand that naziism was but brown bolshevism;{1} yet many of them helped the Nazis. Today it seems that it should be easy for all concerned to recognize in communism the very features that they hated most in naziism; but not all do.
It’s from Simon’s Philosophy Of Democratic Government (Amazon). You can read it online here.
The Kennedy reference is to his and his wife Sara Charles’s 1997 book, Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America, which I have even now waiting for me at the OP library.
As for the two-colors business, I wrote about liberalism as fascism for the Wed. Journal of OP&RF late in the ’08 campaign. This horrified leftist Oak Parkers, fascism being a word the left reserves for its enemies.
I argued that excessive governmental power (authority) was common to fascism and, for that matter, socialism. Will have to stay with Y. Simon et al. to see to what extent they back me up. As Bob McClory says in his comment below, with “perhaps even enlightenment” for me.
Blithe Spirit 