Jun 14, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Foxnews.com:
TEHRAN, Iran -- Pro-clergy militants on motorcycles chased down protesters and beat them with clubs early Friday, the third night of anti-government demonstrations in Tehran, witnesses said. The student-led protests were aimed at Iran's hard-line clerics, who control the security forces and are locked in a power struggle with reformist President Mohammad Khatami....Meanwhile, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani (search) called on Iran's youth not to fall into what he described as an American trap by denouncing the country's political leadership. "I advise the youth, especially students ... that they should be careful not to fall into trap dug out by the Americans," Rafsanjani told worshippers at Friday prayers at Tehran University.
Writes David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand Institute:
Hundreds of Iranian students took to the streets last week to protest the dictatorial religious rule under which they live. They were calling for a separation between mosque and state, and in doing so were risking their lives.
These students could use all the help they can get in their fight against Iran's terrorist regime. But--for all their professed concern about human rights--the Western media and the Bush administration seem indifferent to the students' plight. If our president believes a militarily attack on Iran--the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism--is unwarranted at this point, he should at least give his full support to the students' cause. Such support would go a long way to show freedom-seeking Muslims worldwide, who suffer under secular or religious political oppression, that America stands with them in their struggle for freedom. Such support would also show our enemies that we are serious about defeating them.
A few words spoken by President Bush in support of the Iranian protestors would surely help bring down the regime--without the need of a war. So why isn't the president speaking out?
Related Reading: Iran, Not So Far Away [Hat Tip: Chip Joyce]
Jun 14, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes Ed Cline of the Ayn Rand Institute:Sam Waksal's criminal sentencing to seven years and a multi-million dollar fine, and Martha Stewart's status in judicial purgatory, indicted for "lying" about her innocence, demonstrates that America has turned 180 degrees away from its founding principles. The laws under which these two have been charged and persecuted are precisely the kinds of laws--general warrants and writs of assistance--that were debated and declared unconstitutional not only in many pre-Revolutionary colonial courts, but by Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, who was chief justice of Britain's Court of Common Pleas, in 1765!
When our own Constitution was being framed some 20 years later, general warrants, which allowed the government to arrest someone without specifying charges, and writs of assistance, which allowed government agents to search one's property on mere suspicion of violating a commercial or fiat law, and who were indemnified against any suits for damages, were not incorporated anywhere in the Constitution by the Founders, who abhorred them. These extralegal powers constituted one of the reasons Americans began a revolution!
Jun 14, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Yahoo News:PARIS - France and the United States are engaged in relationship of dialogue and trust, French President Jacques Chirac told business leaders from the French-American Business Council on Friday. Before dozens of major U.S. and French corporate heads, Chirac said Paris and Washington had a period of "discord about how to disarm Iraq the president's spokeswoman Catherine Colonna quoted Chirac as saying. The two countries spoke frankly to one another but will "continue to be faithful allies," Colonna quoted Chirac as saying. Relations between the two countries are strong and have been forged by history and "took root in the same values: respect for liberty, human dignity, justice and peace," Chirac said.
So that's what the French Revolution was about. And all this time I thought the French opposed the war because they wanted to Saddam to pay for all those arms they sold them, and to maintain their oil contracts with Saddam.
From Cox and Forkum:
Jun 13, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
The New York Sun, being a conservative paper, is bad on religion--maybe not as bad as Christian conservatives, but you'll get the occasional column from a rabbi giving the religious justification for war in Iraq, or an offhand comment in an editorial saying that the Jews' right to be in Israel derives from their religion.Monday's paper contained an unsigned editorial praising Hillary Clinton for saying that she has relied on prayer as her "primary source of help":
[T]he moment that struck us most --and that probably did the most to help Mrs. Clinton win over the independent, middle-American voters that she will need to get elected president in 2008--was when Ms. Walters asked Mrs. Clinton about her faith and how it helped her during her difficult times....
[I]t is an amazing thing to see a liberal icon such as Mrs. Clinton speak so publicly, and in such a positive way, about her religion.... Yet if Mrs. Clinton keeps challenging the liberal conventions on prayer and finds some other issues with which she can pleasantly surprise sensible, centrist voters, she may just make some inroads in 2008. [June 9, 2003, New York Sun]
and an even worse lead editorial defending providing public facilities for religious purposes:
On Friday,a three-judge panel of its judges held, two-to-one, that New York City cannot lock out the Bronx Household of Faith Church from public school facilities used by other groups because such an action would constitute "viewpoint discrimination." In doing so, the circuit court reversed its own decision of 1997, to conform with Supreme Court precedent from the intervening years....
There is a holdout, however, in Judge Roger Miner, who issued a dissent that smacked of hostility and defiance....
Judge Miner's churlishness, we suppose, is of little consequence given the outcome of the case. America sided with the Bronx Household of Faith in a brief filed by the Department of Justice.... Meanwhile, the people of the Bronx and the rest of New York have won a famous victory--one that will enable the religious persons among us to stand on a more equal footing with others in access to our public spaces. [June 9, 2003, New York Sun]
I had the following letter published Wednesday in response:
There is no relevant difference between forcing an individual to contribute more to a candidate than he would voluntarily offer, and forcing an individual to contribute more to a religion than he would voluntarily provide ["Faith of the Bronx," June 9]. Both are violations of free speech. That the coercion is accomplished through taxation, or that the money supports all positions equally, make the action no more voluntary.
There is no "viewpoint discrimination" here: The state has no business providing public facilities or tax money to promote any system of ideas--atheistic, religious, communist, capitalist, democratic, or fascist. Cognition never results from coercion. Law, and the police power of the state, are properly concerned only with people's actions, not with their ideas. [New York Sun]
Jun 13, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Looks like the Iraqi war came in very close to its budget:A short conflict that used fewer missiles, sparked fewer oil field fires and created fewer refugees than anticipated produced a lower-than-expected financial cost for the major combat in Iraq...
...A detailed account of expenses won't be complete for months, but senior administration officials say the cost of deployment and combat will be just less than the $62.6 billion Congress approved in March as emergency funding for Operation Iraqi Freedom. It is the first time officials have offered a tally. [USA Today, "Short conflict, less ammo kept war cost down", June 13, 2003]
Some other interesting points from the article:
The price for the combat phase is about $220 per American. The Persian Gulf War in 1991 cost $76 billion in today's dollars...
Planners budgeted $593 million to care for as many as 2 million refugees, a problem avoided when urban combat was less extensive than expected. The refugee count was less than 100,000...
...$200 million was earmarked for emergency food supplies for Iraqis, but no major shortages occurred. [USA Today]
Jun 12, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand Institute:President Bush's new plan to improve elementary and secondary education will fail for the same reason that all previous plans have failed: the way to improve education is not more government involvement but less--much less.
In fact, education in America will substantially improve only when the government's virtual monopoly on education is replaced by a free market, where bad schools go out of business, incompetent teachers are fired, and worthless curriculums are dumped.
As long as schools and teachers are not accountable to parents but to the government, students will be trapped in our current educational system, with little hope of getting the knowledge and thinking skills they need to succeed in life.
