The fraud rate is not expected to fall until the Pope stops inviting Jesus over.
Over the past week, key U.S. allies have sent an unambiguous message to the Bush administration to give United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq time to complete their work, even if it means delaying the onset of hostilities.
The allied opposition to an early war with Iraq has strengthened the hand of moderates in the administration who have been arguing against setting a firm deadline for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to comply with demands for giving up his weapons of mass destruction, according to U.S. officials and allied diplomats. According to these sources, the odds of a February war appear to be receding, barring a major Iraqi misstep that would galvanize Western governments and public opinion.
"The odds have gone down for war," said a well-placed U.S. official. "We don't have a good war plan; the inspectors have unprecedented access to Iraq; we have just started giving them intelligence; we have to give them more time to see how this works. There is no reason to stop the process until it can't proceed any further."
The apparent relaxation in administration rhetoric contrasts with statements by President Bush late last year advocating a "zero tolerance" policy toward Hussein. After weeks of insisting that U.S. forces were poised to intervene in Iraq if Hussein failed to properly account for his weapons of mass destruction, administration spokesmen are now echoing their European counterparts, and saying the inspectors should be given time to do their work.
This is what happens when our President lacks the moral courage to act independently and instead relies on a coalition for approval. He has surrendered U.S. sovereignty and is now in the sorry position of begging for cooperation. Hopefully he will gain courage and go it alone. We will see.
The answer is that a country's government does not have to protect against ideologies, it only needs to protect against those who seek to violate individual rights. And that someone holds an anti-freedom ideology is not a violation of rights. As for the source of idelogies that are crippling America, it is the domestic anti-freedom ideologies (whether of the Chomsky's on the Left or the Buchanan's on the Right), and not the foreign anti-freedom ideologies, that are the problem. It is America's own intellectuals who are destroying it. The big problem is that when immigrants come to the U.S. they learn from Americans that America is evil, racist, imperialist, a robber-barron, etc. from 'European-Americans' (and their various non-European prodigies) in U.S. schools, the media, etc. The ideologies are here already and their source is domestic.
As for unproductive immigrants being attracted to the welfare state, perhaps that is a good reason to dismantle a system that rewards moochers and parasites. After all, a parasite is a parasite, and it is irrelevant to your pocket-book whether that parasite who is imported or home grown. After all if someone murders your mother does it make you feel any better that the murderer was from your own home town? The corollarly of this principle is that a producer is a producer, and whether that producer is an immigrant or a citizen is irrelevant to the fact that you are able to obtain values by trading with them. A productive individual is always a benefit to the economy they are in. The key to the immigration problem is not to look at individuals as members of a collective, but to judge them as individuals, i.e., by their virtues--productivity, honesty, rationality, pride, etc. On such a standard you want to attract as many freedom-loving immigrants into America as possible, while creating an environment that does not reward moochers or looters thus enticing them to leave. The best way to do that is to shut down the welfare state, i.e., laissez-faire capitalism.
Venezuela is beginning to sound like something out of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged -- where the middle class and professionals literally walk off their jobs. Banks have started to join the 40-day-old strike paralyzing the country. Yet things are still at a stalemate with President Hugo Chavez's opposition demanding that he resign or at least hold a referendum on the continuation of his administration.
Rand's novel has workers and management refusing to work at jobs requiring more than manual labor skills because they know any wealth they create will be looted from them by an oppressive government. As Rand once wrote: "The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave." [...]
Repeat after me: No one has a right to anything just because he happens to need it.One in six families seeking housing in the city's strained homeless shelter system is a recent arrival from out of town, out of state, or even out of the country, records show....
New York City is uniquely generous in offering a "right to shelter" to all comers....
The "right to shelter," established in a series of court rulings and consent decrees in the early 1980s, means that if a family has been in the city for a day, New York is obliged to find them a place to sleep by midnight of the night that they arrive in the Bronx intake center....
"The word must be getting out about New York City's unique housing policy: you come here, and the taxpayers will pay for you to have an apartment by midnight tonight or pay you $150 a day in fines," said George McDonald, president of the Doe Fund....
"I would never commit British troops to a war I thought was wrong or unnecessary. But the price of influence is that we do not leave the US to face the tricky issues alone.
"By tricky, I mean the ones which people wish weren't there, don't want to deal with and, if I can put it a little pejoratively, know the US should confront, but want the luxury of criticising them for it....
"I am not surprised by anti-Americanism, but it is a foolish indulgence... For all their faults--and all nations have them--the US is a force for good."