With the 2004 presidential campaign heating up, the permanent debate over how to improve a failing public education system comes to the forefront again. As usual, the proposed solution from both parties is to throw more money at the problem, says Dr. Andrew Bernstein, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.

Dr. Bernstein, a public school teacher, notes that concerned parents are trying to improve their children's education by sending them to private schools. But this forces them to pay twice for education—they're taxed to support government schools and they must still pay tuition to the private school. The solution to this unjust financial burden, Bernstein observes, was proposed thirty years ago by Ayn Rand: tax credits for private education.

Dr. Bernstein notes that though Ayn Rand properly opposed both government-controlled education and a confiscatory tax system, she proposed tax credits as one small step toward freeing and therefore improving education.
       
Such tax credits would require the government to reduce an individual's tax burden to the extent that he spends money on education (his children's or his own). Parents must still pay for education—but this gives them a choice: send their children to failing government schools and pay taxes in full—or pay tuition for a private school, with funds saved from their taxes.

Heavily-armed terrorists wearing masks descended on Middle School No. 1 shortly after 9 a.m. on the opening day of the new school year Wednesday. About a dozen people managed to escape by hiding in a boiler room, but hundreds of others were herded into the school gymnasium and some were placed at windows as human shields.[...] Casualty reports in the raid varied widely, but an official in the joint-command operation for the crisis said on condition of anonymity early Thursday that 16 people were killed — 12 inside the school, two who died in hospital and two others whose bodies still lay outside the school and could not be removed because of gunfire. Thirteen others were wounded.

However, an aide to North Ossetian President Lev Dzugayev said that seven were killed. He also gave the number of hostages at 354. The children were mostly under 14.[...]

From inside the school, the militants sent out a list of demands and threatened that if police intervened, they would kill 50 children for every hostage-taker killed and 20 children for every hostage-taker injured, Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region's Interior Ministry, was quoted as telling the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Around 9 am, an old truck pulled up and about 20 heavily armed terrorists dressed in black and wear black masks and 4 women with bomb belts came out. Children started to run. Those who were standing closest to the street were able to make it out. Terrorists starting pushing others towards the building, and throwing some children through windows (inside the building)(!!!). And elderly woman was shot, and a girl who looked like an 11th grader was shot in the back. She died on the spot. Kazik's sister is still a hostage.

A suspect in the bloody school siege that left more than 330 people dead, nearly half of them children, said Monday the hostage-takers were ordered to seize the school to "start a war across the Caucasus." [Emphasis added]

Rebels linked to the school hostage-taking seek independence from Russia and most want to make Chechnya (news - web sites) a sovereign Muslim nation.

[T]he particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities. [...] I wonder if, as they killed those schoolchildren, they chanted "Allahu Akbar!" -- as they did when they hacked the head of Nick Berg, and killed those 12 Nepalese workers, and blew up those Israeli diners in the Passover massacre.

The good news is that the carnage in Beslan was so shocking it prompted a brief appearance by that rare bird, the moderate Muslim. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, "The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!" "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. This is true. But, as with Nicolson's prettified prose in London, the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it? If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand.

President Lyndon Johnson and his administration had not wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam into a direct confrontation with China, as had happened in Korea. China had the atomic bomb, and Mao was in the midst of a totalitarian killing spree he called "The Cultural Revolution." So the Johnson Administration attempted to fight the Vietcong insurgents and the North Vietnamese Army only where they operated south of the DMZ--making a sanctuary of the North and of neighboring Cambodia and Laos. The Johnson Administration soon found that the scale of the limited war they had planned wasn't very limited after all. American forces fought in a heavily vegetated country of 60 million people against an enemy who dispersed its forces and tunneled to escape American firepower, did not observe any laws of war, and was supplied with a never-ending stream of Soviet and Chinese material....

...Americans fought and died, while their leaders carefully avoided actions that would end the enemy's capacity to continue the fight. American bodies were being shipped back to the United States at a rates approaching 600 per week. Nixon played out Johnson's no-win scenario, week after bloody week. Did John Kerry and the New Left's Vietnam Veterans Against the War choose to denounce, as the moral corruption of America's war effort, a defeated White House and a never-ending stream of body bags? No. They chose to denounce a package deal. From 1971 forward, resistance to Communist aggression was equated with the senseless sacrifice of American lives. This conformed to the New Left's idea that it was morally wrong to impose America's "colonial" designs for a capitalist world on "indigenous" peoples who actually wanted Communism, the true moral social system. And if it was wrong to oppose popular aspirations for Communism in the Third World, any such effort had to also be impractical, futile, doomed to failure...

...John Kerry was the public face of a movement that converted broad based, rational public support for ending what had become the purposeless loss of American life--into a campaign to undermine the defense of liberty against Communism throughout the world.

Kerry's record as a Vietnam War protester is not history; it is consistent with his record and policies in the more than three decades since. As commander-in-chief of the US in its war against militant Islam, President Kerry would exert himself fully against what he has always believed is the greatest evil threatening the world--a self-confident United States, triumphant in its freedom and prosperity, reaching out to aggressively engage and strike down its mortal enemies. [Kerry's Real Vietnam Record: Kerry Has Spread False Fears of American Military Assertiveness, TIA Daily]

[Hostage] Georges Malbrunot, who writes for the daily newspapers Le Figaro and Ouest-France, said, "I appeal to the French people and every Frenchman who appreciates the meaning of life to stage demonstrations demanding that the law banning the Islamic veil be revoked, because our lives are in danger and we might die any minute if this law, which I urge President Chirac to revoke, is not abrogated." [...] The law bans conspicuous religious symbols from public elementary and high schools. It is scheduled to go into effect when schools open on Thursday. [...]

... Iraq's prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said the kidnapping proved that France's position on Iraq -- presumably its opposition to the war and the absence of a troop presence -- offered no protection from terrorism.

"Neutrality doesn't exist, as the kidnapping of the French journalists has shown," Mr. Allawi said in an interview with several European and American newspapers. "The French are deluding themselves if they think they can remain outside of this. Today the extremists are targeting them, too."

That realization, that opposition to the American-led war in Iraq has not provided immunity from Iraq-related terrorism, appears to have sunk in here [in France] as well.

"Nobody is safe," said an editorial in Le Monde on Monday. "No diplomacy can claim to be any kind of Maginot line that would protect us better than our Spanish or Italian neighbors from the death wish that has been at work since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."

[I]n an audiotape broadcast by a Dubai-based television channel in February, Ayman Zawahiri, the No. 2 figure in the terrorist network Al Qaeda, condemned France for defending the freedom of nudity and depravity and fighting chastity and decency with the scarf ban, adding that such anti-Muslim acts by the West should be dealt with by tank shells and antiaircraft missiles.

The Europeans have long clung to the fantasy that certain specific "grievances" -- treatment of Israel and the Palestinians, US "Imperialism," and so on -- are the cause of terrorism. In reality, as French President Jacques Chirac is discovering, Islamic terrorists hate the West because of what we are -- and because we stand in the way of the global Islamic theocracy they long to impose.

On January 31, 1971, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) met in a Detroit hotel to document war crimes that they had participated in or witnessed during their combat tours in Vietnam. During the next three days, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians gave anguished, emotional testimony describing hundreds of atrocities against innocent civilians in South Vietnam, including rape, arson, torture, murder, and the shelling or napalming of entire villages. The witnesses stated that these acts were being committed casually and routinely, under orders, as a matter of policy. In April, the VVAW stormed Washington in a week-long protest. At the height of it, spokesman John Kerry went before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to accuse the United States military of committing massive numbers of war crimes in Vietnam. The appearance launched Kerry's political career. The charges he made shocked and sickened a nation, changed the course of a war and stained the reputation of the American military for decades. But the mass murder of civilians was never American policy in Vietnam. War crimes were the exception, not the rule. And the Winter Soldier tribunal itself -- which John Kerry had helped moderate -- turned out to be, in the words of historian Guenter Lewy, "packed with pretenders and liars." Massachusetts elected John Kerry to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Now he seeks the most powerful job in the world.

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. 

The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)? To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."

North Korea hurled invective at President Bush for a second day Tuesday, calling him a political idiot and human trash, and said six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions appeared doomed. A day earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman for the isolated communist state described Bush as a tyrannical imbecile who put Adolf Hitler in the shade and said Pyongyang could see no justification to negotiate with his administration.

HUME: We got something on our screen now that shows this was. Before the [first Swift Boat Veterans] ad we had 42 percent [of surveyed Independents] leaning toward voting for Kerry. After the ad, it came to 29 percent. KESSLER: That's correct.

HUME: And so you had a decline. Measurable decline, would you say, in support for Kerry?

KESSLER: Yes. The first Swift Boat ad definitely had an impact.

Some political advisers have suggested the Massachusetts senator waited too long to respond forcefully. If nothing else, the issue has thrown Kerry offstride during a between-conventions period when he had hoped to focus on the economy and other issues. Polls suggest that the Democrat's support has been slipping.

A CBS poll said independent voters were split on whether the allegations were believable, and noted a shift in veterans toward Bush.

A survey by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Public Policy Center said more than half of those surveyed had seen or knew about the ad, even though it ran only in a few markets.

The concern, according to these sources, is that Kerry has failed to effectively respond to attacks from Republicans and criticism of his military service in Vietnam, particular ads from a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

On Sunday, August 15, a 16-year-old girl in the town of Neka, northern Iran, was executed. Ateqeh Sahaleh was hanged in public on Simetry Street off Rah Ahan Street at the city center. The sentence was issued by the head of Neka's Justice Department and subsequently upheld by the mullahs' Supreme Court and carried out with the approval of Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Shahroudi. In her summary trial, the teenage victim did not have any lawyer and efforts by her family to recruit a lawyer was to no avail. Ateqeh personally defended herself. She told the religious judge, Haji Rezaii, that he should punish the main perpetrators of moral corruption not the victims. The judge personally pursued Ateqeh's death sentence, beyond all normal procedures and finally gained the approval of the Supreme Court. After her execution Rezai said her punishment was not execution but he had her executed for her "sharp tongue".

The animosity and anger of [local judge] Haji Reza was so strong that he personally put the rope around the girl's delicate neck and personally gave the signal to the crane operator, by raising his hand, to begin pulling the rope.

The shock of Atefeh's execution has gone far beyond this town. Even in a country that has the highest number of executions in the world and routinely executes minors, Iranians across the nation have been bewildered by accounts of the hanging of a 16-year-old girl. The fact that the religious judge himself put the rope around her neck and the letters of "congratulations" from the town's governor to the judge, commending him for his "firm approach" have only added to the torment and pain many say they have felt.

"Atefeh was not a well-behaved girl, that's for sure. But do you hang a girl for having sex with an unmarried man?" asked Fariba, a girl in Atefeh's neighborhood, who like many others did not want to be identified.

According to judicial records, by the time Atefeh was 16, she had been convicted five times of having sex with unmarried men. Each time she spent some time in jail and was given 100 lashes (Under Iran's law, punishment for having sex with a married man would have been far heavier.)

Atefeh's father is an unemployed drug addict whose whereabouts are not known. Her mother died when Atefeh was still a child and she was left in the care of her octogenarian grandparents, which meant no care at all.

"She was abused by a close relative," says Mina, one of the few girls in Neka who identify themselves as Atefeh's friends. "But she never dared even to talk about it to anyone. Tell your teachers? They'll call you a whore. Tell the police? They lock you up and rape you. Better keep your mouth shut."

Mina sobs as she recalls her friend's tormented life, but many of these horrendous experiences are everyday facts of life for girls being brought up under a rigid theocratic regime that has institutionalized misogyny in its laws and practices.

"She sometimes talked about what these ‘Islamic moral policemen' did to her while she was in jail. She still had nightmares about that. She said Behshahr Prison was the Hell itself." [August 31, 2004]

Within this site plan, the Yamasaki Twin Towers return, with several enhancements and modifications over the originals. The Twin Towers of the New Millennium would differ from their predecessors... [Hat Tip: J. Swanik]

Osama bin Laden gave the order to destroy the World Trade Center - but Gov. Pataki & Co. are paying for the funeral. New York's leaders refuse to heal our city's mutilated skyline. In Washington, the horror of 9/11 was met with resolve: The feds rebuilt the Pentagon within a year. In New York, horror was met by bureaucratic flaccidity.

...The governor has chosen architect Daniel Libeskind to erect a "Freedom" Tower that will be a half-hollowed monument to cowardice. The top floors of the Freedom Tower are designed for bin Laden. They'll be empty. The tower is to be built with just 70 occupied stories - 40 floors shy of each of the destroyed Twin Towers. Pataki wants to break ground on the Freedom Tower on the Fourth of July - but all the fireworks in the world won't mask the fact that the Freedom Tower is no World Trade Center.

It is shocking - almost inconceivable - that we haven't snatched back from our enemies what belongs to us. Americans always understood the Twin Towers. They were us: stark capitalism, power and beauty without explanation or apology.