Why are blacks more upbeat than whites about the U.S. economy?

Discussions of race in modern America often focus on gaps between blacks and whites -- the income gap, the education gap, the marriage gap, the incarceration gap. Recent polling suggests the emergence of a new gap: an optimism gap. One group is decidedly more upbeat about both the current state of the U.S. economy and the likelihood of future prosperity. But it’s not the group you might expect.

#ad#In May, the Pew Research Center conducted an exhaustive survey to gauge the impact of the Great Recession. That same month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate among blacks stood at 15.5 percent -- 17.1 percent among black men aged 20 and over -- while the rate among whites was 8.8 percent. Not surprisingly, a much larger proportion of blacks than whites told Pew that the economic slump had forced them to accept reduced work hours, to take unpaid leave, or to switch from full-time to part-time employment. (A technical note: All of the Pew data in this article refer to non-Hispanic blacks and whites; the BLS figures, by contrast, include blacks and whites of Hispanic ancestry.)

Blacks were also “more likely than whites to have had trouble getting or paying for medical care, borrowed money from a family member or friend, or had problems paying their rent or mortgage.” Thirty-five percent of black homeowners reported having an “underwater” mortgage (i.e., a mortgage whose outstanding debt is worth more than the present value of the house), compared with only 18 percent of white homeowners.

Given those disparities, one might reasonably have predicted that blacks would be more pessimistic than whites about America’s economic prospects. In fact, the opposite was true. Despite the yawning racial employment gap, blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to call U.S. economic conditions “excellent” or “good” (25 percent to 13 percent). They were also significantly less likely than whites to say that the American economy was still in recession (45 percent to 57 percent), and significantly more likely than whites to say that their personal financial situation would improve over the coming year (81 percent to 57 percent).

Even though the seasonally adjusted black unemployment rate climbed from 9 percent in December 2007, when the Great Recession began, to 15.5 percent in May 2010, roughly a third (32 percent) of blacks told Pew that their household finances were in better shape than they had been prior to the recession. Only 18 percent of whites gave that response. Between early 2008 and May 2010, the proportion of blacks identifying as members of the upper class increased from 15 percent to 20 percent. Meanwhile, the overall share of Americans in that category declined slightly, from 21 percent to 20 percent, and the segment identifying as members of the lower class swelled from 25 percent to 29 percent. “There are now no significant gaps between black and white Americans in terms of how they identify their social class,” Pew noted. Looking ahead, blacks were far more likely than whites (81 percent to 59 percent) to agree with the statement that “although there may be bad times every now and then, America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress.”

To a certain extent, the black-white optimism gap reflected a partisan divide, and vice versa, since blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to characterize U.S. economic conditions as “excellent” or “good” (17 percent to 11 percent), to say their financial situation would improve over the next year (70 percent to 55 percent), or to agree that America would always remain prosperous (75 percent to 57 percent). They were less likely than Republicans to describe the state of the economy as “poor” (30 percent to 48 percent), to say that the recession was ongoing (43 percent to 63 percent), or to say that it had caused “major” and “permanent” changes in the U.S. economy (12 percent to 22 percent).

The partisan gap was reinforced by Hispanics, who voiced greater economic optimism than whites, and also by younger adults, who were generally more positive than older adults. Both of these groups (Hispanics and younger adults) have experienced a particularly steep jump in unemployment since late 2007, but both are also Democratic-leaning constituencies. Indeed, while Republicans were more likely than Democrats to report losing value on their house, Democrats “have lower incomes and less wealth and have suffered more job losses during the recession.” Yet Democrats were more confident than Republicans about the recovery, and about the future of American affluence, “regardless of their income, education, [or] gender,” or other factors, such as ability to make mortgage, rent, or health-care payments.

How do we account for this?

#page#“One likely explanation,” Pew suggested, “is that in an age of highly polarized politics, Democrats and Republicans differ not only in their values, attitudes, and policy positions, but, increasingly, in their basic perceptions of reality.”

This phenomenon was apparent during the Bush years, when it was Republicans who were more bullish on the economy. In a 2004 Pew poll, only 12 percent of liberal Democrats characterized economic conditions as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 62 percent of conservative Republicans. In a 2006 poll, Republicans with household incomes below $50,000 were nearly three times as likely as Democrats in the same income group to say that economic conditions were “excellent” or “good” (48 percent to 17 percent). Similarly, 65 percent of Republicans with household incomes of $75,000 and above gave the economy an “excellent” or “good” rating, compared with only 31 percent of Democrats in that income group.

#ad#There’s no question that political affiliation now exerts a strong influence on how many Americans view the national economy. But partisanship alone cannot fully explain the current optimism of blacks. We must also consider the Obama Effect.

In a survey conducted last fall, Pew found that “blacks’ assessments about the state of black progress in America have improved more dramatically during the past two years than at any time in the past quarter century.” Between 2007 and 2009, the share of blacks saying that “the situation of black people in this country” had gotten better over the previous five years rose from 20 percent to 39 percent, and the proportion saying that life would be even better for blacks in the future increased from 44 percent to 53 percent. In addition, 56 percent of blacks said that the gap between black and white living standards had narrowed over the last decade, compared with 41 percent who said so in 2007. (This was especially striking because, according to a Pew analysis, the black-white median-household-income gap actually expanded by three percentage points between 2000 and 2008.)

“Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president appears to be the spur for this sharp rise in optimism among African Americans,” Pew concluded. The Obama Effect is also visible in Gallup’s Standard of Living Index, which measures (1) how Americans rate their standard of living and (2) whether they believe it is getting better or worse. Black scores in the index “continue to exceed those for whites,” Gallup reported in July, “a pattern that has persisted since early 2009.” Indeed, “blacks began to be more optimistic around the same time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as president.”

As November 2008 recedes further into history, and as Obama’s political troubles metastasize, it is easy to forget or underestimate the psychological impact that his election had on black Americans. The Obama Effect has helped fuel a remarkable spike in black confidence at a time of severe economic adversity. The official black-white unemployment gap is staggering -- it was 7 percentage points (15.6 percent to 8.6 percent), in seasonally adjusted terms, as of July -- but so is the black-white optimism gap. Whether (or how long) the latter gap will persist remains to be seen.

—  Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.

Duncan Currie

‘Tell me how this ends,” Gen. David Petraeus famously asked during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It’s still a question no one can answer, although the odds of a satisfactory outcome have vastly increased since 2006, when Iraq was spiraling downward into a hellish civil war.

For now, we have transformed Iraq from a hostile, terrorist-supporting dictatorship destabilizing the region into a ramshackle democracy that is an ally in the war on terror. To get Iraq to this point, in January 2007 President Bush had to order tens of thousands of additional troops into a failing war, in the teeth of gale-force opposition from the political establishment, public opinion, and the balance of the military brass. To capitalize on the opportunity we have bought in Iraq with blood and treasure, President Obama has to do something much easier: resist a strategically witless urge to turn his back on Iraq as being merely the site of “Bush’s war.”

The president’s Oval Office address wasn’t confidence-inducing. Appropriately, he saluted the troops for “completing every mission they were given in Iraq,” and he promised Iraqis they will “have a strong partner in the United States.” But he spoke particularly forcefully of removing 100,000 troops from Iraq, closing or transferring hundreds of bases, and moving millions of pieces of equipment out of the country — indices of ending a war, not necessarily winning it. He talked up the growing capabilities of the Iraqis, but in the spirit of declaring victory — or, more precisely, the end of combat operations — and coming home. He exhorted us to “turn the page,” before arguing that we must honor the troops by uniting around his domestic agenda.

#ad#In its failure to credit explicitly Bush’s surge for turning around the war, the speech was graceless; in its cursory treatment of Iraq, it lacked strategic vision; and in its attempt to hijack the troops for Obama’s domestic priorities (“we must tackle . . . challenges at home with as much energy and grit, and sense of common purpose, as our men and women in uniform”), it was shameless. Altogether a poor performance.

Iraq is important not only for the sake of the Iraqis and not only because its success could still, over the long term, provide a model for the region: Any strategy for containing Iran makes no sense unless a stable, U.S-allied Iraq is a bulwark against it. Ensuring that it is will take resources and, especially, U.S. troops. In preparing to pull out all troops by the end of next year, President Obama is adhering to the agreement that President Bush signed with the Iraqis. But there’s no reason that our troop presence eventually can’t be extended under another agreement, and it should be. President Obama praised the performance of Iraqi troops, but we don’t know yet how they will perform under continued assault with only 50,000 U.S. troops on the ground. A more substantial ongoing U.S. troop presence would give us additional leverage to promote the Iraqi army’s professionalism and guard against extra-constitutional adventurism on its part (not unknown in that part of the world).

For all of President Obama’s talk of “our dedicated civilians” stepping up to replace the U.S. military, there are limits to what they can do. Put aside the fact that so far the Obama administration’s diplomatic effort in Iraq has been passive and unimpressive, even as the Iraqis have deadlocked on the formation of a new government. It doesn’t matter how dedicated its civilians are, the State Department can’t patrol the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north the way the military can; it can’t train police the way the military can (as we learned from prior experience in Iraq and Afghanistan); and it can’t protect its own people the way the military can.

Forging a long-term strategic partnership with Iraq needn’t take exorbitant resources, or anything like what we’ve had to devote to the war to get it to this point. Absent a disastrous deterioration of conditions on the ground, we should over time be able to do it with less than we spend annually in aid to Pakistan ($1.5 billion), and with fewer troops than we keep in Germany (54,000) or Japan (36,000). There’s no need to stint on it for the sake of wind power, as President Obama vaguely implied last night.

If we still don’t know how the Iraq war is going to end, an engaged, strategically far-sighted commander-in-chief is essential.

The Editors

If the tea-party candidates are so extreme, why are they so popular?

At first glance, it seemed a silly headline even by the standards of MSNBC: “Can the GOP Survive a Tea Party Takeover?”

Of course, the story was yet another in the narrative that has been eagerly embraced by both the mainstream media and desperate Democrats: “Extreme” candidates who are associated with the tea-party movement are dooming Republicans to defeat this fall. If only the Republicans had nominated more moderate, “go along to get along” candidates, who supported tax increases and the health-care bill -- why, they might even manage a ten-point lead in the Gallup generic ballot.

In fact, Republicans do have a ten-point generic-ballot lead, the biggest GOP lead in the history of Gallup’s tracking poll.

#ad#Has anyone actually looked at those races featuring “tea-party candidates?” In Kentucky, Rand Paul has been the poster boy for tea-party Republicans. The media has wrung its hands and worried mightily about how his primary victory could cost Republicans a competitive Senate seat. However, the most recent Rasmussen poll shows Paul with a 9-point lead. With only two exceptions, he has led in every poll taken in the three months since his nomination. His opponent has not gotten above 42 percent in the polls all summer.

In Colorado, Ken Buck, another tea-party favorite, won the GOP Senate nomination, prompting more crocodile tears from the media. Despite the implosion of the Colorado Republican party, Buck is leading his opponent, incumbent Democratic senator Michael Bennett, by four to nine points and is pushing 50 percent in recent polls. The defeat of incumbent Utah senator Bob Bennett was met with wailing and the gnashing of teeth among D.C. pundits. The GOP nominee, Mike Lee, holds a 25-point lead. And, most recently, with challenger Joe Miller apparently upsetting Republican senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, the media is wondering whether there is now another Democratic “opportunity.” Apparently, not much of one: Miller leads his Democratic opponent 47–39 in the only post-primary poll.

Meanwhile in Florida, Rick Scott’s insurgent victory in the gubernatorial primary was trumpeted as great news for Democratic candidate Alex Sink. No doubt Scott carries some baggage, but he leads by three points in Rasmussen’s latest poll. At the same time, tea-party favorite Marco Rubio has retaken the lead in his three-way race for Florida’s Senate seat.

Similar results can be found in House races across the country: Supposedly “extreme” Republicans are leading in race after race.

Only in Nevada, where Senate majority leader Harry Reid has climbed back into a tie with Sharron Angle, is the media’s narrative even close to true. But one has to ask how different would things be if a more establishment candidate such as Sue Lowden had won the Republican primary. Angle has been nothing if not controversial, but Lowden was hardly gaffe-free. (Remember the “pay your doctor with a chicken” flap?) After Reid spent $3 million on negative advertising, voters would likely have thought that any Republican candidate was slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Despite this, Reid is still far from safe.

In the real world, as opposed to the one inhabited by most of the media, this new breed of anti-spending, pro-Constitution, limited-government candidates does not appear to be dragging Republicans to defeat.

But looked at another way, the question asked by that MSNBC headline is indeed relevant. If by “GOP” one means the party establishment that has controlled Congress and the national party since at least the Bush era, this group of insurgent candidates represents a significant threat. There’s a reason why the tea-party Republicans had to run against their own party leadership.

Just look at where the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and its House counterpart put their muscle. While it was understandable that the NRSC would stick with incumbents like Murkowski and Bennett, it also backed Trey Greyson in Kentucky, Jane Norton in Colorado, and Lowden in Nevada, and stood with Charlie Crist in Florida right up to the moment that he ditched the party. Even now, NRSC chairman John Cornyn has dispatched attorneys to Alaska to help Murkowski with her potential recount against Miller -- even as Murkowski explores her options for a third-party run.

After all, a Senate full of Pauls, Angles, Millers, Rubios, and others of that mindset would be a very different place. For someone like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who based his last reelection campaign on all the pork he had brought home to Kentucky, the thought of Rand Paul joining him in the Senate must be uncomfortable.

The House Republican leadership can’t feel any more secure. Minority whip Eric Cantor has already suggested that the GOP leadership may jettison its moratorium on earmarks next year. But dozens of new anti-spending Republicans will be elected this November. Will they stand for that sort of Republican backsliding?

Republicans claim that they have learned the lesson of their defeats in 2006 and 2008. They say that they are now firmly committed to limited-government principles. This new breed of candidate intends to hold them to that -- and that is making the Washington establishment very uncomfortable.

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Michael Tanner

How the spy codenamed “Farewell” helped push the Soviet Union to its own farewell.

‘True stories” are the highest form of fiction, and so it is with Farewell, a Cold War spy film that, for all its charms and graces, changes too much history in order to fit its story. French filmmaker Christian Carion may be forgiven much, however, because he has crafted a film that despite its historical infidelities gets the feel of the early-Eighties Cold War just right.

Carion, director of the Oscar-nominated Joyeux Noël, does it by depicting the Soviet Union not as some dreary, drab dungeon, but as a place full of color, with everyday Russians living, if not the good life, then at least a European one -- replete with holidays, workplace gossip, swigs of cognac, ungrateful children, and a mistress’s furtive glances. The system is hellish, but, unlike Sartre, these people find heaven in others.

#ad#In one memorable scene, Sergei Gregoriev, the KGB colonel–turned–defector, and Pierre Froment, a French civil engineer–turned–reluctant spy, stroll through Moscow parks talking family, poetry, and Communism when, approached by a smiling wedding party, Gregoriev takes a photograph of them, and then, at their invitation, joins them for another photograph. In the shadow of one of the park’s innumerable statues of dour Communist patriarchs, the family remains unaware of how precarious their lot is, but Gregoriev, who betrays his Communist masters, knows his greater danger all too well -- and yet he smiles.

Gregoriev knows that his is the Russia of Lefortovo prison, where the real-life model for Gregoriev, the highly unstable Vladimir Vetrov, penned his Confessions of a Traitor after stupidly revealing that he was involved in “something big.” Jailed for stabbing his own girlfriend and then killing a KGB agent who came over to investigate, Vetrov regretted only that he had failed to cause more damage to the Soviet Union and render more service to his beloved France. Codenamed “Farewell,” Vetrov helped push the Soviet Union -- which had long been stealing the West’s technological secrets -- toward its own farewell. In the film, Gregoriev does it all for his son. In real life, Vetrov probably did it for his ego. The Francophile agent, who had lived the good life in Paris and Canada, wound up confined to a desk in Moscow, archiving the exploits of lesser agents. He wanted to show just how his talents had been underestimated.

“Farewell” gave French intelligence the complete list of all 250 KGB-affiliated industrial spies -- “the X Line” -- along with the locations of American nuclear submarines, communication codes, radar positions, and even space-shuttle plans. President Mitterrand, played by Philippe Magnan, passes all this information along to President Reagan in a gesture of good will. Mitterrand is the picture of the French statesman effortlessly rebuking Americans who, too conniving for their own good, don’t seem to have the requisite heightened moral sentiments. Seemingly every French movie that deals with international affairs has to have a naïve Frenchman come face to face with an American Machiavelli, and Farewell is no exception: In the final scene, Froment demands that a CIA official (Willem Dafoe) explain why “Farewell” can’t be rescued -- only to hear that sometimes sacrifices must be made for the good of all.

#page#Blindness to the rightness and necessity of realpolitik is the film’s greatest failing: the Gallic oh-so-chic attitude that nothing is worth fighting or dying for. If so, then nothing is worth living for either -- certainly not Alfred de Vigny’s poetry, chocolate, or French high culture, the trappings that Gregoriev asks as his only reward. Gregoriev says he’s not afraid to die, but Pierre Froment is. Froment’s East German wife reminds him that she married an engineer, not James Bond. In fact, his reasons for becoming a spy are never fully explained. His mission isn’t impossible, but it does bring inquietude. Why risk it? It has to be more than his professed solidarity with Gregoriev.

#ad#To burnish his one-worldish bona fides, director Carion plays with perspective and language, bouncing from Moscow to Paris to Washington, from Russian to French to English, yet the film remains indelibly French. Carion actually spent three days trying to persuade Fred Ward to play an unconvincing Reagan who obsesses over The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (a not-too-subtle homage to playing with perspective). Reagan was a bad actor, so maybe bad acting is in order, but he was a great statesman, and Carion does not do him justice. Ward reportedly told Carion he must really be French to cast him as Reagan.

Carion chose better for his two main characters, casting two European fellow directors in these roles, Emir Kusturica as Gregoriev and Guillaume Canet as Froment. Canet is forgettable, but Kusturica is an actor par excellence, whose presence commands the film. Kusturica does this despite having had to learn Russian for the role after the Russian minister of culture strongly advised Russian actors not to make a film about Russia’s greatest traitor. (The scenes that feature Moscow were shot through subterfuge: Carion pretended he was filming a Coca-Cola commercial.)

Kusturica, who is Serbian, has had his own brushes with evil -- and come up lacking. When asked why he did so little against the dictator Milosevic, he replied timidly, “Nobody’s perfect.” But he perfectly captures Gregoriev’s motivations. At one point, Gregoriev says not a word, lying on his back, looking longingly at 8mm sepia films of his son, breathing the carefree air of Paris. The smoke from his cigarette clouds the room and the son ages, but the memory remains. Later, reeling from torture, he quotes Alfred de Vigny’s “Le Mort du Loup,” a poem about a wolf who dies in silence so that his pups might live.

That scene is fictitious, but Farewell is not meant to be cinéma vérité. Still, Carion would do well to read more Vigny, who once wrote: “Actors are lucky, they have glory without responsibility.” Directors, alas, have no such luck when they tell a “true story” that isn’t.

-- Charles C. Johnson is a Claremont Review of Books fellow at The Claremont Review of Books. He can be reached at CJohnson@claremont.org.

Charles C. Johnson

While Washington sounds an uncertain trumpet, Pacific Command has no illusions about the rise of China.

Honolulu -- Visiting America’s Pacific-based military forces, one gets the clear impression that they feel their countrymen are finally catching up with their views on the growing Chinese threat to Asian stability. Yet they worry that smaller budgets will make their job harder, and they know that the Asia-Pacific region will be watching to see whether Washington follows through on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s newly declared intention to oppose Beijing’s attempts to pressure smaller Asian nations over territorial issues. How the Obama administration shapes its Pacific strategy and manages relations with China will go a long way toward determining whether the United States retains its dominant position as a stabilizing force in the region.

#ad#To talk with the professionals at Pacific Command or Pacific Fleet is to return to what most landlubbers consider the bygone maritime world of Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad. Names such as Oceania, Palau, and the Lombok Strait regularly come up in conversation -- not as vacation spots, but as places in which the United States is constantly engaged, wary of China, and planning how to maintain or expand its influence. Such is the worldview of the 325,000 U.S. military personnel under the command of Adm. Robert F. Willard.

In Hawaii, the benign view of China often expressed in Washington political circles is all but absent. Though clearly acknowledged, China’s economic power and its ostensibly positive political role in dealing with global issues are seldom discussed. For those at the tip of America’s Pacific spear, China’s aggressive policies and actions in recent years have immediate impact. They are not simply the fodder for talk shows or political salons.

Above all, there is a recognition that America is at a crossroads in deciding how it will play its role as the guarantor of regional stability. The future budget environment looks “lean,” in common parlance, making it harder to maintain U.S. presence in the Asia-Pacific region, and making it more likely that America will have to struggle to catch up to changing military balances, political alignments, and multilateral initiatives. For those who are forward deployed in the Pacific, “presence” is more than a description of how they operate; it is, rather, the essence of who they are. They believe that American ships, planes, and personnel must constantly interact with allies, partners, and even those who may be competitors. Such presence is crucial to creating pro-U.S. sentiment and alignments, especially given China’s dramatic increase in diplomatic and economic activity across the region.

Unfortunately, Washington, D.C., has become a growing obstacle to Pacific Command’s ability to do its job. While Pacific Command’s leaders publicly assert that they will continue to fulfill their mission, everyone looking at the issue knows that shrinking budgets, fewer ships in the Navy, and an aging Air Force will put severe stress on the force, diminishing its effectiveness. Shipbuilding plans show shortfalls in submarines, destroyers, and other surface ships over the next 30 years. Already, steaming time and flight hours are down, although officials avoid providing specifics. All of this cuts at the heart of operations in Pacific Command’s 100-million-square-mile area of responsibility, stretching from the West Coast of the United States to the Indian Ocean, and containing half the world’s population and 36 separate countries, including four of the most populous and powerful (China, India, Russia, and the U.S. itself).

#page#Pacific Command’s head, Admiral Willard, is a former fighter pilot and a calm, no-nonsense leader. Previously commander of Pacific Fleet, he has transitioned since October 2009 from being directly involved in operations to managing the world’s largest military command. He now concerns himself with the broader geopolitical and strategic questions related to America’s role in the region, and he publicly asserts on a regular basis that the U.S. is fully committed to maintaining its role there. The leaders of Pacific Command are as much diplomats as war fighters, however, and Willard has to balance Beijing, the U.S. Congress, Tokyo, and myriad others who have a stake in the region.

#ad#Of significant concern to Willard and his colleagues are China’s attempts to buy influence among Pacific island nations and gain special treatment for its interests through enticing trade agreements and liberal spending. With a decline in both fleet and discretionary funds, officials both at the Pentagon and at Pacific Command believe that defending U.S. interests and water space against these Chinese incursions must be done increasingly through nontraditional approaches, such as partnership building, confidence building, and infrastructure support and training for less developed nations. Yet budget cuts are making even that difficult.

While a number of administration officials -- such as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Kurt Campbell and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Chip Gregson -- seem to fully share Pacific Command’s views on the threat posed by China’s growing naval and air capabilities, diplomatic heft, and economic influence, the reality is they will increasingly be hamstrung on the security side by budget caps imposed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Adding fuel to the fire, Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Tex.) have recently been questioning why the U.S. continues to base troops in Japan. Such comments only confirm the fears of those working in Hawaii that people on the mainland (including national leaders) don’t understand how important it is to remain present in the region. To a degree little appreciated in Washington, every U.S. pronouncement and action undergoes extremely close scrutiny by Asian leaders and analysts, who seek to read the tea leaves regarding America’s credibility and intentions. 

Hence the feeling in Hawaii that Secretary Clinton’s statement on the South China Sea at the ASEAN Regional Forum in July represents a potential turning point. Yet no one, either here or in Washington, is quite sure how the U.S. will back up her words, an uncertainty shared by our Asian friends and partners. Those at Pacific Command are well aware that many outsiders believe Washington caved in to Chinese demands not to conduct anti–North Korean maritime exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea (near Chinese waters) in late July. Though the Obama administration and Honolulu-based military officials assert that the U.S. will indeed conduct exercises in the Yellow Sea in coming months, this “two steps forward, one step back” type of policy raises questions in nations across the region and makes Pacific Command’s assurances of America’s continued role a harder sell.

For now, however, the diplomatic line has been drawn in the water. As I left Pacific Command headquarters, overlooking Pearl Harbor, the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was steaming off into the ocean to conduct multinational combat exercises. With one eye fixed on Washington, the men and women of Pacific Command continue to show the flag around the vastness of the Pacific, defending America’s interests -- even when those interests remain unclear in the eyes of their countrymen and underfunded by their political leadership.

-- Michael Auslin is a resident scholar in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

The “Restoring Honor” rally showcased a nation dedicated to its constitutional heritage.

Predictably, the “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall last Saturday has evoked a lot of consternation.

#ad#Because the rally explicitly and studiously avoided trumpeting a political agenda, it freed up a lot of people to fill in the blanks themselves. For instance, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post insists it was all a con: “As high-minded as that may sound, the real point of stressing the rally’s apolitical goals was political.” By leaving the listener to infer an anti-Obama agenda from all of this talk of lost honor, host Glenn Beck was practicing “classic political demagoguery.”

So let me get this straight: If Beck had done the opposite, and invited hundreds of thousands of anti-Obama signs, and carved up Obama like a turkey dinner, folks like Sargent would think the rally was less demagogic? Hmmm.

Obviously, Sargent’s not entirely wrong about the rally’s political resonance. Of course it was a conservative-and-libertarian-tinged event. Of course it would have been impossible without the right-leaning tea-party movement. Of course the fact that Beck and Sarah Palin managed to attract so many people to the Mall is not a ringing endorsement of the Democrats.

But the partisan implications of the rally aren’t that interesting. Nor, really, is the argument that the relentless celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. at the National Mall amounted to some grave insult to his memory.

One striking feature of Saturday’s rally was how deeply religious and ecumenical it was. It seems like just yesterday that everyone was talking about how Christian evangelicals were too bigoted to vote for upright and uptight Mormon Mitt Romney. Yet Christian activists saw no problem cheering for -- and praying with -- the equally Mormon but far less uptight Beck, who asked citizens to go to “your churches, synagogues, and mosques!” 

The inclusiveness transcended mere religion. While the crowd was preponderantly white, the message was racially universalistic. That was evident not just on the stage, but in the crowd as well. When Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie asked a couple whether as “African-Americans” they felt comfortable in such a white audience, the woman responded emphatically but good-naturedly: “First of all, I’m not African, I am an American . . . a black American.” She went on to explain how “these people” -- i.e., the white folks cheering her on -- “are my family.”

Peter Viereck, a largely forgotten conservative intellectual, would have found this familiar. During the 1950s, he noted that anti-Communism -- whatever its other faults and excesses -- had the remarkable effect of lessoning inter-ethnic tensions among like-minded activists. Anti-Communist blacks were celebrated and welcomed by anti-Communist whites. Anti-Communist immigrants and Jews were welcomed to the supposedly nativist and anti-Semitic movement. Viereck, who disliked the phenomenon (he said it was akin to xenophobia practiced by a “xeno”), dubbed it “transtolerance.”

I’m more upbeat about the dynamic. Of late there’s been a lot of debate, largely in the context of the so-called Ground Zero mosque, about the evils of American identity. Will Wilkinson, an influential liberal-libertarian writer, sees opposition to the mosque as an entirely reprehensible expression of the “cult of American identity” and the “zaniness of right identity politics.” The upshot of Wilkinson’s argument is that it’s absolutely preposterous for the American people to see themselves as a people.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently argued that there are “two Americas.” The first America is wholly secular, “where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.” The other America is culturally defined: “This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well.”

Douthat makes some good points, but he downplays the relationship between what are really the two faces of one America. It is America's conception of itself as a people that keeps it loyal to the Constitution. The Constitution, absent our cultural fidelity to it, might as well be the rules for a role-playing game.

I confess, if Beck weren’t a libertarian, I would find his populism worrisome. But his message, flaws and excesses notwithstanding, is that our constitutional heritage defines us as a people, regardless of race, religion, or creed. Is that so insulting to Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory?

— Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jonah Goldberg

An indignant President Obama complained last week, “I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead.” Fine. How about plastering a copy of his presidential oath of office there instead? The kowtowing commander-in-chief is in dire need of a daily reminder that his job is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” -- not international law or global diktats.

Case in point: Last week, Obama’s State Department handed in America’s first-ever report to the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights in conjunction with something called the “Universal Periodic Review.” In short, the 29-page document is a self-aggrandizing report card touting the administration’s far-left domestic and foreign-policy initiatives for the world’s approval.

#ad#The report boasts of racial and gender bean-counting in the executive branch; Justice Department outreach to Muslim grievance groups opposed to post-9/11 security measures; teachers’ union payoffs in the federal stimulus law; continuing commitment to closing the Gitmo detention facility for enemy combatants; and the illusory lifesaving effects of Obamacare on minorities through “expanding community health centers” (which have yet to be built, not that it matters in our Nobel Peace Prize–winning president’s age of post-achievement).

The report also includes a section on “values and immigration,” which essentially singles out Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law as a human-rights deficiency “that is being addressed in a court action.”

In response, Arizona governor Jan Brewer rightly blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration for succumbing to “internationalism run amok.” Brewer pointed out in a letter to Clinton, “Human rights as guaranteed by the United States and Arizona Constitutions are expressly protected in S.B. 1070 and defended vigorously by my Administration. In fact, the Department of Justice has correctly not included these so-called ‘human rights’ issues in the current litigation against the State of Arizona.” Somehow, that inconvenient detail escaped the Foggy Bottom bureaucrats’ notice.

No one should be surprised, of course, that the Department of Blame America First is prostrating itself before the likes of repressive U.N. Human Rights Council members Libya, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and China. No one should be surprised that Obama’s globalist panderers couldn’t simply keep their mouths shut and refrain from trashing Americans with whom they disagree. In May, you’ll recall, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner preemptively trashed our country’s human-rights record to Chinese government officials and humiliated Arizonans -- and all Americans -- who support states’ rights to protect their borders and enhance their security through strict immigration enforcement. An obsequious Posner called S.B. 1070 “a troubling trend in our society” in his bow-and-scrape conversations with the ChiComs.

The inclusion of Arizona in a politically correct catalogue of human rights and wrongs is more than “downright offensive,” as Brewer put it. It’s a national travesty. In the very same Obama administration document, the State Department praises the administration for its “robust protections for freedom of expression.” The report notes sanctimoniously: “As a general matter, the government does not punish or penalize those who peacefully express their views in the public sphere, even when those views are critical of the government. Indeed, dissent is a valuable and valued part of our politics.”

Yeah? Tell that to the Democratic members of Congress leading the punitive economic boycott and political demonization of Arizona. Or to Attorney General Eric Holder, who rushed to attack S.B. 1070 before he had even read it. Fresh off this U.N. mess, Holder’s Social Justice Department has launched yet another vendetta against Arizona. On Monday, the DOJ filed suit against Phoenix-area community colleges because they imposed strict citizenship screening of potential employees.

As Obama throws America under the bus for the cause of open borders, the shady U.N. human-rights police must be laughing their jackboots off.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Michelle Malkin

In their reporting on the Gulf spill, the media have been wallowing in exaggeration.

So who’s responsible for the Great Oil Spill Panic of 2010? Surprise, surprise: Scientists are starting to complain about the media’s alarmist interpretation of their preliminary public assessments.

Let’s start with Vernon Asper, the scientist whose team on the research vessel Pelican discovered the much-discussed underwater plumes of oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and who was the first to describe them to the media. Since he’s currently at sea and unavailable for an interview, we’ll let him speak for himself in Nature:

But once he was on shore, Asper found himself at the centre of a mess that would in some ways prove even more challenging than understanding the deep oil. He had agreed to be the Pelican team’s media face, and he did interviews from just after dawn until the evening on the day they returned. “It was just a crazy, crazy, crazy day,” says Asper. “It was a twilight zone.”

During the interviews, he described the evidence for a hidden plume of deep oil that was spreading an untold amount of hydrocarbons into the Gulf. Asper believes he was careful to note that more analyses were needed before anything could be said for sure. Still, some media reports gave the impression that huge lakes of crude oil were hiding in the deep -- a view not supported by the data.

“It was a surprise to us that we had been misinterpreted,” says Asper, who admits that he entered the fray with little media experience. But he says that he did what he could to keep the record straight, and doesn’t know how he could have better controlled the picture that the media painted.

#ad#Asper is still worried about the long-term consequences of the spill and the plumes.

Meanwhile, the media tried to resurrect the most lurid scenarios for size of the plumes, despite official reports issued by Incident Commander Thad Allen that roughly three-quarters of the oil is gone. Those reports are backed up by the widespread surveys of the Gulf that are looking for oil and not finding it.

The most recent vehicle for plume mania was the first peer-reviewed study of the spill, published on August 19 in Science by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which confirmed the existence of underwater oil plumes “the size of Manhattan” and also suggested, less definitively, that bacteria weren’t eating them. The press wallowed in exaggeration, with many reports implying that the Woods Hole study both justified the media’s paranoia about the plumes and also put the government in its place. Some examples: “Major Study Proves Oil Plume That’s Not Going Away” (AP); “Oil Plume from Spill Persists, Data Show” (Wall Street Journal), “Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Study Says” (New York Times).

In fact, that’s not what it said, according to Woods Hole. In an op-ed piece on the CNN website, one of the study’s authors, Christopher Reddy, gave the media a thorough spanking, writing:

Even though my colleagues and I repeatedly avoided contrasting our results with previous NOAA estimates that some 75 percent of the spilled oil was already gone from the Gulf, much of last week’s coverage of our work made that a prominent part of the story.

For example, The Washington Post reported, “Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration’s assertion that most of BP’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico is either gone or rapidly disappearing -- with one group Thursday announcing the discovery of a 22-mile ‘plume’ of oil that shows little sign of vanishing.”

Within a few days, there was another media-created battle of the bands, when a second peer-reviewed study -- this one from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) -- was published in Science. It looked at the plume from a different angle by directly measuring bacterial activity, and concluded that the bacteria were rapidly disposing of the oil. The LBNL researchers, led by Dr. Terry Hazen, continued their work after the paper was written, and are still monitoring the Gulf. According to Hazen, the plume has been eaten, and his team is finding little or no oil. Their work has been part of the basis of the official estimates.

The media backpedaled furiously: “Microbes Consumed Oil Plume, Study Says” (Washington Post); “Newly Discovered Microbe Helped Disperse Oil, Study Finds” (CNN); “Undersea Oil Plume Vanishes in Gulf, Degraded by Previously Unknown Bug” (New York Times). In a hilarious editorial penned after the release of the Woods Hole study but before the LBNL data were made available, the Times urged the Obama administration to clarify the situation for its obviously confused reporters and editors, proving once again why it has never needed a comics section.

Hazen told me that the battle-of-the-bands approach was mistaken, and that the Woods Hole study and his were complementary, not contradictory. Apparently everyone but the media was aware of the fact that, as I reported in NR, the plumes were highly diluted, and most of the oil was doing what it was supposed to do: float, biodegrade, and evaporate. As for the stuff that wasn’t floating to the surface immediately, all scientists agree that it is nasty, and its undefined persistence and long-term effects remain to studied.

And the media? There’s no denying that the Deepwater spill was an ecological disaster, Hazen says, but “the press coverage was sort of appalling. They actually interviewed me for NBC Nightly News, and I was telling them the exact same thing two months ago, that basically all the other folks that know about this stuff would tell them: to calm down, it’s going to go away, it’s a natural substance, it’s going to be biodegraded.”

— Lou Dolinar is a retired columnist and reporter for Newsday. He is currently in Mobile, Ala., working on a book about what really did happen in the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Lou Dolinar

By serious reformers’ rankings, Colorado and Louisiana lead the states in education reform. So how did they lose out?

That was another $4.35 billion poorly spent. Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the winners of the second and final round of the administration’s heavily promoted and widely cheered Race to the Top school-reform program. Unfortunately, after all the headlines and hullabaloo, the results were so dismal they threatened to bring the entire exercise into disrepute. Heralded education-reform states Colorado and Louisiana were left out in the cold, while Duncan bizarrely found himself naming Ohio, Maryland, New York, and Hawaii among the ten round-two winners. (Tennessee and Delaware had been named round-one winners this spring.)

#ad#Several of the winners clearly trail the pack on key reforms that Duncan had said RTT would reward. When it comes to state data systems, the Data Quality Campaign has ranked the states: Hawaii tied for 17th, Maryland tied for 35th, and New York tied for 48th. When it comes to the clarity and strength of the states’ charter laws, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has rated Ohio 26th, Hawaii 34th, and Maryland 40th. On teacher policy, the National Council on Teacher Quality has graded the states, with Ohio and New York each earning a D+, Maryland a D, and Hawaii a D–.

Meanwhile, less than a month ago, Duncan described Louisiana as “leading the way” with data systems that monitor teacher-preparation programs and student performance. Louisiana has been ranked a top-ten state for teacher policy, data systems, and charter schooling. Colorado enacted the single most important piece of legislation to come out of the RTT process -- its remarkable Senate Bill 191, which overhauled teacher evaluation and tenure and introduced a smart statewide framework for gauging teacher performance. (In announcing the results, Duncan did say that Colorado “will continue to be a national leader.” Presumably, it will just have to lead from the rear.)

Conservative education analyst Chester E. Finn Jr. concluded that the review process didn’t reflect “what’s really going on in these states and the degree of sincerity of their reform convictions.” Andy Rotherham, veteran Clinton education hand and key Democratic education thinker, acknowledged that there were “raised eyebrows”; specifically, he anticipated questions about “how New York went from not meeting the absolute priority for the competition to being a winner,” and noted concerns about “reviewers that didn’t reflect the administration’s avowed reform priorities.” Colorado’s lieutenant governor, Barbara O’Brien, fumed, “You can’t say it’s an objective process. . . . I just have no confidence in this process the U.S. Department of Education has put together.”

This was largely a bed of Duncan’s own making. Last year, the administration opted for a competition that primarily rewarded grant-writing prowess and allegiance to the fads of the moment rather than concrete structural changes. Skeptics warned that the administration’s hurriedly assembled contest was not equal to the weight it was being asked to bear and raised questions about the murky criteria for judge selection, ambiguity of the scoring process, emphasis on promises rather than accomplishments, and preference for “inclusive” efforts rather than focused ones.

#page#Moreover, when announcing round-one winners Tennessee and Delaware in March, Duncan took pains to note that the two states had had 100 percent or near 100 percent signoffs from their local teachers’ unions. Not surprisingly, the judges followed Duncan’s lead. Among the winners, North Carolina, Ohio, and Hawaii had 100 percent of their union locals signing off on their proposals, and New York had 70 percent doing so. States like Colorado and New Jersey got hammered for not collecting enough unenforceable assurances from their unions. An official from one losing state steamed, “To have peer reviewers praise the application up and down but still explicitly penalize us because of our union opposition is almost too much to bear.”

#ad#The disheartening close of its prized program is bad news for the administration and probably signals rough seas ahead for its education agenda in 2011. Despite Duncan’s expressed hope that “This may be the end of phase two, but it’s not the end of Race to the Top,” and the president’s request for another $1.35 billion for RTT next year, it will be a surprise if Duncan gets to give this another try. Given that the president’s standing on education has already fallen precipitously, with Gallup reporting this month that just 34 percent of adults give him an A or a B when grading his performance on education, the messy endgame may weaken the administration’s credibility on reform. One respected charter-school advocate lamented, “With the inclusion of Maryland, North Carolina, and Ohio and the exclusion of Colorado and Louisiana, the administration has lost its ability to push states to make tough changes in matters like charter schools or teacher policies.”

In the meantime, Duncan now confronts a whole new headache. While the winning plans are mostly about grand promises, the cast of characters in most of those states is about to change. Half of the RTT winners will be inaugurating new governors come January, and four others may be doing so. In other words, ten of Duncan’s twelve RTT winners may have new leaders in 2011. How wedded will these new governors be to the airy promises contained in the winning RTT applications? If and when they balk, the Obama administration will have two bad options.

Either Duncan will have to admit he handed out 4 billion borrowed bucks on the basis of unenforceable paper plans, or he’ll have to start trying to strong-arm states by holding new governors and state education chiefs to the commitments of their predecessors -- and clawing back dollars from states that don’t comply. Neither of those scenarios is too appealing, especially in a year when a number of amped-up Republican gubernatorial candidates seem all too eager to tangle with the Obama administration.

-- Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book The Same Thing Over and Over (available in October from Harvard University Press).

Frederick M. Hess

It takes a special amount of shamelessness to keep hawking the virtues of stimulus spending.

Joe Biden was an inspired choice as spokesman for the “summer of recovery.”

If the Obama administration wanted someone with little credibility to lose, who will say anything without a hint of shame or compunction, whose mouth habitually outruns the facts and common sense, it found its man.

The vice president is still hawking his recovery summer, even as GDP growth slows to a crawl, and he’ll still tout the marvels of the stimulus even if we dip into negative territory again later this year. He makes the late, great pitchman Billy Mays look restrained and rhetorically scrupulous by comparison. Biden is joined at the hip to the most disastrous White House shibboleth since Pres. Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now.”

#ad#In a vaguely Soviet act of governmental exhortation, in 1974 Ford wanted local citizens’ groups to “whip inflation now,” or WIN. Ford offered a shiny “WIN” button to anyone enlisting “as an Inflation Fighter and Energy Saver for the duration.” Six months later, only one local committee had been formed, and even Ford concluded the initiative was “too gimmicky.” Inflation remained unwhipped.

What WIN buttons were to Ford, the gewgaws of the stimulus are to Biden. He relentlessly plugs the $5 billion for weatherization as “one of our signature programs,” never mentioning, as the Associated Press puts it, that the program “has experienced spending delays, inefficiencies and mismanagement. In Biden’s home state of Delaware, the entire program has been suspended since May, and last month federal auditors identified possible fraud.”

The inefficiencies of the weatherization program are typical. According to the Washington Post, as of June 30, Detroit had spent less than 1 percent of $8.8 million for energy-efficiency initiatives, Phoenix had spent even less of its $15.2 million, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., had spent $66,000 of $2 million.

In a favorite administration statistic, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by 1.4 million to 3.3 million in the second quarter, a suspiciously wide range redolent of seat-of-the-pants guesswork. All the report proves is that if you adopt a model that assumes that the stimulus created jobs, it created a lot of them. The stimulus excels in this ethereal category of assumed job creation.

If the stimulus provided any initial boost to the economy, it was a sugar high, its effect neither healthy nor enduring. It’s been a chilly summer of recovery. According to Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimates growth on a monthly basis, GDP growth declined 0.4 percent in June. Only 61,000 private-sector jobs were created in June and July. Biden must be banking on a hell of an August.

A ruinous shortsightedness is a hallmark of Obama economic policy. In July, sales of new homes dropped to their lowest level since the government started tracking them 40 years ago. The precipitous fall -- down 32.4 percent from a year earlier -- came with the expiration of the new homebuyer’s credit. The credit temporarily boosted home sales, but -- like the cash-for-clunkers program and the stimulus (in the best-case scenario) -- at the price of stealing demand from the future. Unfortunately, the future always arrives eventually.

Obama-administration officials with a sense of shame want to keep their hucksterism within reasonable limits. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was reportedly irked that the New York Times gave his op-ed on encouraging economic signs the Biden-esque headline “Welcome to the Recovery.” Geithner was right to point out that recoveries from financial crises are always long, hard slogs. That should have counseled restraint and realistic expectations from the beginning, rather than the administration’s counterproductive hyperactivity and self-discrediting overpromising.

Once Barack Obama had settled on a nearly $1 trillion stimulus, though, it was inevitable he had to oversell it to get it through Congress, and once he unleashed that sort of spending, it was inevitable that Congress would create a sprawling mess. Amid the political and economic wreckage, there’s only one thing to do: send out Biden.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

Rich Lowry

“The Last of the Luddites” laments the demise of film photography.

Most people have no idea what “E-6” is. To avid baseball fans, E-6 is the way to record an error by a shortstop on your scorecard. But there is another E-6, in photography. This E-6 is the developer in which color slides are processed.

Recently, I received an e-mail from Chromatics, a photo lab used by professional photographers in Nashville, saying that they will be discontinuing the developing of color slides and color transparencies in general after September 9. This was sent to me as an old customer of theirs.

#ad#The passing of E-6 is the passing of an era, because it means that so few professional photographers are using color slides and transparencies these days, in this era of digital photography, that a major photo lab does not get enough of this kind of film to develop to make it worthwhile to stock the chemical that is used.

The films used to make color prints -- as distinguished from slides -- are processed in a different developer (called C-41), and the market for that is still good. But the biggest reason for the decline of color slides is undoubtedly the rise of digital cameras.

The fact that Chromatics will no longer process color slides in E-6 does not mean that nobody will be doing so. No doubt other photo labs in some other cities will continue to develop color slides and color transparencies -- at least for a while.

But the handwriting is on the wall.

To those of us of an older age (80 in my case), this passing of one more icon of our era makes us feel like we are relics of a bygone time. I can remember when I used to develop my own color slides in E-3, a long-ago predecessor of E-6.

Another photographic icon that vanished in recent years was Kodachrome, the film that put color slides on the map. A few years ago, Kodak announced that it was being discontinued. For many years, Kodachrome was the finest color film in the world.

Even after other color films caught up with it, and even surpassed it in some respects, it was still a great film to have, because it did not require refrigeration, as other color films used by professional photographers do. It is a big nuisance to have to take a cooler with you when traveling with professional color film.

The reason for the difference was that Kodachrome did not have dyes in it, like other color films, and it is the dyes that are so vulnerable to heat. Kodachrome was actually three layers of black-and-white film, each layer sensitive to different colors, with the dyes being added later, during the developing process.

It was a more complicated process than developing slides in E-6, and Kodak preferred to develop Kodachrome itself, rather than risk having other processors do a second-rate job that would harm the high reputation of Kodachrome.

#page#For years, Kodak sold Kodachrome with the processing included. When you finished taking your pictures, you simply put your 35mm film cartridge in a mailer that came with the film, and mailed it to the nearest Kodak photo lab.

Unfortunately, our saviors in Washington decided that it was illegal for Kodak to do that. Why? Because it gave Kodak a “monopoly” on processing Kodachrome.

#ad#Any photographer who did not like this arrangement was free to use some other color slide film, one that could be developed in E-6. As so often happens, the government was solving a non-existent problem -- and creating a real problem in the process.

Most photographers who used Kodachrome still preferred to have Kodak develop it. So we had to buy the mailers separately -- and keep track of how many mailers we had, to make sure we had enough for all the rolls of Kodachrome we had.

When Kodachrome was discontinued, I was left with mailers that cost money but were now worthless.

Fortunately, only the U.S. government had this ridiculous ban on selling the mailers and film together. When I was traveling in other countries, I bought the combination together and could mail my Kodachrome to be developed in London, Paris, or wherever.

Now that E-6 seems to be following Kodachrome on the path to oblivion, we relics of the past are left with color print film, but the time may yet come when we will just have to cope with digital.

Someone once called me “the last of the Luddites.” The passing of E-6 makes me feel that way.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Thomas Sowell

Liberals keep unfairly tarring conservatives with the label “racist.”

On a regular basis, we are enjoined, usually by a leading Democrat, to overcome our reticence -- or, in Attorney General Eric Holder’s formulation, “cowardice” -- and engage in a hearty national conversation about race.

#ad#No, thanks. As anyone with eyes can see, we are far from avoiding the subject -- in fact, it often seems that we are unable to talk about anything else. With our national debt ascending like Jack’s beanstalk, our economy coughing blood, a maniacal, extremist regime in Iran close to getting the bomb, a loose worldwide network of Islamic fanatics trying to blow us up, violence flaring along our southern border, the after-effects of a massive oil spill hobbling the Gulf region, and a government in Washington determined to implement a social-democratic agenda despite vigorous public opposition, we are talking, of course, about race.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger gave up her three-decade-old radio program after using the “n” word on the air. Not that she wielded it as an epithet. No, she was just insensitive (no irony intended here, she really was). And racial insensitivity, more than any other kind, is a ticket to American purgatory.

Though Dr. Laura could be flippant and even cruel at times, she was a one-woman corrective to the therapeutic culture that treated everyone as a victim and required responsibility from no one. Over the course of 30 years, she never gave any indication of racist tendencies (and she gave plenty of solid advice to boot). But she touched the third rail one time, and now she’s silenced.

Dr. Laura made it easy for her critics by a lapse of taste and judgment. But even in the absence of such blunders, the Left can make anything about race.

Two rallies were held in Washington over the weekend. One was hosted by TV and radio phenom Glenn Beck to “restore American honor” (whatever that means), and the other by the Rev. Al Sharpton, to whine about the Beck rally.

The Beck rally happened to fall on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech. Okay. Does that make Beck a racist? So said any number of axe-grinders. National Urban League president Marc Morial said Beck’s rally was “an effort to embarrass and poke a finger in the eye of the civil rights community.”

Martin Luther King III, invoking his father, protested that “his dream rejected hateful rhetoric and all forms of bigotry or discrimination.”

A New York Times story about the coincidence of dates started this way: “It seems the ultimate thumb in the eye: that Glenn Beck would summon the Tea Party faithful to a rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington.”

But consider this: The one piece of evidence cited by Beck’s leftist critics to prove that he is a racist is that Beck once called Obama a racist! Oh, and then he apologized. Now we’re really in the weeds of race talk as only 21st-century Americans can do it.

In fact, Beck (who can never be accused of reserve) has become moist (his default mode) when discussing the great legacy of Martin Luther King. He has explained that the timing of the march was accidental but that he has come to think of it as “providential.” His rally was rich with tributes to the civil-rights icon, and included a speech by King’s niece, Alveda King.

Nothing daunted, The New York Times insinuated away. “In the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights,” wrote reporter Kate Zernike, “critics say they hear an echo of slavery, Jim Crow and George Wallace.” Yes, naturally. Just as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd “heard” the word “boy” when Rep. Joe Wilson blurted “You lie” at President Obama. And just for the record, tea-party groups don’t tend to use the term “states’ rights.”

Times columnist Paul Krugman, too, is in a lather (his default mode). Denouncing the “ugliness” he sees coming down the pike (that would be a big Republican victory in November), Krugman fulminates that “a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals #. . . # legitimate.” Krugman is aghast that a Republican majority might initiate a “wave of investigations,” which would be “dangerous.” Well, let’s see, these supposedly lawless Republicans will be exercising their right to vote and will elect representatives who may choose to discharge their congressional oversight responsibility zealously. How is that “dangerous” or “ugly”?

In fact, it is the Left that regards all criticism as illegitimate. No matter what you say, if you hold a rally opposing the liberal agenda, or attend a town-hall meeting critical of a Democrat, you will be tarred as a racist. As the radio host Chris Plante puts it: “The definition of a racist today is anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal.”

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.

Mona Charen

Prominent media hosts equate Christian and Muslim violence.

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

After the Vietnam War, even liberals who continued to describe Communism as evil were labeled “right-wingers” and “Cold Warriors.” And the United States, with its moral flaws, was often likened to the Soviet Union. I recall asking the preeminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that the United States was a morally superior society to the Soviet Union. He would not.

#ad#Little has changed regarding the Left’s inability to identify and confront evil. Its moral equation of good guys and bad guys was made evident again in recent weeks by hosts on three major liberal networks: ABC, National Public Radio (NPR), and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).

First, on May 25, PBS host Tavis Smiley interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim Somali writer and activist for human, especially women’s, rights in Islamic countries. After mentioning American Muslim terrorists Major Nidal Hasan (who murdered 13 fellow soldiers and injured 30 others at Fort Hood) and Faisal Shahzad (who attempted to murder hundreds in Times Square), this dialogue ensued:

Ali: “Somehow, the idea got into their [Hasan’s and Shahzad’s] minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.”

Smiley: “But Christians do that every single day in this country.”

Ali: “Do they blow people up?”

Smiley: “Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that's what Columbine is -- I could do this all day long. There are so many more examples of Christians -- and I happen to be a Christian.

“There are so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country, where you live and work.”

Then, on August 22, Michel Martin, host of NPR’s Tell Me More, in discussing whether the Islamic Center and mosque planned for near Ground Zero should be moved, said this on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz: “Should anybody move a Catholic church? Did anybody move a Christian church after Timothy McVeigh, who adhered to a cultic white supremacist cultic version of Christianity, bombed [the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City]?”

And third, on August 26, ABC 20/20 anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted this to his nearly 1 million followers: “To all my christian brothers and sisters, especially catholics - before u condemn muslims for violence, remember the crusades . . . . study them.”

I have known Tavis Smiley since the 1980s, when we both worked at the same radio station in Los Angeles. He is smart, and he is a gentleman who has accorded me great respect both on and off the air.

How, then, does such a man equate Muslims who murder in the name of Islam with Americans who “murder every day,” none of whom commit their murders in the name of Christianity?

How does Michel Martin equate the thousands of Islamic terrorists around the world, all of whom are devout Muslims, with a single American (one who professed no religion at all)?

And how does ABC’s Chris Cuomo claim that Christians cannot condemn Muslims for violence because of the Christian Crusades?

First of all, the Crusades occurred a thousand years ago. One might as well argue that Jews cannot condemn Christian and secular anti-Semitic violence because Jews destroyed Canaanite communities 3,200 years ago.

Second, it is hardly a defense of Muslims to cite comparable Christian conduct that occurred a thousand years ago.

Third, even if we do compare the Crusades with contemporary Islamic jihadism, there is little moral equivalence. The Crusades were waged in order to recapture lands that had been Christian for centuries until Muslim armies attacked them. (Some Crusaders also massacred whole Jewish communities in Germany on the way to the Holy Land, and that was a grotesque evil -- which Church officials condemned at the time.) As the dean of Western Islamic scholars, Princeton professor Bernard Lewis, has written, “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad -- a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”

So how did Tavis Smiley, Michel Martin, and Chris Cuomo make such morally egregious statements?

The answer is not that these are bad people, or that they are not repulsed by terrorist violence.

The answer is leftism, the way of looking at the world that permeates high schools, universities, and the news and entertainment media. Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of making accurate moral judgments. They once regarded America and the Soviet Union as morally similar. Today, they claim that the people they call Christian “extremists” (who are they?) and Islamist terrorists and their supporters pose equal threats to America and to the world.

That is how bright and decent people become moral relativists and thereby undermine the battles against the greatest evils -- Communist totalitarianism in its time, and Islamic totalitarianism in ours.

The only solution is to keep exposing leftist moral confusion. One problem, however, is that in countries without talk radio, an equivalent to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, conservative columnists, and a vigorous anti-Left political party, this is largely impossible.

The other major problem is that the media that dominate American life have little problem -- indeed, they largely concur -- with the foolish and dangerous comments made by their mainstream-media colleagues. That is why these comments, worthy of universal moral condemnation, were ignored by the mainstream (i.e., left-wing) media. Instead, they directed mind-numbing attention and waves of opprobrium toward Dr. Laura.

Those who don’t fight real evils fight imaginary ones.

-- Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

Dennis Prager

How conservatives should think about Social Security reform.

I don’t usually spend much time disagreeing with people I mostly agree with, but a column in National Review by the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner -- my old boss and an all-around great guy -- presents a chance to talk about why Social Security reform has proved to be such a difficult task for those who believe in free markets and individual choice.

Here’s where I agree with Mike: “Given their large lead in current polls, it is perhaps understandable that Republicans don’t want to risk offending voters, particularly seniors, by wading back into the Social Security thicket. But they are making a mistake.” He’s right: If you run on nothing, you’ll receive a mandate to do just that. Voters need to hear a realistic discussion of how to fix Social Security and other entitlement programs.

#ad#But Mike also argues that conservatives shouldn’t give up on Social Security personal accounts: “By taking personal accounts off the table, Republicans may be boxing themselves into a very bad corner. There are, after all, only three options for Social Security reform: raise taxes, cut benefits, or switch to personal accounts.” These choices mimic those laid out by President Clinton in 1998, although at the time Clinton was arguing for investing in stocks through the Social Security trust fund, not personal accounts.

Here’s the problem: Personal accounts are a valid choice, and one I’ve supported in the past and continue to support. But accounts aren’t exclusive to tax increases or benefit cuts; they don’t, as I’ll explain, reduce the need for these other choices. One problem for the Bush administration’s reform drive in 2005 was that many congressional Republicans had bought into the idea that accounts reduce or eliminate the need for tax increases or benefit cuts. Finding out they don’t may have taken some wind out of their sails. Because of this, combined with some pretty shameless demagoguery from the left, Bush’s reform ideas didn’t even come up for a vote.

President Bush’s 2001 Commission to Strengthen Social Security (on which I was a staffer) wrote that once the program began to run payroll-tax deficits -- something that happened this year -- policymakers would face difficult choices to raise taxes, cut benefits, reduce other programs, or increase the budget deficit. All these claims are true.

Also true, however, is a statement the supercilious younger me made to one of my fellow staffers: With personal accounts, we face the same choices, only sooner. If workers invest part of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts, they could indeed earn higher returns and generate higher benefits without taking more risk. But diverting taxes to accounts leaves the program short of what is needed to pay benefits to today’s retirees. To cover these “transition costs,” we would need to generate new revenues for the program, either by raising taxes, cutting other programs, or borrowing.

But once transition costs are accounted for, the total rate of return on a personal-accounts-based program would be about the same as the current system. (If you’re willing to wade through some math, this paper by Olivia Mitchell, Stephen Zeldes, and John Geanakoplos is pretty much the canonical treatment.) Social Security’s overall rate of return stinks because (a) we paid early generations far more in benefits than they paid in taxes, meaning that later generations must make up the difference; and (b) we didn’t save the trust fund, meaning taxpayers must “repay” something that was supposed to have been an asset. These acts can’t be undone: We’re stuck with them.

Also unchanged would be the program’s financing shortfall, even assuming that account holders gave up a share of their traditional benefits. A pay-as-you-go program like Social Security is always in the hole, such that each generation honors the benefits of the preceding one while hoping their own claims will be honored by the following generation. No generation can break away from this cycle without either ponying up extra cash (tax increases) or defaulting on its promises (benefit cuts). Neither solution is costless.

Now, we could come out ahead if transition costs were funded by cutting other government spending, which at the margin certainly produces benefits below its costs. But we could reap those gains by cutting government spending in the absence of Social Security reform; in any case, few reform proposals have presented a credible way to ensure that non–Social Security outlays are reduced. The most likely path is simply increased debt.

#page#The only way personal accounts could fix Social Security on their own is if accountholders gave up traditional benefits far in excess of the taxes they put into accounts. For instance, individuals might put half their taxes into an account but give up all their traditional benefits. This would fix Social Security, but it’s not clear that most (or even many) workers would take the deal. You might come out ahead if you got solid investment returns, but you could also fall far short. This is just asking accounts to do more than they reasonably can.

That’s why most personal-account plans have worked in two stages: First, do whatever is needed to fix the current system -- cut benefits, raise the retirement age, whatever. Then, offer the option of accounts on relatively favorable terms. This approach is fine, but it’s not the easiest to defend politically. Why? First, you have to admit that the accounts themselves won’t fix the program. Second, you’ll be attacked for the extra costs -- usually borrowed -- that would be incurred during the transition period. Third, you’ll be criticized for putting Social Security benefits at the whims of the stock market. You can respond to these attacks credibly, but you will be spending a lot of time on the defensive. As much as I support accounts philosophically, I’m not sure the political cost-benefit analysis weighs out in their favor, given all the other difficult choices we face on entitlements and the budget.

#ad#So in the end, the choices basically do come down to lower benefits or higher taxes. No one thinks we should cut benefits for true low earners, who need the safety net that Social Security provides. But there’s no reason middle and high earners should derive so much of their retirement income from the government. The real divide over Social Security policy is that the Left wishes to charge higher taxes on higher earners in order to pay higher benefits to higher earners. The Right should respond that these Americans can, should, and will respond to lower benefits by saving more on their own.

An approach that would give many of the benefits of personal accounts with fewer downsides is to fix Social Security’s finances on the benefit side, by increasing the retirement age, reducing benefits for middle and higher earners, and potentially reducing COLA payments to account for the CPI’s overstatement of inflation. Then, to make up the difference in benefits, institute universal 401(k) or IRA accounts. Taxes wouldn’t increase, total retirement income would approach the levels promised under current law, and individual retirement wealth would be increased. Under the circumstances, I’d call that a win.

The short story is that the government should focus on those things only government can do, such as the transfers to lifetime low earners that Social Security provides. Individuals and markets should do what they do best, which includes ordinary retirement saving for middle and high earners. That’s a decent recipe for social policy to begin with, and even more so given the multi-trillion-dollar budget shortfalls we face.

— Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he was the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration and, in 2005, he worked at the White House National Economic Council on Social Security reform.

Andrew G. Biggs

What’s most worrisome is Imam Rauf’s dedication to Islam’s repressive laws.

Location, location, location.

So far, the Ground Zero mosque controversy has focused excessively on its proximity to the scene of the September 11 massacre. The Park51 Islamic center would stand 560 feet from that revered site. Would moving it 5,600 feet away calm this storm?

Perhaps, but far more important is what would happen inside this mosque. That ought to determine if it should be even closer to Ground Zero, or if it even should open anywhere in America.

#ad#Imagine if the mosque’s imam said this:

Our mosque will be the world headquarters of a new Islam that is at peace with the 21st century and that strives to do for Islam what Martin Luther did for Christianity in 1517. That’s when he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg, Germany’s Castle Church, launched the Protestant Reformation, and helped Catholicism correct its excesses.

We will pray every day to save the 2,752 innocent souls slaughtered at the World Trade Center in the name of a militant Islam that we wholeheartedly reject and endeavor to overcome.

We will pray every day to condemn the souls of September 11’s 19 evil perpetrators. May they roast in Hell forever, each morning hotter than the last.

We will pray every day for the rapid defeat of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other violent, Islamic-extremist terrorist groups.

We will pray every day for Islam to be a faith equal -- but not superior -- to other religions that people freely may choose to practice.

We will pray every day for the freedom, equality, and longevity of every human being -- regardless of belief, gender, or sexuality.

We invite Jews, Christians, non-believers, and everyone else to join our efforts. And we humbly ask to pursue them adjacent to where radical Islam committed its greatest modern atrocity. May the light of our example drive the darkness from that day.

If this mosque’s imam preached these sentiments, many -- and perhaps most -- Americans would agree that his antidote to al-Qaeda’s poison could stand 56 feet from the scene of its most heinous crime. Instead, doubts grow about the moderation of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s voice. It seems more likely that the words above would leave him tongue-tied.

• Just 19 days after September 11 -- while Ground Zero still was a flaming, smoking ruin -- Rauf told CBS’s 60 Minutes: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

• Rauf said in 2005 that “the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.” Never mind the millions of Muslims whom America has liberated, or at least tried to rescue from tyranny, in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Somalia. America assisted millions more Muslims after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and is aiding Muslims today in flood-ravaged Pakistan.

• Rauf has repeatedly refused to identify Hamas as a terrorist group.

#page#• Most worrisome, Rauf embraces sharia, the fundamentalist Islamic law responsible for too much of Earth’s totalitarian barbarism. “What Muslims want is to ensure that their secular laws are not in conflict with the Quran or the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad,” Rauf wrote in an April 24, 2009, Huffington Post essay titled “What Sharia Law Is All About.” Rauf added: “What Muslims want is a judiciary that ensures that the laws are not in conflict with the Quran and the Hadith.” He also has written that he wants to give “religious communities more leeway to judge among themselves, according to their laws.” Sharia relies on the Koran, Hadith, and other Islamic texts to punish offenders, too often with sentences that stink of the 7th century A.D.

• A Saudi sharia court is seeking a hospital to enforce its penalty against an unidentified man who paralyzed Abdulaziz al-Mutairi, 22, in an assault with a meat cleaver. Under sharia’s “eye for an eye” principal, Judge Saoud bin Suleiman al-Youssef wants to paralyze the attacker by severing his spinal cord. To their credit, Saudi doctors so far have refused to cooperate in this carnage.

#ad#• Under Iran’s Islamic law, the Guardian reports, twelve women and three men face death by stoning for adultery. After international criticism, Iranian jurists recently announced that several of these individuals instead would be hanged.

• Since Muslims implemented sharia in northern Nigeria in 2000, at least twelve people have received death sentences for homosexuality and adultery. Most of these, however, have been commuted to mere jail time.

• Since January, women in West Aceh, Indonesia, must wear long skirts rather than jeans or trousers. Police enforce this rule, sometimes by cutting the pants that women are caught wearing. “It’s my obligation as a leader to help the people so they won’t suffer in the afterlife,” West Aceh regent Ramli Mansur said in August 18’s Jakarta Globe. “Besides, when women don’t dress according to sharia law, they’re asking to get raped.”

• Once a Muslim, always a Muslim, according to sharia. “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s influential spiritual leader, Sheik Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, declared about Islamic converts to other faiths. The Qatari said these “apostates must be executed.”

• Even snacking can be deadly under sharia. In November 2004, a 13-year-old Iranian boy violated the Ramadan fast. He received 85 lashes, which killed him.

Does Imam Rauf embrace such brutality? Who knows? But the fact that he wants the U.S. to be “sharia compliant” rather than sharia-free should worry every liberty-loving American.

While America battles militant Islam, should a pro-sharia mosque be allowed on our soil? The First Amendment may permit sharia advocacy, much as counseling Marxism-Leninism remained legal even as Americans shivered through the Cold War. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for leaders like Gotham mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama (before his spectacular flip-flop) to applaud a mosque that would enshrine the grotesque and deadly doctrine of sharia. Even 5,600 miles away, such a facility would not be far enough from Ground Zero.

--- New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Deroy Murdock

The new feminism of life as it is really lived.

Could politics end the mommy wars?

What mommy wars, you ask? One short answer is: the ones that make for awkward silences at cocktail parties when a woman is asked what she does and she responds that she raises her children. The feminist revolution would have us believe that’s undignified.

#ad#That’s bunk. It always has been.

With the increased media presence of women of all political stripes, especially in politics -- as candidates, as tea-party players and participants -- that lie is being exposed in a whole new mainstream way, crowding out the delusion of the lamestream (to borrow one woman’s word). Exposing that lie in a reasoned, well-researched, sober way was the goal of a panel presented by the Susan B. Anthony List in Manhattan on the 90th anniversary of the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the constitutional right to vote.

At the heart of the reasonableness of it all was, as moderator Helen Alvaré of George Mason University put it, “women’s lived experience.” You can only mess with reality -- and the natural law -- for so long before your feminist fantasy is revealed to be misery.

The event, billed as “A Conversation on Pro-Life Feminism,” was both a primer on its existence and an attempt to replace the conventional approach to so-called women’s issues. Women are not and never have been a monolith, period, never mind a monolithic voting bloc.

And it was a real conversation. One aiming for real answers about real life, embracing just that. Not life as Ms. and academy radicals portray it.

W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia got to the heart of this mythological mommy war pitting stay-at-home moms against so-called working moms (I say so-called because they are all actually working), continuing the discussion with me after: “Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

“This is particularly true for women who self-identify as gender traditionalists -- who believe men and women are fundamentally different, and that men should focus more on breadwinning and women should focus more on homemaking -- or maternalists -- who believe that infants and toddlers do best when they are cared for by their mother. It is also more likely to be true for women who have children currently in the home.” 

Where is he getting this alternative to the conventional media/political/cultural understanding of the world? Wilcox bases his analysis on the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, which, he explains, “indicates that, among married mothers with children in the home under 18, only 18 percent of married mothers would prefer to work full-time; by contrast, 46 percent would prefer to work part-time, and 36 percent would prefer to stay at home. Clearly, the most popular option for married mothers is part-time work, whereas only about one-fifth of these mothers would prefer to work full time.”

If it becomes tolerable, even in supposedly sophisticated circles, to admit the obvious -- that men and women are fundamentally different -- those numbers may even increase.

Feminists claim to be all about choice, yet many women in our feminist paradise seem to be doing what they really wouldn’t choose to do, given other options. Most working women would like to work fewer hours and be home with their kids. According to Wilcox, “74 percent of married mothers who are working full-time would prefer to work fewer hours or not at all.”

#page#About half of American women, says Wilcox, are “adaptive”: They “have interests in both work and family, and . . . they seek to scale back their work when they have children in the home -- especially infants and toddlers. But when they don’t have children, or their children are older, adaptive women are often interested in working outside the home on a full-time basis. So their orientation to work and family shifts over the life course, and according to the needs of their children.” So they’re not stay-at-home moms or working moms: They’re women who do what’s best for them and their families at a given time. They “don’t fit the standard conservative stay-at-home model or the liberal full-time-working-woman model. For that reason, they are often invisible in media and academic debates about work and family.”

#ad#Neither political party, says Wilcox, addresses these issues in a clear way. “This is particularly unfortunate when it comes to poor and working-class families, who are more likely to have wives and mothers working many more hours than they would like to. . . . Poor and working-class families are much more likely to break up than are affluent families, where women have more choices when it comes to juggling work and family,” he says.

Like a woman who goes from the PTA to being mayor of Wasilla? Wilcox does see this adaptiveness in some of the women we’ve been seeing this cycle. He points to Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in South Dakota, and Michele Bachmann in Minnesota. “These are candidates who have pursued a variety of work-family strategies in their effort to realize their dual commitments to family and public life over the years. And they don’t fit neatly in any boxes,” he says.

Wilcox tells me that “both parties could do a lot more to make it easier for women to realize their ideal work-family strategies by promoting public policies that encourage flexible work arrangements, dramatically expand the child tax credit, and add more off-ramps and on-ramps for women who are seeking to move out of or into the workforce.”

Will this authentic view of womanhood usurp the old political archetypes of what women want? The conversation has begun to rise above self-identified feminists’ assertions as to women’s desires. May it continue and bear fruit. And, whoever wins or loses, this is a whole new playing field in politics, one that more accurately reflects who American women actually are and, yes, what they really want. The American woman wants to annihilate this idea that career is everything. She wants a life. She wants life. And she wants help in being adaptive, not pressure to be something she’s not.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com. This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt it, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com.

Kathryn Jean Lopez

Restive Alaskans, Aussies challenge elite assumptions.

In this tumultuous political year, the latest sharp surprises come from the far reaches of the Anglosphere -- Alaska and Australia.

These were lands to which Capt. James Cook voyaged even as the seaboard Atlantic colonists were rebelling against king and Parliament in London. Cook’s charts of the southern coast of Australia are still in use, and he sailed from there to Hawaii and then through the Bering Strait to the ice-choked Arctic Sea. You can see splendid murals of his voyages in the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage.

Australia joined the Anglosphere when the British established a convict settlement there in 1788, and Alaska joined when Secretary of State William Seward purchased it from Russia in 1867.

Today they are commonwealths with economies thriving on mining and oil. Australia’s 22 million people have a massive export trade with China; Alaska’s 700,000 people, as Sarah Palin accurately noted, live in a state that has boundaries with Canada and Russia.

Neither the August 21 federal election in Australia nor the August 24 primary in Alaska were supposed to produce surprises. One reason: Both have economies relatively untroubled by the financial crisis and recession.

#ad#In Australia, the Labor government headed by Julia Gillard (after the intra-party ouster two months before of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd) was expected to cruise to victory, as Australian parties have after one term in government since 1930. The new leader of the conservative Liberal party, Tony Abbott, was considered too extremist to win.

In Alaska, Republican senator Lisa Murkowski was expected to easily win renomination over Fairbanks lawyer and political newcomer Joe Miller.

But the voters had other ideas.

In Australia, the Liberals and Labor are both short of the 76-seat majority in Parliament. Postal and provisional ballots are still being counted, as both parties seek the votes of five independents, while Labor has the support of the one Green candidate elected.

In Alaska, Miller’s narrow lead of 1,668 votes may vanish as at least 7,600 absentee and mail ballots are counted.

Whatever the final outcomes, there are lessons to be learned. One is that the current unpopularity of left parties in the Anglosphere (Republicans lead Democrats by a record margin in polls on voting for the U.S. House) are not just a reaction to bad economic times.

Australia’s Labor party was hurt by its attempt to slap a 30 percent tax on the mining industry. Voters evidently understood that soaking the rich would hurt just about everyone.

And Labor’s attempt to put burdens on carbon use, rejected in the Australian Senate, was a liability, even in the country with the world’s highest incidence of skin cancer.

Murkowski was hurt by her assertion in a debate that the Constitution put no limits on Congress’s ability to make laws. She won votes from Alaska insiders and Alaska Natives for supporting spending on local programs, but not as many as local pundits expected.

The key votes against Labor in Australia and against Murkowski were cast in fast-growing areas -- in semitropical Queensland in Australia, in the Matanuska and Susitna Valley (including Sarah Palin’s Wasilla) in Alaska.

We see there what we saw in the Massachusetts special Senate election in the suburban rings around Boston that depend on the private sector rather than government and universities: a massive repudiation of the liberal policies of what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls “the educated class.”

And we did not see any sign in Australia or Alaska that the cultural issue card can trumping other issues. Australia’s Abbott was supposed to be unelectable because of his opposition to abortion; turns out that wasn’t a problem. In Alaska, a ballot proposal putting restrictions on abortion brought out voters for whom Murkowski’s pro-choice stance was a liability.

The results in Australia and Alaska are congruent with developments elsewhere in the Anglosphere. The British coalition government headed by David Cameron since the election in May is getting wide approval for its 25 percent cuts in most departments’ spending. The Canadian government headed by Conservative Stephen Harper seems firmly in power in a country that has long seemed well to the left of the United States.

“The educated class” in Sydney, Melbourne and Washington, at a loss to understand this, is furiously denouncing fellow citizens as bigots. That makes no more sense, and wins no more votes, than blaming Captain Cook.

-- Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 the Washington Examiner.

Michael Barone

Today, I think we’ll wrap up this Salzburg journal, these “souvenirs.” For the first three installments, please follow the links: I, II, and III.

Cynthia Polsky is a grand, wonderful, and invaluable lady of New York. She and her husband Leon do any number of things, serving on boards, keeping the arts alive, and so on. Mrs. Polsky herself is an artist. The Polskys have been coming to Salzburg for over 20 years. And Mrs. Polsky has what you might call Salzburg roots.

#ad#Her father was Joseph Hazen, a pioneer in the movie business. Working for Warner Bros., he “wrote the contract between the studio and Edison Vitaphone that resulted in ‘The Jazz Singer,’” the first talkie. (I’m quoting from an obit, here.) He later left Warner Bros. to partner with Hal Wallis in what became Wallis-Hazen Productions. Mrs. Polsky’s mother was Lita Annenberg Hazen, daughter of Moses and Sadie, sister of Walter.

Incidentally, Mrs. Polsky’s cousin is Donald Kahn, a friend of National Review and The New Criterion -- and one of the principal benefactors of the Salzburg Festival. He lives here in Salzburg, as well as in other places.

This year, Mrs. Polsky tells some of us an interesting story -- I will relate it briefly, just the outlines. Her mother and father honeymooned in Salzburg: in August 1936. Max Reinhardt, one of the founders of the festival -- along with Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal -- gave them the use of Schloss Leopoldskron. It was his wedding present to them. The Hazens brought along the Warners, Jack and Ann. A very fine time was had by all: You can tell by the pictures.

Joseph Hazen had been to Salzburg several times before, attending the festival (which began in 1920). For the bride, it was the first trip. She filled up a trunk with dirndls, the Austrian dresses -- including little ones. Cynthia Polsky would grow up in those.

Of course, after 1938 or so . . .

We’ll flash-forward. After the war and Holocaust, Hazen attended the Nuremberg trials, taking pictures, both still and moving. They exist somewhere, in archives.

The Polskys first came to Salzburg in 1989, at the invitation of her cousin Donald. They are an adornment to Salzburg society, during Festspielzeit, festival time.

#*#At lunch one day, I’m seated next to a strikingly beautiful woman, a senior citizen. She is German, but has lived for many years in Salzburg (as I understand it). Her father was a German general -- a Nazi general, if you will: Hermann Ritter von Speck. He was the first German general to die in the war. The year was 1940, the month was June; the place was France.

According to his daughter, he wanted to die, and arranged to die. He felt he could not break his oath to the army -- he could not desert. And his Catholic faith prevented him from committing suicide -- suicide straight out, you might say. So, he put himself in the line of fire.

In his dying words, he did not say, “Give my love to my family,” or anything like that. He said, “It had to be this way.”

His daughter went to 13 different schools in 12 years. You can imagine the tumult of her life. (Less tumultuous than many, to be sure.) In the last five years of the war, she did not participate in any Nazi groups. Her mother forbade it. When officials questioned the mother about this, she said, “This is General von Speck’s daughter -- I think we have paid enough.” Or words to that effect.

As a woman in her 20s, the general’s daughter spent a few years in New York, working on the Upper East Side. She loved it. But she eventually missed her language and her culture and returned home.

She has a lot to tell, as do many people here. In my experience, people are quite open about the war years, the Nazi period. I like talking to them -- and feel the clock is ticking. Children know more than grandchildren, etc.

#*#The general’s daughter tells me something interesting. But first I have to relate something, about my first visit to Salzburg, years ago. Doing what comes naturally, I crossed the street, when there were no cars coming. I did that whether the sign said “Walk” or “Don’t Walk.” But no one else did. The Salzburgers: They just stood there, until the light changed. No matter what. Could have been the dead of night.

And if you cross the street while others are not -- it’s kind of awkward. So you stop doing it. And I have mainly stopped doing it, but not entirely. The urge to cross is just too strong.

I tell all this to the general’s daughter. And she says gaily, “I cross too, if cars are not coming!” Maybe the influence of her American years, long ago?

#*#I have a friend who’s a native Salzburger but who has lived in America most of her life. Once, someone asked her how many Hapsburgs there are in Austria. She responded, “As many as there are gas stations in America.”

I have met a few of these Hapsburgs. Some years ago, I met the would-be emperor, the pretender to the throne. This year, I meet another Hapsburg, who I’m told is above the other in pedigree and hierarchy and is “the real pretender.”

I just love that phrase, don’t you? “The real pretender.”

#*#I have a favorite restaurant, in Anif, outside of Salzburg (where Herbie the K. -- Herbert von Karajan -- lived). It is named for a family. And my friend -- the Salzburger who has lived in America most of her life -- says, “Oh, they were the biggest Nazis in town.”

Great. Food’s still good, however.

#page##*#My friend’s family was in the candle business, and they owned a factory. One day, their foreman came in, all cut up and bloody. My friend’s father exclaimed, “Matthias, what happened to you?” The foreman grinned with relish: “Oh, those Jews have had it coming for a long time. We smashed up all their shops.”

This was a little Salzburg Kristallnacht; the foreman had been a secret Nazi. Salzburg has many, many stories . . .

#ad##*#I meet an Egyptian, resident in Salzburg for many years. He is from Alexandria -- beautiful English, of course. Slightly British. And he laments that old Alexandria is gone, long gone. It was a cosmopolitan, even a chic, city. But Nasser and his gang came along and wrecked the place, along with Egypt at large. A veil was drawn over the city and the country -- and that veil has become more literal.

We talk a little presidential politics: Mohamed ElBaradei? The Salzburg Egyptian likes him -- anything to break out of the pattern of “presidential dictatorship.” Anything for a little liberalization. “I also like Boutros-Ghali. He could be president. But he would never make it, because he’s a Christian. If I expressed support for him, I would be denounced -- even by my friends.”

Great.

#*#Krystian Zimerman is scheduled to give a recital here -- a recital in the festival. As you may remember, this marvelous Polish pianist is boycotting the United States. Why? Because of our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he is happy to play in Austria and other moral leaders among nations.

He is sick, and has to bow out. His substitute is Arcadi Volodos, a Russian and another marvelous pianist. Not a boycotter, as far as I know.

#*#Feel like a picture? A famous shot -- through the Mirabell Gardens, looking up to the Festung. The gardens were deserted (pretty much) at this moment -- owing to the early hour. Go here.

#*#Another shot? This is just another little cellphone job, looking up the river -- or is it down? Don’t know. Who am I, Magellan? Davy Crockett? Anyway, here.

#*#Is Crockett the only Davey who is “Davy,” rather than “Davey”? Strange, that absence of “e.”

#*#When covering concerts and operas here in Salzburg, I notice a dog not barking: no cellphones. Cellphones do not go off, as they go off routinely in concert halls and opera houses in New York. I find this remarkable (which is why I am mentioning it). One night, however, a cellphone does go off: at an inopportune moment, during a song recital -- during Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch, sung by Angelika Kirchschlager and Ian Bostridge. Otherwise, in about 14 concerts and operas -- no cellphones. In New York, there are two, three, four per performance. Maybe I should make a scientific study.

Some weeks ago, Paavo Järvi and his band from Bremen (they don’t call it that) played in Alice Tully Hall, during the Mostly Mozart Festival. One of their encores was Valse triste -- and, in a particular section, Järvi had his band play very, very softly: almost freakishly so. I wrote for The New Criterion (words to this effect), “It was a minor miracle that no cellphone went off. If it had, it would have sounded like an atomic bomb.”

#*#The delicious Angelika K., mentioned above? She is a native Salzburger -- once a member of the children’s chorus in Carmen.

#*#There is a restaurant here called Carpe Diem -- very modern, slick, and excellent. Owned, I believe, by the man who concocted and sells Red Bull. He is one of the richest men in Austria, if not numero uno. At Carpe Diem, they have “finger food” (in addition to the luxury stuff). And this food comes in ice-cream cones -- for example, mini-hamburgers do; and beef tartar. The beef tartar, atop its cone, looks like raspberry sorbet.

#*#When you’re walking up the Kapuzinerberg -- which is very steep -- there is a rule: You don’t want to be passed by nuns. By fit, spry nuns with muscly legs. Intolerable. If one tries to pass me, I’ll elbow her into the ditch, I swear.

#*#Want to see Salzburg’s golden boy -- and Austria’s golden boy, and music’s golden boy -- tucked into the Kapuzinerberg? Here he is.

#*#I know I’ve made this joke before -- maybe some readers haven’t heard it: I get to the top of a peak; I behold some breathtaking view. I make to recite “God’s Grandeur,” that fine chestnut of a poem: and I can’t remember the words . . .

#*#You now what America does very, very well? Milkshakes. The Euros have us beat in many areas; in milkshakes, we are untouchable.

You know what Europe does very, very badly? Orange juice. Our worst orange juice -- frozen, from concentrate -- is the nectar of the gods compared with the foul liquid these people peddle under the name of “orange juice.”

You know what Europe does very, very well? A million things . . .

#*#August 22, 2010, is the 90th anniversary of the Salzburg Festival -- of the first performance, which was of Jedermann, Hofmannsthal’s treatment of the English morality tale Everyman. I knew a man who attended the first performance: Dr. George Sgalitzer, who was seven years old at the time. He was taken there by his grandparents, who lived outside Salzburg. They liked theater, but, interestingly enough, did not like music.

Dr. Sgalitzer, a Viennese, became an American -- a military doctor who lived in Seattle and traveled the world. He also became the senior patron of the Salzburg Festival, never missing a summer, staying in the Sacher Hotel -- in the same room. Right up till the end, he walked all around town. I remember going to the Felsenreitschule with him -- this was in his last year, just a few years ago. Before we set out (after dinner at the Sacher), I said, “George, would you like to take a taxi?” He looked at me like I was nuts.

Anyway, on 8/22/10, the 90th anniversary, “callers” all day long shout out the signature Jedermann “call.” They do this from rooftops, hanging from steeples, wherever: “Jedermann!” “Je-der-mann!” Yeah, yeah, I hear you.

Or, alternatively, Hey, buddy, I’m not just any man, okay?

#*#Friends, thank you for joining me for these Salzburg scribbles. I will have a piece on the festival in the next NR. And then more -- considerably more -- in the October New Criterion.

See you soon, for other stuff.
 

#JAYBOOK#

Jay Nordlinger

Rauf and his friends employ different methods, but they are on the same team.

Hamas is a shibboleth. If you want to know whether an ostensible Muslim “moderate” is really moderate, ask him if Hamas is a terrorist organization.

It is really not a hard question, even if Feisal Rauf can’t -- or won’t -- answer it. Rauf, the would-be imam of the controversial Ground Zero mosque, is also a stud in the State Department’s stable of ready-to-travel-on-your-dime “moderates.” That same State Department has branded Hamas a terrorist organization, and we can’t even get it to say that about the Taliban, the guys we’re fighting in the overseas contingency operation formerly known as the War on Terror.

During a WABC radio interview, Aaron Klein three times pressed Rauf to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Rauf bobbed and weaved in classic Islamist style. “I’m not a politician,” he replied, as if only politicians trouble themselves over whether terrorists are terrorists. “I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” Avoid the issues? You don’t say!

#ad#But it is not a complex question, no more complex than “Does Derek Jeter play for the Yankees?” It is a straightforward question that Islamists complicate with clever casuistry, carefully designed to ring all the right chimes for our opinion elites and their media pitchmen.

TWISTING THE RELIGION WITH POLITICS?
On Tuesday, I appeared on Scoreboard, a Fox Business Channel program, to debate the proposed mosque with Dawood Kringle, a prison imam who is a perfect fit for the correctional system in Michael Bloomberg’s New York City. Like the mayor, Imam Kringle knows and admires Imam Rauf, so it’s only natural that he supports the Ground Zero mosque. He reasons, in his best Rauf-speak, that it would be “a tangible manifestation and demonstration of the spiritual principles of Islam as applied to everyone’s lives.”

Exactly: The main problem with Islamists is that they want to apply the principles of Islam -- which are far from limited to “spiritual principles” -- to everyone’s lives. It never seems to register with Imam Rauf’s apologists that we already have thousands of mosques and Islamic centers in the United States, and no one is suggesting these should be shut down, even though many of them are hotbeds of rabidly anti-Western ideology that have not proved to be reassuring “tangible manifestations” of how Islam is lived.

Nor does it seem to matter that Rauf’s project is an exercise in self-absorbed indignation. Claiming to “build bridges,” Islamists demand that their First Amendment right to religious freedom (which no one has denied) be deferred to while urging that your First Amendment right to free speech be smothered by governmental scolds -- including a preening president, a demagogic mayor, and a House Speaker who wants to use her public office to investigate the project’s opponents (i.e., 70 percent of the public). The anticipated “tangible manifestation” in question not only divides a nation still under jihadist siege; it deeply wounds the 9/11 families, the remains of whose slaughtered loved ones are still being retrieved from the vicinity of Ground Zero.

Still, even Kringle’s desultory case for the mosque paled in comparison with his adamant refusal to answer the question, “Is Hamas a terrorist organization?” You can watch the short debate for yourself here. There are long pauses, shucks, jives, and gibberish -- but no answer:

Asman: Do you believe Hamas is a terrorist organization?

Kringle: [Pause] I would, um -- [pause]

McCarthy: That’s not a hard question.

Asman: [To McCarthy] Hold on a second.

Kringle:  No, no, no. I --

Asman:  Is Hamas a terrorist organization? A simple question.

Kringle: I believe that there’s people, uh, connected with Hamas that are, uh -- advocate terrorism --

Asman: Is Hamas, though, a terrorist organization, as the State Department says it is?

Kringle: I believe that the people -- that people that, uh, that, uh, exist on the fringe of there -- Hamas is a political party that, uh, that grew out of, uh, out of, uh, what happened to, uh, Palestine. Obviously, there’s going to be people that are, uh, that are going to twist up, uh, the religion to serve their political agendas.

This is just counterfactual bunk. It is served up by the imam and many likeminded apologists as though Hamas did not have a richly documented history, and as though Islamists did not reject the very premise that religious and political agendas can be distinguished.#page#

THE CHARTER
The name “Hamas” is derived from the Arabic phrase for “Islamic Resistance Movement” (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya). It was established in late 1987, at the start of the Intifada, for the singular purpose of waging a violent jihad that, Hamas pledged, would continue until Israel’s annihilation. This is not my opinion. It is an undeniable fact -- regardless of how often denied. Set aside its decades of barbaric attacks, its celebration of a death culture in which streets are named after “martyrs” and children are garbed in mock suicide belts at summer camp. Hamas proclaimed its existence in a formal charter that could not be more emphatic:

The Islamic Resistance Movement erupted in order to play its role in the path of its Lord. In so doing, it joined its hands with those of all Jihad fighters for the purpose of liberating Palestine. The souls of its Jihad fighters will encounter those of all Jihad fighters who have sacrificed their lives in the land of Palestine since it was conquered by the Companion of the Prophet, be Allah’s prayer and peace upon him, and until this very day. This is the Charter of the Islamic Resistance (Hamas). . . . Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.

Self-consciously, Hamas cast itself as an Islamist alternative to Yasser Arafat’s comparatively secular/socialist Palestinian nationalism. Consistent with Islamist ideology, it rejects the separation of mosque and state, because its political objectives are Islamic imperatives: “Nothing is loftier or deeper in Nationalism than waging Jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims,” the charter decrees. Jihad is an obligation of Islam to spread the faith until it is universally dominant. For Islamists, “Palestine” is “the land of the Muslims” -- never mind that Israel was the Jewish homeland before there were Muslims. Thus, the charter explains, jihad -- savage, bloody jihad -- “becomes an individual duty binding on every Muslim man and woman.”

So unabashedly committed to violence is Hamas that it rejects peace negotiations and diplomatic settlements as a matter of principle. The charter avers:

The so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad.

Nor could it be clearer that the jihad is to continue until every last Jew has been killed or disappears. On this point, the charter asserts: “Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

#ad#With due respect to Imam Kringle and Islam’s other American cheerleaders, this neither “twists up the religion to serve a political agenda” nor “hijacks” Islam. Hamas, to the contrary, accurately quoted Islamic scripture. As the scholar Andrew Bostom observes, the pronouncement by Mohammed about Muslims killing all remaining Jews on the Day of Judgment comes straight from a canonical hadith, Sahih Muslim, Book 41, No. 6985. Hadiths are collections of the prophet’s words and deeds, and the one in question flows seamlessly from the Koran itself, from verses like Sura 2:61, which condemns Jews for purportedly rejecting Allah’s signs and “slaying his Messengers.” That indictment, reiterated in Sura 3:112, is echoed in the Hamas charter’s opening passages: “They have incurred anger from their Lord, and wretchedness is laid upon them. That is because they used to disbelieve the revelations of Allah, and slew the Prophets wrongfully.” Thus, the charter warns, “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

THE BROTHERHOOD
This is why Imam Rauf and his friends get so tongue-tied when it comes to Hamas. Like many of Rauf’s principal supporters in the United States, Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood; in fact, it is its Palestinian branch. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Hamas itself says, in the charter:

Article Two: The Link between Hamas and the Association of Muslim Brothers: The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.

Again: no separation of the spiritual and the temporal, of Islamic and civil law. They are one. And, it turns out, the top priority of Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative is the Sharia Index Project, which is designed to plant and expand Islamic law in every country. Wonder of wonders, that just happens to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s top priority -- the installation of sharia being the necessary precondition to the Islamicizing of a society. And, lo and behold, Rauf’s partners in the Sharia Index Project include Jamal Barzinji and his International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).

#page#As Zeyno Baran recounts in an essay for the Hudson Institute’s invaluable series, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology (available here, scroll to page 78), Barzinji is a pivotal figure in the construction of the Brotherhood’s American network. Barzinji formed IIIT as a think tank geared toward the “Islamicization of knowledge.” Later, perceiving the need to establish an “umbrella organization” for Islamist groups in the United States, Barzinji forged the creation in 1981 of the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA later funded Hamas, using its Illinois headquarters to house the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) -- an ostensible “charity” set up by the Brotherhood to underwrite Hamas’s operations. Thereafter, when the Brotherhood created the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to be its public-relations arm (disguised as a civil-rights organization), seed money came from HLF.

In late 2008, IIIT and ISNA republished Rauf’s book, What’s Right with Islam, under the new title, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America. The book had been released in Malaysia, in 2004, under the more ominous title A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11 -- “dawa” being the stealth form of jihad by which the Brotherhood promises to “conquer America,” according to its spiritual leader, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a figure admired by Rauf. Barzinji personally chaired the meeting that launched the republication of Rauf’s book, and the IIIT subsequently hosted Rauf at a December 2008 event. ISNA and CAIR, meantime, have become leading advocates for the Ground Zero mosque. Both groups are enjoying a resurgence in the era of Obama’s “outreach” to Islam, notwithstanding their designation by the Justice Department as unindicted coconspirators in the recent HLF prosecution, in which several defendants were convicted for financing Hamas.

#ad#Barzinji has been involved in large-scale American mosque projects before. He is a founder of the Dar al-Hijra mosque and Islamic community center in Virginia (about which I’ve written here). His co-founders included Ismail Elbarasse, another Brotherhood heavyweight who helped his former business partner, Mousa abu Marzook, run Hamas from Virginia in the early Nineties. (Deported from the United States in 1994, Marzook is now the No. 2 Hamas official.) Besides being a hub of Hamas support, the Dar al-Hijra center is now infamous for having retained al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki as one of its imams, as well as for ministering to some of the 9/11 hijackers, the Fort Hood assassin, and an al-Qaeda operative now serving a life sentence for plotting to murder Pres. George W. Bush.

ONE-STATE SOLUTION
In repeatedly refusing to condemn Hamas during the WABC radio interview, Rauf took pains to offer the caveat that “the targeting of civilians is wrong. It is a sin in our religion. Whoever does it, targeting civilians is wrong. I am a supporter of the state of Israel.” Nonetheless, the interview was a public-relations disaster. Attempting to contain the damage, Rauf’s office put out a statement: “Imam Feisal has always condemned terrorism (see his . . . hundreds of speeches). Hamas is both a political movement and a terrorist organization. Hamas commits atrocious acts of terror. Imam Feisal has forcefully and consistently condemned all forms of terrorism, including those committed by Hamas, as un-Islamic.”

These are clever assertions. They give Rauf’s admirers ammunition to plead his case but leave his Brotherhood friends pacified. Yes, Rauf now appears, finally, to concede that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Yet it is one he cannot bring himself to condemn because, voila, it’s also a “political movement” (just like the Muslim Brotherhood!). Rauf condemns “terrorism” in the abstract, but don’t ask him to condemn specific terrorists. Being against “terrorism” is safe: The Brotherhood does not consider attacks by Hamas to be “terrorism” -- they are resistance (as in “the Islamic Resistance Movement” -- Hamas). Rauf declares that “targeting civilians is wrong,” but when it comes to Israel, a country fighting for its survival, Brotherhood ideology emphasizes that all Jewish men and unmarried women are drafted into the armed forces, and most remain in the reserves for years thereafter; therefore, most Jewish Israelis are not considered civilians by Hamas.

But wait a second, you say: Didn’t Rauf declare outright that he is a “supporter of the state of Israel”? He certainly did, but he was careful not to say in what form. In fact, he supports a state of Israel stripped of its Jewish character. Earlier this week, a 2005 speech was uncovered in which Rauf explained that he sees Israel, with its growing Arab sector, becoming “post-Zionist,” “secular,” and “multicultural.” He perceives its “identity” as a Jewish state having “shifted enormously” since its founding. Consequently, he rejects the so-called “two-state solution” -- the American government dream of a Jewish state and a Muslim state, co-existing side-by-side in peace. Instead, Rauf concluded, “My own personal analysis tells me that a one-state solution is a more coherent one than a two-state solution.”

One state, no longer a Jewish state, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River -- you know it’s funny: That just happens to be Hamas’s plan.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Is a mighty stock rally next?

It’s a bit too early for House Republican leader John Boehner to measure the drapes and pick out new wallpaper. But the Intrade pay-to-play prediction markets are now showing a 76 percent chance of a GOP House takeover in November, along with a 60 percent probability that Republicans will capture at least seven new Senate seats. 

So Boehner’s lengthy broadside attack on Obamanomics at the City Club of Cleveland this week takes on special meaning. Headlines following the speech were all about Boehner’s call for the resignation of Obama policy generals Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. But the more substantive question is this: What might a newly ascendant congressional Republican majority actually stand for?

#ad#Republican leaders are expected to publish a governing agenda next month, probably an updated version of the bold and successful Newt Gingrich/Dick Armey “Contract with America” of 1994. John Boehner is a key alumnus of that effort. But folks around the country are waiting to see if congressional Republicans will make a strong and aggressive case for a true economic-growth and jobs agenda now, in 2010.

The stock market, for example, has known for months that the GOP will capture the House. But investors are not yet confident that the GOP will focus on GDP, instead of mere ambiguous generalities, trying to be all things to all people. Indeed, if the Republicans borrow heavily from the tea-party “Contract from America” -- and its call for constitutional limits to government, tough spending restraint, free-market reforms, and supply-side tax policies -- stocks could mount a mighty rally in the weeks ahead.

Well, Mr. Boehner’s speech was a very promising beginning to all this.

Near the top he said, “Right now, America’s employers are afraid to invest in an economy stalled by ‘stimulus’ spending and hamstrung by uncertainty. The prospect of higher taxes, stricter rules, and more regulations has employers sitting on their hands.”

His first proposal to break that uncertainty? Boehner said, “President Obama should announce he will not carry out his plan to impose job-killing tax hikes on families and small businesses.” In other words, extend all the Bush tax cuts. To this end, Boehner quoted former President John F. Kennedy: “An economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs.”

And Boehner was just getting started.

#page#He called for an Obama pledge to veto any lame-duck congressional actions that would damage the economy, including the union card-check bill and a national cap-and-trade energy tax.

He called for the repeal of Obamacare’s job-killing 1099 mandate that would require small-business paperwork to show any purchases of more than $600.

#ad#He slammed Obamacare in general, noting the creation of more than 160 boards, bureaucracies, programs, and commissions, and the 3,833 pages of new regulations already in place.

He called for an aggressive spending-reduction package that would rollback non-defense discretionary expenditures to 2008 levels, before the stimulus plan was put in place.

He said he wants to end TARP and all TARP bailouts.

He bemoaned the fact that no one in the White House has any business experience, chiding Obama by saying, “We’ve tried 19 months of government-as-community-organizer. It hasn’t worked. Our fresh start needs to begin now.”

He called for a freeze on federal pay and hiring. He noted that, on average, federal employees now make more than double what private-sector workers take in.

He cited Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan’s plan for $1.3 trillion in specific spending cuts. He called for strict budget caps. And he argued for pro-growth tax reform that would get rid of “the undergrowth of deductions, credits, and special carve-outs in order to bring simplicity and certainty, instead of transfer payments to the favored few.”

And he spotlighted the fiscal restraint of governors Bob McConnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, elected Republican officials who balanced their budgets by throttling spending instead of raising taxes.

All this is good. Very good.

Instead of playing it safe, it looks like Republicans intend to be aggressive in changing the statist, government-planning, socialist-lite agenda of President Obama, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It sounds like the new Republican party intends to end the ongoing war against private-capital investment, entrepreneurial rewards, free-market incentives, and private business that is plaguing the economy and sapping the strength of the recovery.

In a little over two months, the election will take place. In a little over four months, the 2003 tax cuts will expire. And in just a few weeks, congressional Republicans will presumably put more meat on the bones of their new platform. John Boehner’s Cleveland speech was a very encouraging beginning. Now let’s see if the Republican’s next step will truly provide some much needed optimism to the economy and body politic.

-- Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

Larry Kudlow