Right Wing Nut House

My latest column at FrontPage.com looks at the announcement made by the Iranian government yesterday that the reactor at Bushehr has become “operational.” While most analysts agree there is no “immediate” danger from the plant as far as contributing to the Iranian’s ability to make a bomb, there are legitimate concerns about what might occur down the road.

The question with regards to how much of a threat the reactor poses has always been based on the reliability of the current agreements between the Iranian and Russian governments. Once up and running at full power, the plant will produce between 100 and 300 kilograms of plutonium a year – a by-product of spent fuel rods. Since as little as 6 kgs of plutonium is needed to build a bomb, the temptation for the Iranians to cheat will be great.

Whether they could get away with it is the nub of the matter. The Iranians have agreed that Moscow will supply Bushehr’s fuel rods and remove the spent fuel for shipment back to Russia where it will be de-processed. It will be very difficult to divert plutonium elsewhere as long as the Russians don’t deliberately look the other way. Also, the IAEA will be inspecting the plant regularly for safety concerns — a regime that includes keeping track of the fuel cycle at the plant.

This is the logic behind Bushehr being no “immediate” threat. But there are also legitimate concerns about Iran’s intentions with regard to the plant, and even some suspicion about Russia’s motives in selling and reprocessing the fuel rods.

Iran has threatened to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) several times. If they ever made good on those threats, activity at Bushehr would come under increased scrutiny. Within a few years, Iran will be technically capable of creating their own fuel rods, thus obviating the need for Moscow to supply them and consequently, removing the necessity for the Russians to remove them for reprocessing. With Iran in complete control of the nuclear fuel cycle, and no inspectors looking over their shoulder, the chance that the Iranians will take advantage of the situation is too great to ignore.

The question of not trusting the Russians to hold up their end of the deal and allow Iran to cheat is more a matter of politics as it is one of intent. Why would Russia do it? To make life miserable for the US and the West? The risk to Russia would seem to outweigh any value in allowing the Iranians to keep some of the plutonium from the spent fuel rods. No doubt Russia would be considered culpable if the Iranians were to use a plutonium bomb on Israel or the West. There would be unknown, but probably severe consequences from the rest of the world if such an event were to occur.

Another possible threat from Bushehr comes from contacts the Iranians may develop in using Russian technicians to help run the plant. It’s no secret among proliferation experts that Russian nuclear workers are prime targets of nuclear smugglers. Also, the Russians have a history of not keeping good track of their nuclear materials. Bought off nuclear workers might assist the Iranians in keeping some of the plant’s plutonium, and sloppy record keeping by Russia might never discover the discrepancies.

That last scenario is admittedly a long shot. But when discussing nuclear weapons, any possibility, no matter how remote, must be entertained. There is no margin for error — especially when considering Iran’s intent to develop a bomb.

This is more a symbolic victory for the Iranians than anything substantial. They finally got the project working despite enormous pressure from the west. We’ll see if the Russians hold up their end of the bargain, although allowing the Iranians to cheat would not be to their advantage.

I have an article up at FrontPage.com critiquing the president’s speech from yesterday. Needless to say, we were not amused.

As sample:

As for his own plan, the president proposed massive tax increases on the “rich,” cuts in defense spending, Medicare and Medicaid “reform,” and closing tax loopholes, while continuing to “invest” in clean energy, education, medical research, and transportation. He would leave Medicare and Medicaid relatively untouched, while claiming that his plan would cut $4 trillion over the next 12 years.

Yet, the president offered no specifics on the cuts he was advocating except broad, unrealistic dollar amounts. For example, the president believes we can realize budget savings by cutting $1 trillion from interest payments on the debt over the next 12 years. But interest rates are near zero now, and it is highly unlikely that they will remain that low for the next 12 years, especially given the fact that inflation is rearing its head. Some analysts are predicting debt service payments to rise from its current $196 billion to a whopping $800 billion by 2016 as a result of rising interest rates.

The president’s Medicare proposal is equally unclear. Obama proposed that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board can keep costs down. The president said he would do this by “chang[ing] the way we pay for health care — not by the procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results.” Obama clearly believes he can slow the growth of Medicare by strengthening the advisory board, which will recommend the best ways to reduce spending while still providing seniors with adequate care. The president claims that these measures will save an additional $500 billion by 2023. If this number is as real as his $1 trillion in Medicare “savings” to come out of Obamacare - savings that are dubious in the extreme - the result will be little or nothing done about an entitlement program that is going broke and could sink the US economy by itself eventually.

Obama offered no specific cuts in defense beyond savings that would occur in winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a promise to look into more cuts. He will do this by conducting a “fundamental review” of our “role in a changing world” and examine our mission and capabilities. Practically speaking, he will look to reducing our readiness, which is the easiest and least painful part of the military budget to cut, but the one which is the most dangerous to skimp on.

The president’s plan was claimed to have been based loosely on the report issued by his Deficit Reduction Commission, which recommended broad cuts in government programs and smaller tax increases. Both parties rejected the findings of the commission as unrealistic and unworkable.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the president seems to believe he is scarcely culpably for the deficit crisis himself. Obama’s long, misleading narrative on how the deficit was created at the beginning of his Wednesday speech, completely absolved him of any responsibility for the $4.5 trillion in debt his administration has piled on in just two years. At times, it was a surreal performance, as the president talked about problems with the deficit as if his administration’s increase of nearly 40% in federal spending never happened. He placed the entire blame for our fiscal woes on his predecessor - something he has been doing since he was sworn in.

Obama had no intention of making this speech a statement of policy. It was a red meat, brutally partisan, dishonest, misleading hash that “poisoned the well” as Paul Ryan remarked, for any kind of bi-partisan negotiations. Extraordinarily irresponsible in its tenor and intent, one could almost hear his liberal base screaming “Yes! Hit ‘em again!”

Senior editor at the Atlantic Clive Crook:

My instant unguarded reaction, in fact, was to find it not just weak but pitiful. I honestly wondered why he bothered.

There was no sign of anything worth calling a plan to curb borrowing faster than in the budget. He offered no more than a list of headings under which $4 trillion of deficit reduction (including the $2 trillion already in his budget) might be found–domestic non-security spending, defense, health costs, and tax reform. Fine, sure. But what he said was devoid of detail. He spent more of his time stressing what he would not agree to than describing clear proposals of his own.

His rebuttal of the Ryan plan was all very well–I agree it’s no good–but the administration still lacks a rival plan. That, surely, is what this speech had to provide, or at least point to, if it was going to be worth giving in the first place. His criticisms of Ryan and the Republicans need no restating. And did the country need another defense of public investment in clean energy and the American social contract? It wanted to be told how fiscal policy is going to be mended: if not by the Ryan plan, with its many grave defects, then how?

Good question. The answer is, as my radio guests all agreed on Tuesday night, was that serious reform will only come when we have already been pushed over the precipice and are on the way to disaster. Only when fixing things won’t do a bit of good will the Washington establishment bestir itself and act.

This point will probably be reached sooner than any of us can imagine. It may come as a result of service on the debt skyrocketing to the point that we won’t be able to fund much of anything else. Or some other time bomb - pensions, another financial crisis, global depression - goes off and we are left staring at fiscal Armageddon. Maybe the Chinese will simply decide we aren’t worth the trouble and take the hit by dumping their US Treasuries.

The point being, there are so many land mines out there, it is inevitable that we’re going to step on one eventually. God help us when we do.

CBS:” Paul Ryan’s radical plans for Medicare, Medicaid.”

Forbes: “Paul Ryan’s Radical Budget.”

The Guardian: “Paul Ryan’s ‘beyond Reagan’ radical budget plan.”

There are dozens of articles that use the term “radical” in association with Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent budget proposal.

Begging your pardon, liberals, but what’s more radical? Trillion dollar deficits for the next decade or a plan that will cut about 50% of the total deficit by 2020?

We seem to have a disconnect between what is truly radical - obscene budget deficits - and what is a modest effort to address this gargantuan problem. It may be “radical” in the sense that we’ve never had a plan that proposes such huge amounts of cuts. But then we’ve never faced $20 trillion in national debt by 2020 before either.

Ryan is the only person in this debate to use the “T” word when talking about budget cuts. It is interesting to see the denial on both sides of the aisle as Democrats and Republicans are killing themselves over budget cuts that only use the “B” word.

Radical or not, Ryan’s plan should be seen as a starting point for additional cuts in government spending. I just wish there were a lot more “radicals” like Ryan in both parties.

In my youth, it was popular to say, “The revolution will be televised.” At that time, it seemed magical that we could witness unrest in countries from around the globe almost in real time, not to mention videotape of riots and demonstrations here in the states.

The technology of recording video at the time was laughably primitive. The professional grade video recording equipment may have been “portable” in the grossest sense of the word, but it was still bulky and was awkward to handle. More importantly, home videotape recording equipment was in its infancy and few thought to walk around with a video camera hoping to catch history as it happened.

Perhaps the shocking video of Rodney King being beaten by LA police officers was a seminal moment in history. It was purely by accident that a citizen witnessed the confrontation, was able to grab his home video camera, and in just a few minutes of recording, impact politics, race relations, and history itself in such a way. People still weren’t walking around town and putting themselves in position to capture the moment as it happened. But the potential to do so was there when technology would be able to catch up with history.

Welcome to the future. As we sit glued to our TV’s watching the disaster unfold in Japan and elsewhere, I am struck by the quantity and quality of video that is streaming on TV networks, websites, and an iPhone near you. Truly remarkable, frightening, wrenching images all brought to us largely by cellphone and flip cameras so small they can fit in your shirt pocket.

No one consciously walks around waiting for history to unfold so they can record it. People turn from being spectators of history to chronicling events in the blink of an eye. It is one of the most remarkable, consequential, and, in the end, frightening developments in my lifetime. Historians 500 years from now will be reviewing videos of the various uprisings, disasters, accidents, and probably the foolishness that has been and will be recorded by the omnipresent, all seeing eye of the video camera. It will give them background and context to events that historians from generations prior to the advent of this technology were denied. Will it color their findings in any way? I wonder.

You might ask why this is frightening? The ubiquitousness of this technology when combined with the human frailties inbred in all of us, threatens our personal space in a way that no other technological development in history has been able to do. Government has sophisticated surveillance devices that could easily threaten our privacy if the microphone would be pointed our way. But it is unlikely that the Justice Department would post any videos of you committing crimes (or no) to YouTube, U-Stream, or other video sharing sites. However, your nosy neighbor could take a stealth video of you sunning nude in your backyard and it could go viral before the day was out.

Other, more sinister uses for this great leap forward in telecommunications could easily be imagined. The only thing that constrains the misuse of this technology is the individual’s personal ethics. As usual, the law is behind the curve in catching up to the impact of new technology on our liberty. But since this is, in a very real sense, personal technology and thus, an extension of our own freedom, how can the law deal with the use of private video recordings violating the personal space of someone without impinging on rights like freedom of expression? There are already laws on the books that prohibit some violations of our personal space, but not everything can be foreseen when writing such laws and it is possible that some scenarios would slip through the cracks.

Perhaps it would be helpful to redefine privacy. In an age when your neighbor is as much of a threat to your privacy as the government, we may need broader definitions of what personal space is. This would cover not only cell phone cameras but also security cameras. red light cameras, and other surveillance devices that are proliferating at an alarming rate in cities around the world. It’s bad enough that the state can mail you a ticket for running a red light. But surveilling citizens who have done nothing wrong and present no evidence that they are about to do wrong throws the entire notion of innocent until proven guilty, not to mention “just cause” on its head.

At some point, a clarifying moment will occur and we’ll have a serious discussion of these and other issues regarding the right to privacy. If we are going to err - and that is very likely considering we are all human and prone to it - we should err on the side of more privacy and less intrusion. That goes for both the gargantuan state using awesome technologies to watch our every move and our nosy neighbor armed with a flip camera.

My latest is up at FrontPage.com and the subject is the utter cluelessness of a man who is supposed to know what’s happening in the world.

I don’t know why James Clapper said that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “largely secular” organization that “eschews violence.” The first proposition is radically wrong while the second is radically naive. Even reporters covering Egypt were searching for words to describe how off base Clapper was in his statements.

His is a special kind of incoherence that either reflects the shockingly ignorant consensus of our intelligence community or he is going easy on the Brotherhood because we may have to deal with them as part of any new government in Egypt. Either way, we’re in trouble. The Brotherhood has not “eschewed” violence. They made a tactical decision to de-emphasize their reliance on it. Few who know the Brotherhood agree with Clapper. That ought to seal his fate right there.

Time for Clapper to spend more time with his family. He should go - today.

A sample:

Examining Clapper’s remarks before the Intel Committee, one can’t help but be astounded, and not a little bewildered at his cluelessness about the Brotherhood. It’s not like the Islamists are trying to hide the nature of their organization, their goals, their history, or their reason for being.

As former CIA operations officer Brian Fairchild writes, there are no secrets between the Brotherhood and the rest of the world. Muhammad Mahdi Akef, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, from 2004-2010 repeatedly made clear the religious nature of his organization. He said on December, 11, 2005, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a global movement whose members cooperate with each other throughout the world, based on the same religious worldview — the spread of Islam, until it rules the world.”

Akef went on to say, “[W]e are in the global arena, and we preach for Allah according to the guidelines of the Muslim Brotherhood. All the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the international arena operate according to the written charter that states that Jihad is the only way to achieve these goals.”

This is the organization Mr. Clapper referred to before the Intelligence Committee as “largely secular.”

Again, it’s not as if the spooks have to dig very deeply to ferret out the truth about these extremists. Here’s a quote from Akef in which he makes it crystal clear that Clapper’s contention that the Brotherhood has “eschewed violence” to be slightly premature. On August 17, 2004, he stated: “Islam considers the resistance to be Jihad for the sake of Allah and this is a commandment, a personal obligation [fardhayn] incumbent on all of the residents of the occupied countries. This commandment takes precedence over all other religious duties. Even a woman is obligated to go to war, even without her husband’s permission, and youth are permitted to go out and fight.”

How very peace-loving of them.

Clio, the muse of history, can be a bitch of a mistress. Just when you think the world has settled into a nice, ordered regimen with the “March of Progress” proceeding at a stately pace, along comes the Countess of Chaos, the Mistress of Mayhem to throw all of our pretensions about controlling events into a cocked hat and teach us a lesson in humility, if not in respect for the gods.

Egypt; Land of the Pharaohs, cradle of civilization, crossroads of empire, and more recently, a linchpin in the strategic position of the US in the Middle East, has had enough. Enough of oppression, enough of dictatorship, enough of grinding, endless poverty, enough of being beaten down and ground to powder by a pitiless state.

In short, they’ve had enough of Hosni Mubarak and want him out.

Americans are of two minds regarding Clio’s intervention in Egypt. The idealists are swooning with joy over what appears as of this writing to be the possible exit of President Mubarak and the historic chance for democracy to flower in the ancient Nile valley. The realists are sounding the alarm about the probable participation in a post-Mubarak government of the Nazi-inspired, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood. The push-pull of these two forces on American policy has always been part of our national life, so it’s not surprising that when historic events explode across our TV screens and computer monitors, that an acrimonious discussion would break out about what the US should do now, and how we should handle what comes next.

Clio is silent in this debate. She doesn’t do the future. She’ll occasionally lift her skirt and slyly reveal the broadest of hints about what is to come based on what we know of the past and what we can see of the present. But our vision is a clouded one; so much that is unseen, unperceived, and just unknowable.

Our hearts our with the protestors, urging them on, praying for their safety, and marveling at their otherworldy courage. This is the patrimony given to us by the Founders that every generation of Americans is charged with keeping safe; the belief that liberty must eventually spread across the world and that anything we can do to aid in that sacred mission must be done. We have spilled an ocean of blood and spent a king’s ransom a thousand times over to advance this cause. It is in our DNA and there’s no use fighting it.

But prudence dictates that we also be mindful of the future and the catastrophe that is possible if Islamists were to take a leading role in the formation of any “Unity Government” that emerges following a collapse of the old regime. Clio gives us hints about the outcome of any such folly. Before there was Lenin, there was a Karensky; before Hitler, Von Papen; before the Sandinistas, there was a “Junta of National Reconstruction” with the Sandinistas a minority; and before there was a radical Islamist state in Iran, there was the “moderate” government of President Banisadr. In each case, the hopes and dreams of the people were shattered when ruthless men with guns blew up the moderate intent of those whose earnestness and good hearts were no less than we find in Egypt today.

So it is with a mixture of awe and trepidation we watch as Clio pulls back the curtain on events in Egypt. As for the future, the Greeks believed that the threads of our life were spun by the Fates and everything that happens to us has been preordained. We can’t afford to be such fatalists. We are not helpless as the movement of peoples and ideas rolls forward, flattening the past and changing the landscape to reflect a new reality. In the case of Egypt, however, it might be true that our ability to effect events to our advantage will occur after President Mubarak is gone, rather than having us standing in the way of the juggernaut as it steamrolls the dictator and the remnants of his odious rule.

Titanic historical forces are now loose in the Middle East. Other nations - Jordan, Yemen, Syria. Qatar - are trying to forestall the wave by changing personnel, making symbolic liberalizing gestures, and overusing the word “reform.” I doubt whether their own citizens are buying it. As the spirit Dave Bowman keeps telling us toward the end of the movie 2010, “Something wonderful is about to happen.”That “something” is the awakening of a long oppressed people who have finally realized that the power to be free resided in the strangest of all places - within their own hearts and minds. The revelation itself is as liberating for the Arabs today as it was for English colonists 235 years ago who threw off the shackles of their own tyranny to begin the world anew.

There will probably be much disappointment across the Arab world when the wave recedes and the hard, slogging, grinding, work of creating a civil society where none existed before is undertaken. The kinds of governments thrown up by these protests will have a hard time meeting the stratospheric expectations of the citizens who braved the worst their oppressors could throw at them to will themselves to freedom. There will be triumphs and setbacks. Some governments will no doubt be freer than others. More blood will need to be spilled before the hopes and aspirations of so many can be fulfilled, and the liberty - however they perceive that term - so hard fought is to be fairly won. That is the way of the world, though we wish it were not so.

Many in Egypt have lived a lifetime this past week. But that mischievous minx Clio is just getting started.

Michael Daly writing in the New York Daily News:

Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care.

But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.

Palin should have taken it as a warning of what might happen when a Tea Party hothead dropped a gun while heckling Giffords at an earlier Congress On Your Corner event, more than a year ago.

No doubt Palin is not even bothering to defend her use of metaphors because “figures of speech” are just that; a way to colorfully enhance language to make it more interesting and memorable. If I were to say, “Hang Michael Daly from the highest yardarm!” no one with a rational brain cell in their head would actually believe that I was advocating violence against Mr. Daly - despite the fact that a swift whop to the nose with a rolled up newspaper is in order for his clueless rant about metaphors inciting violence.

Similarly, as Jack Shafer points out, the use of military metaphors in politics is so pervasive as to make any criticism of it both bizarre and hypocritical:

For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such “inflammatory” words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I’ve listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I’ve even gotten angry, for goodness’ sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge.

From what I can tell, I’m not an outlier. Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding crass, the only reason this brouhaha erupted was because a nutcase coincidentally got a gun and shot a congresswoman. Otherwise, Sarah Palin’s “bullseye” map had long been forgotten and dropped off the radar of our political conversation.

This begs the question of when Mr. Loughner could have been exposed to the map and why it took him many months to become inspired enough by it to act out his fantasy. Is this a slow motion incitement by metaphor? Why the delayed reaction - even if you accept the preposterous notion that Loughner saw the bullseye map in the first place. Someone on the left might want to explain this to the rest of us before they continue with the “Palin has blood on her hands” meme. Where did Loughner see the bullseye map? When? How could a mind without logic or reason, logically process the bullseye map - as in the suggestion of cause and effect being posited by many liberals - and become inspired to kill?

If you’ve read Loughner’s YouTube blather and incoherent ranting, you wonder if any such logical assumption can be made:

If I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letterand pronunciation then the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that’s replacing an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letter and pronunciation.

Thus, the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that replaces an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

Every human who’s mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency.

If you create one new currency then you’re able to create a second new currency.

If you’re able to create second new currency then you’re able to create third new currency.

You create one new currency.

Thus, you’re able to create a third currency.

You’re a treasurer for a new currency, listener?

You create and distribute your new currency, listener?

There’s more, but if you believe that this tragically broken mind can process information the same way that you or I do then you’re as illogical as Loughner.

Note also that much of the narrative about this incident being caused by conservatives using violent language, threats, and metaphors was formed within a couple of hours of the shooting. In other words, before anything was known about the killer - even his name - the meme had been set, the narrative formed, the smears unleashed despite the fact that motive, state of mind, or even the political affiliation of the killer was published.

This appears to be another case of liberals not letting a crisis go to waste. Already, there has been a move to introduce gun control legislation in Congress. If someone can show me how this tragedy could have been prevented unless guns were banned entirely, I would love to see that fantasy.

And as a sign of the times, Democrats are already using the tragedy to raise money. On the linked page, right next to the letter asking Democrats to send well wishes to Rep. Giffords, is a great, big blue button encouraging people to donate. That link appears in an mass emailing sent by “21st Century Democrats” with this partisan appeal:

We also know that Sarah Palin and Rep. Giffords’ opponent used violent imagery last year urging her opponents to “target” her. Last spring, after she voted to expand health insurance coverage to working families and cut drug costs for senior citizens her office was violently attacked.

Members of 21st Century Democrats helped elect Rep. Giffords in 2006 and re-elect her 2010 because she wasn’t afraid to fight for working people — or listen to them at the neighborhood supermarket. She voted for health care; Wall Street reform, job creation, and much more.

She stood with us — and we need to stand with her in her toughest hours.

Makes you want to pull out your hanky, doesn’t it? Oh, and while you have your hand in your pocket, could you also take out your checkbook and give generously?

You really can’t blame them. They are only following the dictum about not letting a crisis go to waste - perfected by Rahm Emanuel and his boss, the President of the United States, who himself, once used a very colorful metaphor in giving advice to his supporters about how to “debate” the opposition:

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said in Philadelphia last night. “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.

Politics is not tiddlywinks. It is a full contact sport that oftentimes makes the MMA look like a tea party (metaphor deliberate). Efforts to curb “violent metaphors” - a matter of opinion with which reasonable, rational people recognize as accepted speech - is really about curbing speech by the opposition. Liberals don’t expect anyone to take their violent metaphors seriously when they use them. Only the tragic coincidence of a shooting spree by an individual whose reason has abandoned him has given the left a blatantly political opening of which they have shamelessly and to their great discredit, cynically taken advantage.

Rep. Danny Davis has dropped out of the Chicago mayor’s contest and thrown his support behind the only other major African American candidate in the race, former US senator Carol Mosely-Braun.

“I’m proud that I will be here when Carol Moseley Braun becomes the next mayor,” Davis said. “I come here tonight…to help prove unity is more than just a concept.”

Braun said she is emboldened by the endorsements from both Davis and state Sen. James Meeks, the other major African-American candidate who dropped out of the contest last week. Braun called it a “great way to start the new year.”

“I’m so please to have their support,” she said. “Their endorsements…bring us closer to winning this election.”

Davis at first said he wasn’t so much dropping out of the contest as “dropping into victory” by endorsing Braun. He later clarified that he is ending his campaign.

“I am totally dropping out of the race. I am supporting Carol Moseley Braun with every ounce of fervor that I have,” Davis said. “I am even going to give her some money. I am going to try to get every person who thought that they might support Danny Davis to switch their support to Carol Moseley Braun. In fact, I will start tonight.”

The announcement at Davis’ West Loop headquarters came after African-American leaders met privately for days with the candidates in an attempt to unify behind a single contender who could improve the odds of an African-American winning the Feb. 22 election.

Davis and Braun both had insisted Thursday that they would keep running for Chicago mayor. Then they met again today, leading to Davis’ departure from the contest.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson brokered a roughly four-hour meeting Wednesday night with Davis and Braun at his Rainbow PUSH headquarters that was also attended by several ministers, business leaders and politicians. Among them was U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, who is backing Braun, and state Sen. Rickey Hendon, who is backing Davis.

Where does this leave Rahm Emanuel?

With a unified black political community behind Mosely Braun, her chances of winning just shot up substantially. It is significant that the Rev. Jackson brokered this agreement given the factionalization of the black vote in the past between west side and south side African Americans. For the first time since 1983 when the city’s only black mayor - Harold Washington - was elected, the African American community will head into primary day backing a single major candidate.

For Emanuel, this negates any opportunity he had to use Mayor Daley’s very successful game plan in winning the primary. With the black vote usually split, Daley successfully courted the growing Hispanic vote while siphoning off just enough black machine votes to add to his astounding margins of victory in working class white neighborhoods. For Rahmbo, the Hispanic vote is expected to split between two major candidates and it is doubtful that he will be able to run up the 85-90% margins in Bridgeport and other white communities in the city that Daley was famous for.

Might Rahm’s former boss take a hand? Bill Clinton offered to come to Chicago to campaign for Emanuel and had his face slapped by black leaders for even thinking about it. And the African American community, while supporting Obama to the hilt as president, no doubt recalls some of the betrayals the former state senator effected when Obama was part of the regular Democrats prior to his run for the presidency. His tacky deal with Daley to support his mayoral re-election (over a qualified African American candidate) in return for Daley’s support in his bid for the White House did not sit well with many in the “reform” community, or among rank and file blacks. Obama’s “help” may be no more welcome than Clinton’s.

Meanwhile, Daley is quietly doing what he can for Emanuel without showing his hand too much. A lot of Daley’s support, however, was personal, based on patronage and loyalty to his family. It is difficult to see how he can transfer many important Democrat’s loyalty from their chieftan to someone who many Democrat’s see as an interloper.

Now Mosely Braun has the opportunity to employ Harold Washington’s successful strategy of uniting the black community while exciting the liberals in Hyde Park and along the lakeshore to back her candidacy. Her name recognition will also help immensely. She will have decent funding, an army of dedicated volunteers, and the opportunity to portray Rahm as a carpetbagger.

Emanuel is down, but not out. Obama no doubt still has some pull although how much personal capital he will be willing to expend probably keeps Emanuel up at night. Rahmbo wins or loses now based on how big a hand his friend and former boss Barack Obama takes in seeing his former chief of staff succeed Daley.

The St. Paul, MN school system is about to adopt a most draconian rule; they are to be “sweet-free zones:”

Debra LaBounty, president of the Minnesota School Nutrition Association, said she believes St. Paul is the only district in the state to institute such a dramatic measure. National nutrition leaders say fewer than a handful of school districts in the country have tried such a thing.

With a nod to their role in reducing the nation’s high obesity rate, Minnesota’s second-largest school district plans to fully enforce the ban on sweets.

Reminders have been sent to teachers, students and parents that “sweet, sticky, fat-laden [and] salty treats” aren’t allowed during the school day, said Jean Ronnei, the district’s director of nutrition services.

The move was made this year, four years after the idea was conceived in a new St. Paul schools wellness policy, passed at the recommendation of a panel of parents, teachers, school nurses and administrators.

Using kids as lab rats is right up the alley of these people. Besides:

Opponents say there is little proof such policies work and say it’s a school’s role to teach — not force — students to eat healthy.

Now there’s a novel idea; teaching in school. Rather than brainwash and impose adult behavior on 10 year olds, why not have a good old fashioned “Health Class” where stuff like nutrition and healthy eating are taught, not rammed down the throats of children by denying them the simple pleasures of a childhood treat.

A nutritionist at Tufts University nails it:

“Nobody has the money or the will to do the real work it’s going to take to get American kids to lose weight,” said Jim Tillotson, a professor of nutrition policy at Tufts University.

She underestimates the “will” of these food nazis. Eventually, they will have to criminalize behavior like this in order to achieve their goals. Frog marching 10 year olds off to the slammer sounds impossible but so did “sweet-free zones” a few years ago.

Jacob Sullum at Reason’s Hit and Run raises a few other issues:

According to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune, the new policy covers food served in cafeterias, food sold in vending machines or at fundraisers, food kept in employees’ drawers as rewards for themselves or students, and even food that parents send to school for their children’s lunches, which evidently will be subject to searches for contraband snacks and desserts. Food control officials will have to decide thorny issues such as whether an orange counts as a sweet and sticky treat, how much sodium chloride renders a snack “salty,” and whether cheese should be banned because of its high fat content or welcomed for its protein and calcium.

[...]

Evidently the message is that children’s bodies are a collective resource that needs to be managed by agents of the state for their own good and the good of society, regardless of what they or their parents think.

It’s not like schools have anything better to do.

This post originally appears on American Thinker.

My latest piece is up at Pajamas Media and in it, I ask the question: is too much openness and transparency a good thing?

As sample:

I would imagine most of those reading this article treasure the idea that the internet is one of the last bastions of almost total freedom on earth — a place where anything and everything goes, where the sublimely beautiful rubs elbows with the most profoundly depraved, and where radiance and raunch can occupy the same space, at the same time, thus defying the physical laws of the universe.

It is the the last outpost in the Wild West complete with gunslingers, banditos, highwaymen, and the occasional offended aboriginal. All of this freedom and openness comes at a huge cost, however: we, the meek and mild-mannered townsfolk, have yet to get around to appointing a sheriff in a white hat to protect us from the likes of Mr. Assange and his merry band of nihilistic knaves .

At the moment, the bad guys seem mostly interested in knocking off the rich ranchers and cattle barons who can afford to hire armies to protect them. Tweaking the tail of the lion by dumping diplomatic cables on to the internet or publishing the cell phone numbers of politicians and bureaucrats is serious mischief-making but doesn’t threaten our privacy or well being directly.

What about 10 years from now? Can the concept of “openness” and “transparency” be taken too far? Suppose an Assange-like messiah arises who declares that personal assets, bank accounts, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, tax returns and other very personal information have no business being hidden from view; that privacy itself is an authoritarian construct; and that everybody should know everything about everyone else. Only then can we all be truly “equal.”