Posts

The ADL, Ilario Pentano, the Ground Zero mosque, and what it means to be an American

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A few years ago, a friend of mine -- an editor, only about 10 years older than I, a man of some Italian lineage -- looked ahead to the 2008 elections and declared, flatly, that Barack Obama would never be president. "Nobody becomes president whose last name ends in a vowel," he said. The remark struck me, because I wasn't really used to thinking of my friend in ethnic terms.(He'd was a little over-rhapsodic about "The Sopranos," but then again, what man wasn't?) But my friend was heir to a not-so-distant history, the son of a family that -- thanks to its Mediterranean origins -- had just a few decades previous been considered not- quite -fully American. By 2005 or 2006, whenever I had that discussion with my friend, those days seemed past -- but he still felt it in his bones. I thought about my friend last night, when I read the New York Times' story about how the Anti-Defamation League has decided to oppose the Cordoba House, better known as

The Cordoba House mosque, Ground Zero, and all you religious people trying to run my life

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That's the topic of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week. Since you already got most of my take in blog form last week , let me do something different and focus on Ben's take. An excerpt: Now let's contrast Washington with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the Cordoba House project who wrote a fascinating book in 2004 called "What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America." In it, Rauf casually argues that the U.S. Constitution and the core principles of Islamic law (sharia) are not in conflict at all and, indeed, the "American political structure is sharia-compliant." "Islamic law and American democratic principles have many things in common," Rauf wrote, stressing that sharia's support for "political justice" and "economic justice ... for the weak and impoverished" "sounds suspiciously like the Declaration of Independence." To the casual reader, maybe. Fact is, sharia doe

I still don't believe the Tea Party: Eavesdropping edition

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I've long believed the Tea Party phenomenon is mostly about sore loserdom -- the people who've been taking to the streets and raising hell at Congressional town meetings these last 18 months say they're alarmed at deficits and runaway government spending. But they were nowhere to be found while those same things were getting started under George W. Bush. The complaints of Tea Parties have, generally, fallen under the rubric of "tyranny." The Obama Administration is infringing on our freedoms, it is said, to a degree unimaginable outside of historically extreme circumstances. But really, I don't believe the Tea Partiers on this front, either. Why? Well, let's look at today's Washington Post: The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. Cr

Tom Corbett still really thinks that unemployed people are lazy

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Looks like Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett has decided to double-down on the " unemployed people are lazy " theme in fairly cowardly fashion : Speaking to reporters after a campaign stop in Delaware County, the Republican nominee for governor noted that newspapers across the state are carrying line after line of help-wanted ads. "Are there jobs out there? . . . How would you interpret that?" he asked. Corbett reported seeing one newspaper page that he said promised thousands of jobs listings in print and online. "You guys asked me if there are jobs out there," he said to a pair of reporters. "If I am a common citizen, the average citizen, and I look at a newspaper . . . and I see jobs - what's the answer to that question." Asked if he was implying that the unemployed were not taking advantage of these listings, he said no-adamantly no-he wasn't saying that. But he clearly is saying that. And he's being a pun

This is why I won't read the Philadelphia Inquirer in print

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At right is today's front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a demonstration of why -- much as I'd like to support local journalism -- I can't bring myself to subscribe to this paper in print. The big main story ? The one that occupies the two-thirds of the space above the "fold" and is thus the main selling point to buy the paper off the rack? It's a two-day-old story. And it was written by the Los Angeles Times. The first issue is one that print newspapers will always deal with. They simply can't hit the news with the same speed as the web. (The story broke late enough Sunday that the Inky, apparently, couldn't or didn't get it on Monday's front page.) And the Inky's editors, in all fairness, went with a story that analyzes the fallout from the WikiLeaks document dump instead of reporting it as "new" news. The second issue, though, goes to the heart of the Inky's problems. It used to be one of the newspape

Dennis Prager: Liberals hate conservatives

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National Review's Dennis Prager departs from dispensing invaluable marriage advice  to offer similarly valuable insight into human nature. Liberals, he says, hate conservatives. Granting the exceptions that all generalizations allow for, conservatives believe that those on the left are wrong, while those on the left believe that those on the right are bad. I'll grant that there are lots and lots of liberals who feel this way. But Prager's blithe dismissal of similar phenomena on the right suggests he's not dealing with the issue honestly. Because there's lots of conservatives who think that liberals are evil. For example: I was attending a conservative evangelical Mennonite college in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected president. I was one of the few students to openly support Clinton for president that year; many of my fellow students and faculty warned of literally Biblical, literally Apocalyptic consequences if he attained office. (The night of the election, a

Andy McCarthy in a nutshell

Abigail Thernstrom of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, replying to Andy McCarthy in National Review today: McCarthy’s screed falls far short of reasonable disagreement, offering superheated and sarcastic rhetoric where evidence and logical analysis are needed. Sounds about right.