Maggie's Farm

Is this statuetory rape or a moosedemeanor?

Last June, Turkey expert Gerald Robbins answered questions about what’s happening in Turkey, in the wake of its support for the Marvi Marmara provocation. Robbins is the Turkish-speaking expert and Associate Scholar at Philadelphia’s Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Regarding the prospects for yesterday’s national referendum in Turkey to change its constitution, Robbins commented in June: “The judiciary is the secularists' last line of defense against AKP creeping Islamization. The military's been largely neutered as an intervening force and as mentioned above, there really is no credible political alternative on the horizon. If the referendum is successful (which seems likely) it will effectively signal the end of Ataturk's legacy.”

I went back to Robbins with some more questions.

Why did the opposition party do less well than polls?

Family Security Matters collected essays today about 9/11 nine years later. I was asked to contribute one.

On 9/11, I awoke, turned on the computer, saw something bad had happened in New York, turned on the TV in the living room, and sat there from 6AM to 9PM Pacific. My then 1 ½ year old son was toddling around. Several times I hugged him and cried, for America, for New Yorkers, for the battles that I was sure lay ahead, and for my son’s future in that world.

My son has a Hebrew name, shield of Joshua, and an English name, non-labeling, as he, his younger brother and my wife visit my mother-in-law in Dusseldorf, Germany for a month each summer. We don’t want the boys targeted by the increased number of open anti-Semites in Europe, especially the radical Arab youth who prowl the streets. Some of the wonderful counselors at the summer camp my sons go to in Dusseldorf are Muslim. My sons are warned to keep their religion to themselves, not knowing who might be infected with hate. The synagogue in Dusseldorf is well-secured and under constant police protection.

Back home, in suburban San Diego, my sons don’t have that fear. But, since 9/11 there is a locked gate and a guard at the Jewish preschool my sons attended, and guards around our synagogue. The fear is spreading in the US, as is the Leftist-Muslim alliance to delegitimize Israel and to stir hate. We have Muslim friends, who are not radical, and appreciate being in the US. And, 64% of Arabs in the US are Christian, who know persecution for not being Muslim. Unfortunately, their voices, though subdued, are drowned out by those with bigger mouths and designs.

Last Memorial Day, we went to Petco for a Padres game. At the end was a stirring salute to the US military. On the way home, my now 10-year old son, knowing I served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, quietly asked me what I felt. I told him, simply, that sometimes we have to fight, not because we want to, only after trying not to, to do good and to survive.

To my surprise, a few weeks ago, my son came into my office and told me he was watching a four-part, two-hour, documentary about 9/11 on Youtube. Since 9/11, I’ve not watched such films, trying to avoid the pain and fear I felt in 2001. Neither had my son watched any, or been taught about it in school.

I watched the documentary, very factual and matter-of-fact, with my son. After, I asked my son what he was feeling.

He said, “I’m glad the US has people who will fight so another 9/11 or worse doesn’t happen again.”

Religion is about doing good, not feeling good.

Just returned from the second day of Rosh Hashanah services. We search within ourselves for error, correct it, and develop ways to be better. As the Jewish new year begins, the Torah reading for today is Bereshit Bara Elohim: “In the beginning G-d created…”

A millenia ago, Biblical and Talmudic scholar Rashi wrote a homily in which bereshit could be rendered bishvil reyshit, “For the sake of beginning did G-d create the world.”  The point is that we’ve been given our start, and then what we do with ourselves is in our power. Another famous Jewish Rabbi, Joseph Soloveitchik, wrote, “The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself.”

My Rabbi, then, passed out this quote from Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Speech: “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

More fun than what some do with sheep.

Rosh Hashanah starts tonight. My ever-active boys sat still, watched, listened, learned, and had fun with this Lady Gaga inspired Rosh Hashanah performance. Who am I to argue with Lady Gaga anymore!

A few translations:

Days of Awe = The ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, for especially intense introspection, self-correction and launching on better behaviors toward others.

Mahzor = Special holiday prayer book

Shofar = Rams horn, usually, blown from Biblical times to announce holidays, and at Rosh Hashanah to trumpet the Rebirth of the World and of us. In the Bible the day is called Yom Teruah, the day of the sounding of the shofar.

Shanah Tovah = Our greeting to others for a good year, a shortened version of "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year."

Shanah Tovah to all from Maggie's Farm.

The New York Daily News editorial today is titled "Academically incorrect: Brooklyn College book choice makes a mockery of education."

This comes in reaction to my blog posts (here, here and here), which the New York Post, New York Times, and many other blogs have also featured.

Today's New York Daily News editorial:

The faculty at Brooklyn College chooses one book each year that will be required reading for nearly all incoming freshmen. This year's choice, "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," has generated controversy.

Up front and for the record: President Karen Gould and her professorial force are free to assign whatever works they choose - even if academic excellence takes second place to offering students an unchallenging, feel-good bonding experience.

But that freedom comes with the responsibility to provide inquiring minds with the straight goods about the literature they've been ordered to read. Here, by all the evidence, Brooklyn College has failed.

"How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" was written by Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at the school. The book is a collection of seven profiles of Arab-American youths living in Brooklyn after 9/11. Each is a victim in one way or another.

Akram works in his family's East Flatbush bodega, which one resident boycotts because "they support Bin Laden"; Rasha and her family are roused from bed and held in detention as suspected terrorists, then released; Sami, a Marine, deploys to Iraq, where fellow soldiers call him a terrorist because of his background.

College officials say the book is in line with previous selections, such as Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." In their telling, the reading is meant to mirror the diversity of the student body, particularly its immigrant experience.

But to treat Bayoumi's book as nothing more than an anthology of coming-to-America stories is supremely false advertising. This is not a memoir, but a polemic.

Bayoumi chose the profiles to support his argument that social attitudes have combined with the effects of U.S. foreign policy to deprive Muslims and Arab-Americans of civil rights, with the effects felt most severely by the young.

Had he chosen to tell stories of seven other Arab-Americans, people who immigrated from, say, Lebanon or Syria and followed well-trodden paths to success, he could have just as easily titled his book, "How Does it Feel to Live in the Land of Opportunity?"

Bayoumi sees America more darkly. In the book's afterword, he writes that "Muslims and Arabs are scrutinized for sedition at every turn," that Arab-American life includes "substantial government surveillance and repression," that "today, everyone - immigrant and citizen, activist and spectator - has become vulnerable," that "spies and government informants have penetrated Muslim-American communities" and that "torture has been normalized into American culture."

In sum, he asserts, "What we are currently living through is the slow creep of imperial high-handedness into the rest of American society, performed in the name of national security and facilitated through the growth of racist policies."

Bayoumi can hold these views if he likes. And Brooklyn College students would be well-served by rigorous debate over their merits. But that's not about to take place. College officials say that the contents of Bayoumi's afterward are not part of the conversation.

Richard Nixon's bitter farewell after his defeat for governor of California in 1962: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore..."

Now we have President Obama one-upping Nixon, whining that he feels that some critics talk about him like a dog. Maybe he's angling for votes from sympathetic dog lovers. After all, Nixon was elected President in 1968. Smart doggie, that Obama, huh.

My friend Bookie pretty well sums up, "truly bizarre."

This is a Labor Day reprint of a portion of a post I wrote in 2005, when a transit workers strike was pending in New York City.

The New York Sun’s editorial yesterday said should the Metropolitan Transit Authority “reward the union’s illegal behavior” it would send a “message of appeasement” elsewhere. The Sun continues, that’s “how they used to work in the New York of the 1960’s and 1970’s.”  But, the Sun said, “it is not a way to run a successful city in the competitive global economy.”

I laugh, at just 58, at another of my Forrest Gump moments. The Sun’s editorialist missed that this began, actually, back in the 1950’s, and I’m a witness to how.

It was 1958 or ‘59, and my social studies assignment from P.S. 246, Walt Whitman Junior High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was a term paper about how local government works.

Not having much of a clue, I went to New York City Hall to find out and wandered about asking people in the halls. They all rushed by, with puzzled and frustrated looks on their faces how to quickly respond. In a big conference room, the famous, feisty, Irish orator who built and led the Transport Workers Union, Mike Quill, a genuine New York-style colorful character, was in one of his fascinating harangues of the press threatening a strike if he didn’t get what he wanted, and he’d bring the city and mayor to their knees as he beat them with his union shillelagh.

As the crowd cleared, I asked Mike Quill my broad question. He flashed his broad smile and said I looked familiar, probably thinking me Irish due to my red hair and freckles. I told him I’d seen him speak years before at the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, while my grandparents’ cousin, David Dubinsky, founder of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was bouncing me on his knee. I guess that vouched for my membership in the socialist workers movement that Quill had been active in since his youth, so Mike Quill invited me to join him and his crew at lunch, at a neighborhood restaurant on 14th Street that served heaping portions of the best corned beef and cabbage I’ve ever had.

At the table, Mike Quill explained to me how government works: It’s all just politics among friends, all out to make their constituents happy, and to hell with the beancounters, and tories, and other allusions to old enemies and battles.

When I turned in my termpaper, all I got was an incredulous look from my teacher, a shake of the head, and note that I’d missed the assignment’s requirement to discuss the structures and laws. I received a C.

After I told this story to a younger New Yorker last night, I checked my memory online, finding this entry at Wikipedia:

"Quill and the TWU became even more important figures in New York City politics in the 1950s. He was a key supporter of Robert F. Wagner, Jr.’s campaign for mayor of New York and became a lightning rod, based on his radical past, for Wagner’s Republican opponent and unfavorable press attention. While the union repeatedly threatened to take the subway workers out on strike, it managed to settle with the Wagner administration short of a strike on each occasion."

The ground was laid in the 1950’s, as the New York Times reports, that New York City’s current  pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year [2005], triple the amount in 2002. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s director of labor relations summed its negotiation objective: “If you know a tidal wave is coming and you can still play around in the surf because it’s not here yet, anyone would think that’s foolishness.” A two-tier pension plan is offered, trimming costs of pensions for future workers. The current union president says that would “sell out the ‘unborn.’ ” A former NYC labor commissioner reflects the city “might have picked a union that was more willing to consider the subject.”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: (excerpt from Time ;H/T: Real Clear Politics-World)

…America is great for a reason. It is looked up to, despite all the criticism, for a reason. There is a nobility in the American character that has been developed over the centuries…

That nobility isn't about being nicer, better or more successful than anyone else. It is a feeling about the country. It is a devotion to the American ideal that at a certain point transcends class, race, religion or upbringing. That ideal is about values: freedom, the rule of law, democracy. It is also about the way you achieve: on merit, by your own efforts and hard work. But it is most of all that in striving for and protecting that ideal, you as an individual take second place to the interests of the nation as a whole. It is what makes the country determined to overcome its challenges. It is what makes its soldiers give their lives in sacrifice. It is what brings every variety of American, from the lowest to the highest, to their feet when "The Star-Spangled Banner" is played. Of course the ideal is not always met — that is obvious. But it is always striven for.

The Need for American Confidence

The next years will test the American character. America won't be loved in this presidency any more than in previous ones. But America should have confidence. That ideal, which produces the optimism that generates the achievement, is worth all the striving. It is the most precious gift a nation can have. The world is changing. New powers are emerging. But this does not diminish the need for that American ideal. It reaffirms it, renews it, gives it added relevance….

A friend of mine whose parents were immigrants, Jews from Europe who came to America in search of safety, told me this story. His parents lived and worked in New York. They were not well off. His father died when he was young. His mother lived on, and in time my friend succeeded and became wealthy. He often used to offer his mother the chance to travel outside America. She never did. When eventually she died, they went back to recover the safety box where she kept her jewelry. They found there was another box. There was no key. So they had to drill it open. They wondered what precious jewel must be in it. They lifted the lid. There was wrapping and more wrapping and finally an envelope. Intrigued, they opened it. In the envelope were her U.S. citizenship papers. Nothing more. That was the jewel, more precious to her than any other possession. That was what she treasured most. So should America today.

That would, also, be the story of my grandparents and what they communicated to me.

We owe much to our English heritage.

FTC Subpoenas 48 Food Companies Regarding Marketing to Kids

NSFW photo below the fold.

The Preface to In The Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, by Ngo Van:

“The only historians I trust are those who risk getting their throats cut” (Pascal). Considering the present “Socialist” Republic of Vietnam and its official history, which is uncritically accepted virtually everywhere, I cannot read this maxim without a strong sense of how narrowly I managed to survive.

In Vietnam 1920-1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, I attempted to rescue that period from oblivion — a period that was marked not only by the struggle against colonial imperialism, but also by movements striving instinctively for an internationalist social revolution, movements that refused to subordinate themselves to the dictates of Stalinist Russia. In the present text I am going to speak as a direct witness of that period. Most of the others who took part in that struggle, if they were not massacred, imprisoned or sent to the penal colonies by the French colonial regime, or forced into exile, ended up being murdered by Ho Chi Minh’s “Communist” Party.

Scarcely eleven years had elapsed since the October 1917 revolution in Russia when I became fully aware of the oppressive reality of Indochinese society and fully determined to revolt against it. For me, like so many others, the Russian Revolution was a hopeful sign of possible liberation. Yet even then, during those early years of my apprenticeship in life and revolt, the rare news that reached us from Russia sometimes contained disturbing features. Oppositionist revolutionaries were being hunted down and Trotsky had just been forced into exile. Through the Third International, Stalin was imposing a totalitarian policy that seemed to us to betray the internationalism integral to every revolutionary struggle. Under these circumstances, confronted with the emergence of a regime whose full horror became glaringly evident with the Moscow Trials, it was natural that our critique of Stalinism was initially oriented around the ideas and partisans of Trotsky.

Since my departure from Indochina in 1948, if the hope and conviction of the necessity of overthrowing the despicable world order never left me, they were nourished by new reflections on Bolshevism and revolution. In France I found new allies in the factories and elsewhere, among French people, colonized people, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 — anarchists and Poumistas who had gone through a parallel experience to ours. In Vietnam, as in Spain, we had been engaged in a simultaneous battle on two fronts: against a reactionary power and against a Stalinist party struggling for power.

These encounters, along with rereading Marx (illuminated by the work of Maximilien Rubel), discovering the 1919 workers councils in Bavaria and the 1921 Kronstadt revolt in Russia, then seeing the resurgence of workers councils in Hungary in 1956, led me to investigate new revolutionary perspectives and permanently distanced me from Bolshevism-Leninism-Trotskyism. I developed a total distrust of anything that might turn into a “machine.” The so-called “workers’ parties” (Leninist parties in particular) are embryonic forms of the state. Once in power, these parties form the nucleus of a new ruling class and bring about nothing more than a new system of exploitation. “The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery” (Marx).

Orwell rightly noted that those who control the present control the past. When history adopts the discourse of the victors, concealing and dissolving all past struggles with a simplistic Manicheanism that obscures what was truly at stake, the present reality seems inevitable and inescapable. The future of human societies thus depends on our capacity to wrest this past from the cold grip of the present masters. Voices have been lost. We must try to bring them back to life; to rediscover the living traces of the relay of rebellion that traverses time; to restore them and to pass them on.

When even the New York Times recognizes criticism of a leftist attempt to indoctrinate students with an Arab-American victimism and anti-American book, the sole one distributed by the college to incoming students and also a reading in the required English course, we’ve surely stirred up something that resonates with many.

The NYTs article, Brooklyn College Furor Is More Heated Online, is largely dismissive of the issue as a blogosphere thing and attributes it, as does the college’s Dean involved in the selection, as “unfolding a bit like the debate over the planned Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan: much of the intensity seems far afield, while the response in the neighborhood itself is more muted.”

The reporter phoned me a few minutes before posting her report, but I was out, and she hasn’t returned my return call to her. (UPDATE 7:18AM Pacific: The reporter emailed me this morning. I replied that she seems to have attributed a quote from Prof. Bayoumi to me, and she just corrected the syntax in the article to make it clear. She, also, added to her article Prof. Bayoumi's defense of the Gaza Flotilla. Sincere thanks. I, also, noted to her that "I understand that you phoned others earlier, but you are the reporter so you determine the priorities of contacts." The reporter replies that she was on the subway and did not get my phone call back to her.)

The Comments at the NYT are, as one would expect there, mostly dismissive. There is one, however, that deserves wider attention:

As an American of Syrian descent I have never, nor has any member of my very large, noisy, opinionated, dark skinned, prominent nosed, extended family, EVER been discriminated against in this country. My children are extremely proud of their Middle-Eastern roots and very rich culture of food and family, generosity and hospitality. Mr. Bayoumi is confusing discrimination with the healthy practice in the US of dialogue tinged with a bit of mistrust – based on the undeniable fact that we were attacked on 9/11 by radical Arab Islamists. The US invites open dialogue – which can sometimes become very heated. Mr Bayoumi should be familiar with participating in heated arguments – which are practiced intensely in all of the Arab households that I have lived in or visited. Arab immigrants have to ride the current wave of mistrust and anger that the proposed Mosque has stirred up. Arabs also have to check their tendency to want people to accommodate them without giving anything in return – something called a compromise. We aren’t the first group of immigrants to have to deal with animosity from US groups who were here first and we will not be the last. Think of it as an initiation to a fraternity; if you tough it out it will pay off handsomely. Mr. Bayoumi, if Middle-Eastern voices have been censored in this country prove it.

After the New York Daily News  reported the issue, and Professor Emeritus in History at the City University of New York, Ron Radosh, wrote about it in the New York Post,  the New York Times, I guess, had to ride to the rescue of leftist hogwash.

P.S.: Many of the Commenters at the New York Times article assert that it is up to the students to find an alternative point of view or facts. A current student at Brooklyn College replies at the New York Times with the reality. (Below the fold, with the remainder of this post.)

Luckily I forgot to bring the bag of Sun Chips I bought when I took the boys to Petco for Sunday's ball game. It is the loudest, most annoying food packaging I've ever heard. The new Sun Chips packaging is biodegradable and compostable. Great for the environment. Terrible for my ears, or anyone else's, at 95 decibils. That's the sound level at which "sustained exposure may result in hearing loss." Not to mention a bop in the nose from someone in a seat nearby. My wife was sleeping in the next room, after dental surgery, and was just woken by my opening the bag.

On the other hand, I may now have an excuse for not answering my wife's questions. Sales have fallen since introduction of the new bag. Maybe a new ad campaign for "Did you say something, honey?" will revive sales. 

Since last Friday, when I wrote why I Just Disinherited My Alma Mater,  the post has had “legs” about what I and others say is politicized indoctrination as official college policy.

Brooklyn College requires incoming freshmen and transfer students to read an absurdly slanted book that Arab-Americans are routinely rousted by law enforcement and discriminated against, which the author attributes to racism akin to Jim Crow discrimination against Blacks a century ago and due to American imperialism. Somehow, according to college authorities, this is supposed to create a beneficial, educational “common experience.”

Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit blog, which is read by about 200,000 each day, linked my post and on successive days two posts by others about my post. By contrast, my hometown San Diego Union-Tribune’s daily circulation  is about 250,000. Many other blogs also picked up on my post.

Today, the New York Daily News, circulation about 570,000, reported the story after interviewing me: “Alum to cut Brooklyn College out of will over required freshman reading by 'radical' prof” Moustafa Bayoumi.

“Bayoumi did not return a call for comment.”

In a statement, Brooklyn College said it was "regrettable that Mr. Bruce Kesler misunderstands the intentions of the Common Reader experience and the broader context of this selection."

The National Association of Scholars wrote, however, that Brooklyn College does not understand, or understands all too well, the Common Reading Controversy at Brooklyn College.

We agree with those who find the assignment of this polemical book as common reading troubling. While much of How Does It Feel to be a Problem? seems a straightforward telling of stories, its central purpose is clear. It aims to establish Arab and Muslim Americans as victims and indict American society for making them so.  By assigning this book as the sole one to be read by incoming undergraduates, most of whom will have little of the knowledge needed to evaluate its claims, Brooklyn College opens itself to the charge that it is using what should be an important education experience for ideological goals – a charge which the evidence of our study indicates could be made against a great many other colleges and universities as well.

Many readers have written about their “common experience” in indoctrination at their colleges. It is getting harder for slanted -- indeed, blatant -- indoctrination to hide behind ivy-covered walls. The reactions continue and builds.

P.S.: I just received this email from a former classmate:

 

I also had it with Brooklyn College and their attitude regarding Israel. I'm a retired N.Y.C teacher. I retired after 33 years in the system in 2001. I joined IRPE- a retiree organization at the college. I attended one of their lectures concerning the middle east. When we walked in, we were given maps of various mid-east countries. The so called conference became a hate session regarding eretz Yisroel. 3 speakers got up and one by one they denounced Israel. No one was allowed to respond to them. People walked out cursing them. When I wrote a letter to the college, they denied all of this. I left IRPE and would not contribute one further penny to the institution. Having worked, I graduated in 1969 and am the class representative for that year.
Congratulations on taking a stand.

See UPDATE 

Two pictures from the Mall in Washington.

I just updated my will and trust and, with heavy heart, cut out what was a significant bequest to my alma mater, Brooklyn College.

What caused the disinheritance is that all incoming freshmen and transfer students are given a copy of a book to read, and no other, to create their “common experience.” This same book is one of the readings in their required English course. The author is a radical pro-Palestinian professor there.

When I attended in the 1960s, Brooklyn College – then rated one of the tops in the country -- was, like most campuses, quite liberal. But, there was no official policy to inculcate students with a political viewpoint. Now there is.  That is unacceptable.

Health insurance agents are the canary in the mine of ObamaCare.

Having been a heavily credentialed health and other benefits broker for the past two decades, and working on the corporate buyer side of the relationship for 15-years before that, I will say – strongly – we have been worth it. I described why and how in this earlier post, “In Defense of Health Insurance Agents, and You.”

A health insurance agent is required to complete initial and regular formal training courses in the subject (including ethics), pass initial and periodic tests, and are screened by their state and by insurance companies for criminal or personal conduct (including declaring bankruptcy) that may negatively affect their reliability to be licensed to provide agent services. In addition, through professional associations, through insurer education programs, through self-study, and through competitive pressures, health agents stay current on the latest laws and offerings from various insurers. Furthermore, almost all health insurance agents are independent businesses or work for independent agencies, not beholden to the insurers but to their customers. Importantly, individuals, small and larger businesses have priorities more important and pressing than becoming experts in health insurance or its interactions with other laws or aspects of their primary concerns, and heavily depend upon qualified, trusted health insurance agents. Lastly, many health insurance agents have extensive credentials and experience….

But, the unfolding of ObamaCare raises the question of whether health insurance brokers will continue to be of value, or able to be.

H/T: IOwnTheWorld.com

At Maggie’s Farm we’ve been debating how much nudity is safe for the protection of our readers’ sensitivities. The Raelians, who believe that alien scientists created humans and we should be prouder of our bodies, sponsor annual Go Topless Day “dedicated to the belief that in order for America to be a truly equal society, women should be able to bare their breasts without fear of being arrested.”

A video of their breast “outing” and beliefs is presented below the fold, in keeping with the Maggie’s Farm interest in philosophy.

Orange County, south of Los Angeles and north of San Diego, used to be a reliable Republican stronghold, but changing demographics and a hidebound Republican Party has changed that.

In 1994, Loretta Sanchez lost as a moderate Republican for the Anaheim City Council. In 1996, Sanchez had changed her registration to Democrat and, with the help of the 1990 reapportionment adding many Hispanics, won the Congressional District then represented by conservative Republican Bob Dornan.

Loretta Sanchez is not publicly as radical as her younger sister, Linda, elected to Congress from more liberal Los Angeles in 2002. Yet, in 2009 the liberal Americans for Democratic Action rated her 90%. Her composite conservative score at National Journal is 28%, better than her sister’s 5%. This primarily reflects less antagonistic votes on national security issues. She has expressed her desire for higher political office, so this year’s race is necessary to her ambitions.

Loretta Sanchez, to her credit, and representing the heavy Vietnamese expatriate community in the District – home of little Saigon – has been courageous in publicly damning human rights abuses and the despotism in Vietnam.

This year, Loretta Sanchez faces off against Van Tran, the highest elected Vietnamese in California, who is being termed-out of his state Assembly seat. Van Tran is decidedly conservative. The National Republican Congressional Campaign committee has named him to its Young Guns program for support.

Van Tran’s supporters have been active in the District. While all the major pollsters had rated the seat reliably for Sanchez, Charles Cook just broke from the pack and moved the seat into “leaning” Democrat. Van Tran’s facebook page is full of the hoped for boost from the widespread discredit of the Democrats. I’ve tried repeatedly to speak with Van Tran’s campaign to get a better feel for internal polling, and not received a response.

The District is about 65% Hispanic, 18% White and 14% Vietnamese. The District, where Democrat and Republican registration is near even, was carried by Sanchez with 69.5% of the vote and by Obama with 60.1% in 2008.

The race has not, yet, overtly become an ethnic battle – and shouldn’t -- but Van Tran is counting on the heavier voter turnout usual among Vietnamese to put him over the top. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has highlighted this District as a key concern.

There is momentum evident for Van Tran, as affirmed by the Cook Report shift, but it will take heavy funding and good campaigning for Van Tran to pull off this upset. It’s doable, and tough.

Krista Branch should be made the official songstress of the Republican Party for 2010, and then the Republican establishment better take heed or face the consequences of an aroused America that won't take any more BS.

Three justices of the 9^th federal circuit, all appointed by Republican Presidents, disagree on the limits of free speech under the 1^st Amendment. This presents an interesting appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Two of the justices rule that the Stolen Valor Act, which criminalizes knowingly wearing or claiming federally authorized military decorations and medals of valor, is unconstitutional. These justices describe stolen valor as vile and worse, and deny that they provide a constitutional right to lie. But they deny that there is any harm done that requires punishment. Their arguments are basically that, barring a demonstrable harm to another person, free speech should prevail. Interestingly, they point out that the Defense Department providing a public list of those who have been awarded medals of valor would help publicly reveal frauds. However, the Democrat Congress has failed to act and the Defense Department has quibbled away its responsibility. (I analyzed this here.)

On the other hand, the dissent presents judicial and legislative chapter and verse that demonstrable harm to an individual is not a necessary hurdle to restrictions on certain types of knowingly false speech (or actions) that go beyond the pale of acceptable or protected. He reaffirms, as did Congress in passing the Act, that knowingly representing oneself as a decorated hero disparages the valor of those who were awarded. He provides prominent examples of Congress’ authority to so legislate. Further, he dispels the contention that satire or theatrical performances would fall within the Act, or that it is overbroad in practice as only the clearest cases have been brought by federal prosecutors.

You may like or not the arguments raised by either side, but should also recognize that judging a law is about its lawfulness not the rhetoric. So, unless the Supreme Court decides to broaden or overturn existing case precedent, the Stolen Valor Act would be upheld. But, we’ll see.

The majority and minority opinions are here.  

Josh Gerstein at Politico raises some interesting judicial undercurrents that may become clearer at the Supreme Court.

Toddlers commonly swing their sippy cups in a motion resembling swinging a beer stein. So, I thought, it would be a fun and lucrative invention to market a baby beer stein sippy cup.

The mothers I talked to didn't think it near as much fun as did the fathers, and we all know who rules the high chair.  The closest photo I could find of my idea was this one, for seniors.  The one I had in mind would have been fancier.

As usual, mothers had it correct, if only because the joke might have been taken more seriously. This mother in Florida learned that lesson, the hard way, due to posting a photo on her facebook of her baby with a bong. The mother was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, not for child abuse.

In any event, if you want my invention, you're welcome to it.

I presented the case for an amendment to the Constitution to restrict birthright citizenship.

I've been considering another post to address the objections raised by some conservative commentators.  Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine has done just that.  I'd only add to what Paul has written that, as seen with the just passed additional $600-million for border controls and Justice Department backup, this is just a small incremental and complete control, were it possible, would take many more tens of $billions per year. The Amendment would save much of that, as well as much of the tens of $billions per year taxpayers are spending on birthright citizens.