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True
North Archives - August 07, 2007
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Featured
Articles
Democrats
Worry About Positive Report by Petraeus
By Robert Maynard
It is a sad day in America
when the possibility of a positive report on the progress of our troops
in a battle that is central to the War on Terrorism is greeted by a leader
of one of our major political parties with concern over whether such a
report might split his party.
Another
Middle-Class Exodus? Part III
By Martin Harris
 Now
Burlington, along with a growing number of other districts across the country,
wants to reprise mandatory quotas; not by race, this time, but by Socio-Economic
Status, using mandatory re-districting, bussing and other devices to insure
that non-middle-class kids sit next to middle-class kids in the classroom.
Why? Here’s the original explanation from KC plaintiff’s attorney Arthur
Benson: "when white students…integrate the schools, their middle-class
aspirations would change the school culture…" In short, it’s cultural diversity,
not race or SES, which middle-class parents flee when forced diversity
is threatened. They don’t want their kids exposed to non-middle-class behaviors.
That’s why the both the white and the black middle-class fled Detroit after
the 1967 riots, Manhattan Institute scholar Julia Vitullo-Martin writes
in a recent Wall Street Journal column: they didn’t want their kids exposed
to underclass behaviors in school any more than they could accept their
businesses being burned in mob-action street theatre.
 Symington:
Privacy for me, but not for thee
By Rob Roper
Symington’s casual disregard
of Vermont citizens’ rights and expectations of financial privacy while
being aggressively protective of her own is both elitist and hypocritical.
# # #
Quotable
"Democrats are not the ones
who won the midterm election, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost.
Rather the Mujahideen—the Muslim Ummah’s vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq—are
the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are
the ones who lost." -Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader
* *
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This
Week's Mail Bag
The Consequences of Over-Taxation
I’d like to explain one of
the many consequences of over taxation resulting from Vermont's out of
control school and government spending.
We have a housing shortage.
Rising property taxes on privately owned rental housing only worsens this
shortage. High taxes and stiff regulations discourage would-be landlords
from building new units. High taxes make it impossible for many would-be
homeowners to build.
The Dems' solution is to
put up, with even more taxpayer dollars, government owned and controlled
"Public Housing."
Under the Soviet Union, most
residents of Moscow, and elsewhere in Russia, lived in "Public Housing."
They had NO property rights. Communism collapsed due to economic failure.
If our property taxes keep
going up, SO WILL WE!
--Bill Day, Barre
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Keep up the Good Work
My husband and I were in
Vermont in May and found your station and of course fell in love immediately.
We were searching for Rush and had no idea that there were sane people
in Vermont, are LIBERALS SANE? Anyway my brother and sister-in-law
will be in Vermont in November and December and I was telling them about
True North Radio and wanted to know where they could find you on the dial?
We were not really impressed with Vermont when we arrived in the state
but when we left 10 days later we did find ourselves sad to leave.
I think its a place worth saving and we do want to go back to visit.
We were staying at Smuggler's Notch and were able to travel through the
Notch before we left. Please keep up the good work and I love the
weekly e-mails from you.
--Mary Linda and Charles
Hunter, Forest, Virginia
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Vermont
Weekly News Round-Up
Border
Crossing Problems
Caledonian Record Editorial,
August 4, 2007
What should U.S. authorities
do to alleviate the long crossover times? Heaven forbid that they go a
little easier on the vast numbers of guiltless Canadians who make up the
majority of border crossers. Giving them a pass would mean racial and ethnic
profiling of the ones authorities stop because they fit the description
of terrorists, and we must never, never do that. Just as with airport security,
we must inconvenience everyone in order not to offend anyone. The great
irony, of course, is that our good neighbor Canadians must wait hours to
come down here to spend their money, while a thousand illegals cross our
southern border from Mexico without a five minute wait. There's got to
be a better way of discriminating between illegals and visitors.
Affordable
Housing....for Software Designers?
From VermontTiger.com, July
30, 2007
When someone earning an individual
wage of $60,000--which is the median family income in Vermont--can't
find an "affordable" place to live, either that person's definition of
what they want, and what they are willing to pay, are out of synch with
reality, or more likely, there is something wrong with housing prices in
Vermont. Affordable housing should connote an image of a lower income wage
earner or family having a hard time meeting mortgage or rent payments,
not an image of a well-educated, well-paid software worker not being able
to find a house. If we think the state should be in the business
of subsidizing housing for people earning $60,000, then we've got real
problems.
Test
questions
From VermontTiger.com, July
31, 2007
I'll ignore the question
of defining neo-feudalism, since I really don't understand what that means,
and I haven't seen too many serfs slaving away on large corporate farms
recently. So I'll stick to this question: Explain the
difference between government support of small family farms and government
income support payments to low income working families. Be
sure to deal with the issue of why the government should treat low income
farmers differently than low income workers (or low income business owners)
elsewhere in the economy.
Undressing
for the Taxman
From VermontTiger.com, August
01, 2007
So a
new glitch has appeared in the Act 60/68 apparatus that was so carefully
designed and precisely calibrated to raise revenues and distribute "fairness"
across the state. This thing has more holes, and requires more patches,
than the latest upgrade from Microsoft. We are long past the
time when the state should scrap this turkey and start over.
Vt
GOP Sounds Alarm on Tax Checks
By Daniel Barlow, Vermont
Press Bureau, Rutland Herald, August 1, 2007
House Republican leaders
warned Wednesday that residents could be exposing some of their personal
financial information to the public when they receive property tax rebates
and prebates this year. Under Vermont's new rebate law, the amount reduced
from a resident's total bill is public information. Republicans said that
information could be used to determine a person's annual income as well.
Rep. Steve Adams of Hartland, the House minority leader, asked the top
House Democrat in a letter Monday to consider making changes to the 2006
law when the Legislature returns to work in January.
Hillary's
Cleavage
Caledonian Record Editorial,
August 1, 2007
It would be nice if the columnists
who get light-headed during the dog days of August and write feverish fluff
columns took the month off, instead. Some things say more about the columnists
than about their targets. Hillary's cleavage is one of those things. Mitt
Romney's religion is another. Both - and many things in between - are irrelevant.
# # #
Freedom
Under Fire:
The
Global War on Terrorism
The
New/Old Cold War
by Monica Crowley, Human
Events, August 2, 2007
The Soviet Union may have
ended, but the cold war between Moscow and Washington never did. Over the
last 16 years, the Russians have taken full advantage of our distraction
with our domestic issues in the 1990s and the war against Islamic terror
since September 11, 2001. They have used that time to solidify an increasingly
powerful authoritarian regime in the Kremlin, re-assert their influence
over the former Soviet Republics and tighten their control over some of
the world’s richest oil reserves. At the same time, they’ve proliferated
nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, grown fabulously rich doing
so, and propped up useful proxies like Iran. They have also paralyzed the
UN Security Council on issues like nuclear inspections of regimes such
as Iran and North Korea, not only because they have a veto but because
the Chinese (and often the French) follow their lead. The Russian bear
never really hibernates.
Defeatism
Defeated?
Cracks on the homefront
By Thomas Sowell, National
Review Online, August 1, 2007
Another revealing sign is
that the solid front of the mainstream media in filtering out any positive
news from Iraq and focusing only on American casualties — in the name of
"honoring the troops" — is now starting to show cracks. One of the most
revealing cracks has appeared in, of all places, the New York Times,
which has throughout the war used its news columns as well as its editorial
pages to undermine the war in Iraq and paint the situation as hopeless.
But an op-ed piece in the July 30 New York Times by two scholars
at the liberal Brookings Institution — Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth
M. Pollack — now paints a very different picture, based on their actual
investigation on the ground in Iraq after the American troop surge under
General Petraeus.
Perceptions
of Iraq War Are Starting to Shift
By Michael Barone, Real
Clear Politics, August 06, 2007
It's not often that an opinion
article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed.
But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion
article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack
on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.
U.S.
military sees 'marked and increasing Iranian influence' among extremists
in Iraq
From The Associated Press,
August 2, 2007
"There's three pots of bad
guys in my battle space. One's the Sunni extremists, one's the Shia extremists
and the other is marked and increasing Iranian influence," he said. "They're
all anti-Iraq, they're all against the government of Iraq, they're all
against the Iraqi people."
Related: Operation
Fahrad Al Amin: the Anbar Offensive
Bush's
Gulf Gambit
By containing Iran,
the U.S. remains in Iraq
By Michael Young, Reason
Magazine, August 2, 2007
If Iran is accepted as the
arch enemy, then withdrawing from Iraq suddenly looks like a bad idea,
particularly when influential critics of the conduct of the Iraq war like
Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack are writing
that the U.S. is "finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military
terms." By anchoring Iraq policy in a consensus that previously existed
vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, buttressing this with
lucrative defense contracts, and gaining Israeli acquiescence
for the sales, the administration has made it more difficult for Congress
impose its will on President George W. Bush when it comes to the Iraqi
conflict.
Cut
Iraq some slack
U.S. is fighting for
its own interests; Baghdad’s leaders could be worse.
By Clifford D. May, USA
Today, August 1, 2007
Granted, Iraq's government
has disappointed. Americans liberated Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and gave
them the right to vote. What we couldn't give them are the institutions,
values and habits required for effective democratic governance. Those they
will have to develop over time, if they can. But keep in mind: We are at
least partly responsible for the Iraqi government's dysfunction. Watching
the debates taking place in Washington — hardly the most inspiring example
of democracy in action — Iraqis don't know whether we are going to stay
to finish the job or abandon them to al-Qaeda terrorists and Iranian-backed
death squads.
Their
Western Ways
We infidels are good
for something
By Victor Davis Hanson,
National Review Online, August 2, 2007
Recently on a British Airways
flight to London, members of Qatar’s royal house were outraged that its
princesses had been seated next to male passengers who weren’t related
to them. Was this a clash of civilizations?
Not quite. The entire entourage
was, in fact, returning from an all-day shopping spree in Milan, Italy.
The angry members of Qatar’s royal house may claim outrage at gender equality,
but they seem to have no problem with the libertine West when it comes
to splurging their kingdom’s wealth on luxury items.
This type of hypocrisy in
the Muslim world is not limited to supposedly devout oil-rich Gulf sheiks
who cherry-pick Western sin. Terrorists — with one foot in the 7th century
and the other in the 21st century — want it both ways, too.
# # #
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From
Elsewhere
The
Real Long War
By Christopher Chantrill,
The American Thinker, July 31, 2007
The great challenge for us,
conservatives and libertarians, people inspired by the spirit of democratic
capitalism, is the challenge of the "oikophobes." It means that the
war on terror is not finally a war with Islamic terrorism, but an episode
in the long war within the west that began in 1789. It is the war
between the heirs of Burke and the heirs of Rousseau and Robespierre, between
ordered liberty and the "oikophobic" alliance between rational experts,
progressive activists, designer revolutionaries and out-and-out thugs.
The "oikophobic" alliance presents a Janus face to the world. It
claims to be the very highest and best in human evolution, committed to
equality, sharing and caring. In pursuit of this ideal it advocates
constantly for inclusiveness and against divisiveness. Yet it conducts
its politics according to the crudest techniques of the demagogue, setting
worker against boss, renter against owner, woman against man, poor against
wealthy, secularist against believer, black against white, gown against
town.
Live
and Let Live
by John Stossel, Capitalism
Magazine
Is it really necessary to
explain that government is force? When the Salvation Army asks you for
a donation, you are free to say no, and you suffer no consequences. When
the U.S. government demands a tax return and a check on April 15, you can't
say no and go about your business. You comply or face fines or imprisonment.
Yes, you get to vote for candidates periodically. But having an infinitesimal
say in who will coerce you doesn't change that fact that they are using
force.
Increasingly, it seems that
the biggest difference between conservatives and "liberals" is that the
conservatives know government is force. But that doesn't stop them
from using it. Michael Moore may not have thought about it, but there are
only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government
is all about force. Government has nothing it hasn't first expropriated
from some productive person. In contrast, the private sector — whether
nonprofit or a greedy business — must work through persuasion and consent.
Tax
Hike Scorecard
Editorial, The Wall Street
Journal, July 31, 2007
With a new Democratic majority,
the agenda on Capitol Hill has shifted abruptly this year, and no more
so than on taxes. For a decade the focus in Congress was which taxes to
cut. Now everywhere you look someone running the Congress, or running for
President, is proposing to raise taxes on some industry or group of Americans.
Reluctant
Class Warriors
Do Dems finally understand
the collateral effects of taxing the "rich"?
By Kimberley A. Strassel,
The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2007
Back in the hot summer of
1990, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell proudly engineered the infamous
"luxury tax," a nasty little tithe on everything from furs to jewelry to
yachts. Democrats were proud: Not only were they throwing new dollars at
the Treasury, they'd done it by socking it to the rich.
The
Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care
By David Gratzer, City Journal,
Summer, 2007
Socialized medicine has meant
rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking
to the market. .... America is right to seek a model for delivering good
health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but
close to home...
The
Day "New Media" Was Born
By Joseph Farah,
Human Events, August 1, 2007
I think I know the precise
day the "New Media Revolution" was born -- and, no, it was not the date
Al Gore invented the Internet. Specifically, it was Aug. 4, 1987 -- 20
years ago this Saturday. And I'll bet there won't be a commemoration anywhere
in America or around the world -- except maybe at my house. What happened
on that date? Something momentous. Something wonderful. Something that
changed the world for the better. It was on that date the Federal Communications
Commission abolished the Fairness Doctrine by a 4-0 vote, ruling "the intrusion
by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement
of (the Fairness Doctrine) restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters
… (and) actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public
importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial
prerogative of broadcast journalists."
Environmentalists
Against "Buying Green"
From the Ayn Rand Institute,
July 30, 2007
"The truth is that environmentalism
is not compatible with human flourishing. It does demand economic
destruction and unbearable hardship. The claim that its goal is to protect
the environment for the sake of mankind is a Big Lie. Its goal is to protect
nature, not for man, but from man--to preserve an untouched
environment as an end in itself, no matter what cost or hardship that imposes
on human beings.
U.S.
Still Great, Even as Democrats Act Small
By Kevin Hassett, Bloomberg.com,
July 30, 2007
The U.S. is indisputably
a great and thriving nation. The economy right now is about the same that
it has always been, delivering growth and general well-being that is unrivaled
in world history. And yet, judging by the mood of the country, Americans
seem close to despair. Why? .... The best explanation for this disconnect
is that our government is failing us. Year after year, no progress is made
on the big problems facing the country.
Domestic
Terror in Iran
Iran has just carried
out the largest wave of executions since 1984.
By Amir Taheri, The Wall
Street Journal, August 6, 2007
It is early dawn as seven
young men are led to the gallows amid shouts of "Allah Akbar" (Allah is
the greatest) from a crowd of bearded men as a handful of women, all in
hijab, ululate to a high pitch. A few minutes later, the seven are hanged
as a mullah shouts: "Alhamd li-Allah" (Praise be to Allah).
Hot
and Cold Running Temperatures
By Fred Gielow, The eco-logic
Powerhouse, August 01, 2007
Let's
see if there's a pattern here:
DANGER: The Globe Is Cooling
New York Times, February
24, 1895: "Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again."
…
DANGER: The Globe Is
Warming
Los Angeles Times,
March 11, 1929: "Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and
that it will continue to get warmer."
…
DANGER: The Globe Is
Cooling
Science News, November
15, 1969: "How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most
important problems of our civilization."
…
DANGER: The Globe Is
Warming
New York Times, August
22, 1981: "[Global warming of an] almost unprecedented magnitude [is predicted]."
Washington Post,
January 18, 2006: "[Rising temperatures] could literally, alter the fundamentals
of life on the planet."
…
Let me check my calendar.
My guess is it won't be too long before we'll be worried to death about
the next big Cooling scare.
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