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True
North Archives - September 11, 2007
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Featured
Articles
Education:
What Works What Doesn’t
Robert Maynard
When education was removed
from its religious context in the family and church and the purpose of
education shifted from personal academic and moral excellence to the kind
of socialization that makes one fit to be a cog in someone's view of a
socioeconomic utopia, the result was that the quality of education suffered.
No amount of money or integration schemes is going to change that."
The
Never-ending War Against Poverty
By John McClaughry
 There
are two main reasons why 17.4% of all children in America live in poverty.
The first one is that their parents typically work for pay only sixteen
hours a week. If the adults in a poor household worked a total of 2000
hours a year, as most full time workers do, over 70% of poor children wouldn't
be poor any more. Two thirds of poor children live in single parent homes.
If poor mothers married and formed families with the fathers of their children,
almost three quarters of the children would immediately be out of poverty.
Why
the E-Court Pulled a 180 Part II
Martin Harris
 Over
the long pull, the law isn’t a set of rules, black ink on white paper;
those written prescriptions merely codify what the general public expectation
calls for. Thus, our European ancestors once, quite legally, burned alive
or tore into pieces those who violated contemporary expectations; and more
recently, our own respected jurists found legal support for slavery and
prohibition, then changing their minds and their legal rules in deference
to the public changing its own expectations. On a less life-and-death plane,
the same transition in expectations has taken place in that part of Vermont
governance which sets the rules for land use. Once upon a time, you could
attend a planning board meeting and reliably expect to hear a grizzled
old Yankee warn them that "no one’s goin’ to tell me what I can’t do with
my land" and today you can attend a similar hearing and reliably expect
to hear a neighbor to a proposed project demand that the permit be denied
because "we like it here just the way it is" even though the zoning regulations
clearly permit the proposed use.
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Quotable
"Above all, we must realize
that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable
as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our
adversaries in today’s world do not have." --Ronald Reagan
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Notes
& Events
September 11 (Tuesday):
A
conversation between BILL Mc KIBBEN and JOHN McCLAUGHRY on the topic of
CLIMATE CHANGE. Author and climate change activist Bill
McKibben of Middlebury College and EAI President and "global warming hysteria
critic" John McClaughry will engage in a "Climate Change Conversation"
at the Riley Center at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester on Tuesday,
September 11, at 7:00. The event is sponsored by the Green Mountain Academy
for Lifelong Learning, and the public is invited. Advance registration
to guarantee seats may be accomplished by going on line to Green
Mountain Academy’s website.
September 20: Republican
Town Organizational Caucuses, contact the VTGOP for more
information, 802.223.3411.
September 21: David
Barton Returns. The Sheraton Inn and Conference Center.
For those of you who do not know David’s work, he is a powerhouse scholar
on our constitution, the Founding Fathers and the Christian history of
our nation. As some may recall, last year David’s plane was grounded in
Chicago and he never made it to Burlington. The good folks at Christian
Action Ministry are planning a similar event again this year. David
will be speaking on the Founding Fathers and Islamic Terrorism and
the Role of Pastors and Christians in Civil Government. These are
timely topics, so mark your calendars. Freewill donation and only 750 seats
are available, so call or email for reservations:
Grand Isle:
372-6442 Winooski: 655-0280
Burlington:
862-3427 Rutland: 773-2602
or Email: camnet@surfglobal.net
September 29th (Saturday):
Annual
Dinner and Silent Auction - Chittenden County Chapter of the Vermont Right
to Life Committee.
5:30 PM
to 9:00 PM, St. John Vianney Parish Hall, 160 Hinesburg Road, South Burlington,
VT. Tickets are $12 per person, paid in advance. Payment can be mailed
to: CCRL, P.O. Box 677, Milton, VT 05468. Payments
must be received by September 24. Email chitrighttolife@gmail.com
and reserve your tickets today.
October 4th: 87th
AIV Annual Meeting.
The Associated
Industries of Vermont (AIV) 87th Annual Meeting will be held at the Capitol
Plaza Hotel in Montpelier. The luncheon will feature a keynote address
by Farooq Kathwari, Chairman, President, and CEO of Ethan Allen Inc., as
well as an address by Governor Jim Douglas. Ethan Allen is a leading Vermont
employer but also at the forefront of the struggle to make manufacturing
in Vermont and the US succeed in the face of national and global competition.
October 13th: Teens
for Life Summit 2007.The Vermont
Right to Life Committee, Inc. 8:30AM - 4:00PM, DoubleTree Hotel, 1117 Williston
Road (Route 2), South Burlington, VT 05403
# # #
Vermont
Weekly News Round-Up
No
More Free Doughnuts For The Elderly!
Caledonian Record Editorial,
September 5, 2007
We've said it before and
we will say it again. There are no limits to where the nanny-governments
- local, state and federal - will go once they perceive a problem that
they believe is beyond the control of their constituents.
To
Build A House ... or, perhaps, four thousand of them.
VermontTiger.com, September
05, 2007
There are reasons why builders
can't make money on "affordable" housing. These have been pointed out,
here
and in other venues, over and over, and ignored by the legislature just
about that often. One of the reasons for the high cost of housing is price
of land. And land is expensive because, increasingly, it is scarce.
Or, rather, it has been made scarce by, among other causes, the efforts
of trusts whose raison is to make more and more land off limits
to development. The campaign to sequester more and more or Vermont may
or may not be a good thing but it undeniably reduces that amount of land
on which builders can put up houses. And where development is allowed
(once all the requisite flaming hoops have been cleared) it is more expensive
than it would otherwise be. Scarcity tends to drive up prices that
way.
Vermonters
Pay for Legislature’s Unconstitutional Law
From Vermont GOP, September
6, 2007
Vermont taxpayers are getting
a $1.4 million bill for loser’s legal fees, the consequences of the legislature
passing a radical, unconstitutional campaign finance law in 1997. What
is still unknown is how much taxpayer money the office of Vermont Attorney
General William Sorrell wasted in defending a law that intentionally violated
Vermonters’ First Amendment rights.
Speaker
Gaye Symington's Privacy
Caledonian Record, September
7, 2007
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.
King
Arthur (aka Art Woolf) Responds
VermontTiger.com, September
06, 2007
"In Vermont as well as
the United States," said King Arthur, "the middle class is getting
smaller, but it’s because people are moving out of the middle class and
up, not out of the middle class and down."
Who
You Calling "Socialized Medicine?"
VermontTiger.com, September
06, 2007
"If you think health care
is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
# # #
Freedom
Under Fire:
The
Global War on Terrorism
Tick,
Tock
Michael Ledeen on the
Iranian Time Bomb
A National Review Online
Q&A, September 5, 2007
"Most people…do not realize
that, for nearly thirty years, the Iranians continuously attacked us, and,
aside from some harsh rhetoric from time to time, we never responded."
So writes NRO contributor and American Enterprise Institute scholar
Michael Ledeen in his new book The
Iranian Time Bomb. The book is an analysis of Iran’s ongoing war
with "the Great Satan" and a blueprint for finally fighting back. Ledeen
took a few questions on the book and the current scene from National
Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez over Labor Day weekend.
The
'Ramadan spike'
By Ray Robison, The American
Thinker, September 06, 2007
But perhaps more important
to determining the status of the surge is the fact that this summer saw
the first breakage of the run-up to the "Ramadan spike". The month-long
Islamic holiday of Ramadan can happen in any season, thanks to the lunar
calendar employed by Islam with no leap-year corrective. But in recent
years of the rotation cycle it has been in the Fall. The "Ramadan spike"
is not precise and numbers can be found that are outliers from the norm,
but there is a general, detectable trend. As you can see by
these numbers, the end of summer foretells the autumn Ramadan spike
with an upsurge from July to August usually peaking in October or November.
In 2004, the numbers of fatalities to hostile fire went up from 45 in July
to 63 in August. In 2005, the numbers went from 48 to 75. In 2006 it went
from 41 to 59. This year it went from 74 in July to 60 in August which
marks the first reduction in the run-up to Ramadan since the anti-Iraqi
forces began to fight in earnest at the end of 2003. It is the first downward
trend in the most violent part of the year.
Al-Qaeda’s
Hope
By Cliff May, Townhall.com,
September 6, 2007
As the sixth anniversary
of September 11th, 2001 approaches, we should be grateful: al-Qaeda has
not successfully attacked Americans a second time on American soil. We
also should be distressed: Americans are debating whether to fight al-Qaeda
-- or whether to retreat from the one battlefield on which we have a chance
to seriously damage al-Qaeda, both militarily and ideologically.
Rafsanjani
in as Head of Iran's Assembly of Experts
By Rick Moran, The American
Thinker, September 06, 2007
Former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani has been elected head of the powerful Assembly of Experts in
Iran in what many experts see as a repudiation of the hard line faction
headed up by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
OBL,
Thompson, and the Long War
From the Right Wing Nut
House, September 08, 2007
How big a threat is the global
jihad being waged against the United States and the west? I agree with
the left that the threat should be kept in perspective. I do not agree
with the left when they attempt to minimize it. Fred Thompson’s take on
OBL and The Long War is just
about right:
"Bin Laden being in the
mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan is not as important as there are probably
al-Qaida operatives inside the United States of America," Thompson said.
Bin Laden is considered the man behind the attacks that killed nearly 3,000
people. The former Tennessee senator and actor argued that "bin Laden is
more symbolism than anything else. I think it demonstrates to people once
again that we’re in a global war."
Thompson said the al-Qaida
leader and the Iraq war must be seen as part of the larger war on terrorism.
"It’s one that bin Laden
and people like him are heading up and we need to catch him and we surely
need to deal with him, but if he disappeared tomorrow we still have this
problem. If Iraq disappeared tomorrow, we’d still have this problem," Thompson
said.
Post-9/11
Hubris: The war@home
By Victor Davis Hanson,
National Review Online, September 6, 2007
In short, six years of quiet
at home since 9/11 have fooled some into thinking that terrorists pose
little danger here — or that we may be doing far too much rather than too
little to stop such killers. No matter that this past week a jihadist plot
to destroy U.S. facilities in Germany was thwarted. Others make the mistake
of endlessly refighting the past six years — who let al Qaeda grow?; who
"lost" Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? — instead of concentrating
on the storm ahead. Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and
in-fighting was naivete. But what will be the reason for the next successful
strike against us by the jihadists?
The
Tide Is Turning in Iraq
The Tribal Movement Against
al Qaeda in Anbar Province has Spread to Other Parts of the Country
By Kimberly Kagan, Opinion
Journal, September 9, 2007
Phantom Thunder was the first
coherent campaign aimed at all of the major al Qaeda strongholds at once.
As a result, terrorists could not move from one safe haven to another.
Iraqi and coalition forces killed, wounded and captured thousands of them.
Listening
to Petraeus
The president had the
courage to change course on Iraq. Does Congress? By John McCain &
Joe Lieberman, Opinion Journal, September 10, 2007
The Bush administration finally
had the courage to change course in Iraq earlier this year. After hearing
from Gen. Petraeus today, we hope congressional opponents of the war will
do the same.
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From
Elsewhere
Elections,
media, and money
Part 3 of 'The Crisis
of the Republic'
By Alan Keyes, Renew America
2007
The people exercise this
sovereignty through periodic elections, in which they choose their
representatives — the legislators and magistrates who make and carry out
the laws. Obviously, the reality of the people's sovereignty depends on
the integrity of the elections, that is, on whether or not they represent
a true choice by the people.
If their choice is decided
by fraud or deceit, or preemptively determined by some other means, the
exercise of sovereign power passes to the successful deceivers and manipulators,
whoever they may be. In this event, the outward appearance of elections
is simply a way of procuring the people's submission to the will of their
actual rulers, which they more readily offer on account of the delusion
that this will is the result of their own decision.
Related: A
Bundle of Trouble
Norman Hsu & Hillary
Clinton -- More Clinton Campaign Scandal News By Tom Fitton, The National
Ledger, September 10, 2007
On the heels of that [Norman
Hsu] Clinton campaign fundraising controversy, came this one. According
to The Washington Post: “Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman
has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton’s campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to
escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens.”
Related: You
Wouldn't Want to Be in Hsu's of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama
Rosy
Scenario: Are Happy Days Here Again for GOP?
By Tony Blankley, Human
Events, September 06, 2007
If military success and growing
political success at the local and provincial levels with the Sunni tribal
leaders continues and expands its effect to the national Baghdad government
-- and we have both military calm and maturing pro-American governance
in Iraq -- Democrats from presidential candidate to city council will be
in an awful state.
New
NCLB Plan Establishes International Education For All
By Ed Watch, The Eco-logic
Powerhouse, September 07, 2007
Leaders of the U.S. House
Education and Labor Committee would institute international education standards
in all public schools as part of their proposed changes to the No Child
Left Behind Act (NCLB). "International education standards" translated,
means requiring that schools teach the beliefs and values of the U.N. It
does not mean having higher standards than we now have. …
International
Baccalaureate (IB) is the framework for an International Curriculum.
According to the IB website, IB (and mational/international curriculum
standards) are all about beliefs and values. It is pure
multiculturalism. For example, IB curricula teaches that the American
Creed - that is, the principles of the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution that all men and women are created equal, with inalienable
rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that government exists
to protect those rights, and limited government - may be highly regarded
by some Americans, but it lacks universal truths and values that are good
for all Americans, and it certainly isn't good for other nations. Rather,
International curriculum standards promote the U.N. Universal Declaration
of Human Rights [UDHR] as the highest, universal principles. The Declaration
of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are fundamentally opposite from
the UDHR. A few examples are these (see "The IB
Curriculum").
Related: Home-schooling
Numbers are Up
Global
Warming Faces Popular Backlash
By Thomas Lifson, The American
Thinker, September 05, 2007
Further evidence that global
warming enthusiasts have jumped the shark comes with the box office disaster
experienced by Leonardo DiCaprio's film 11th Hour. Roger Friedman
of Foxnews.com reports
(hat tip: Drudge):
"The
11th Hour," has been a total bust at the box office. After
18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales.
The 90-minute snore-fest is playing on 111 screens this week, but that
number is likely to be reduced this Friday. The film will be sent to DVD
heaven after that.
…. I wonder how many years
it will require for global warming's snake oil faction to become ashamed
of their role in pushing their dogma with their chosen methods. The public
seems to have caught on, judging by the box office surprise Leo got, not
to mention all the empty seats at various Live Aid concerts. By the way,
have you seen Al Gore in the news recently? I haven't. Maybe he and his
obsession have become what Variety used to call "B.O. Poison".
The
Withdrawal Crowd is in Retreat
By J.R. Dunn, The American
Thinker, September 05, 2007
The withdrawal campaign hit
its peak last spring as dissatisfaction with the war effort edged past
the 50% mark and GOP opportunists such as Domenici and Lugar climbed aboard.
For a time going into summer it seemed that a withdrawal vote might actually
have a chance in Congress, an eventuality that would have seriously jeopardized
the surge strategy.
That initiative failed thanks
to Harry Reid's unmatched ability to screw up a royal flush. Reid's gimmick
of holding an all-night session to force a vote backfired, antagonizing
the Republicans to the point that they held the line.
The surge has put the lid
on all that, by revealing that public dissatisfaction was based on lack
of progress against the Jihadis and not actual opposition to the war itself.
After three months of Al-Queda and associates being chased from pillar
to post, accompanied by an impressive drop in attacks and other incidents,
the polls
have begun to turn around despite everything the media, the Democrats and
Brian de Palma can do to muddy the results. Support for withdrawal short
of victory was soft in the first place and is growing softer every day.
Related: Has
MoveOn Betrayed the Democratic Party?
Thompson's
Bold Vision
By Dennis Byrne, Real
Clear Politics, September 06, 2007
Thompson has enunciated a
truth: Without us, other free nations are unwilling or unable to take the
leadership in the worldwide struggle for freedom. While others will shrink
from this reality, painting the sentiment as xenophobia, chauvinism, bellicose,
blah and blah, the reaction on Leno's show reflects or plays on the deep
feeling among Americans of just pride and earned obligation. An America
withdrawing from Iraq and relinquishing its power to others less determined
to preserve liberty is not an America we know. Nor is it the America we
should become. This is an understanding that has been stewing underneath
as the useless and negative chattering goes on in Washington and the "elite"
media.
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