The Great I Am

   Near the end of Pres. Obama's first year in office, columnist Jeff Jacoby noted the president's decision not to attend the celebration in German marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The president, wrote Mr. Jacoby, was "too busy to attend the celebrations," opting instead to send a video of himself.

 

In the video, Mr. Jacoby writes, the president was careful not to offend any current or former enemy, blandly calling the wall   '' 'a painful barrier between family and friends' that symbolized 'a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.' He referred to 'tyranny,' but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words 'Soviet Union' or 'communism,' for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev."

 

Pres. Obama, however, was not too busy to talk about...well...Pres. Obama.

 In "Obama's Swelling Ego" Mr. Jacoby notices that "[a]s presidential rhetoric goes, [the video] was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat."

Recently, the president spoke at a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). According to The Weekly Standard, Mr. Obama gracelessly decried what he saw as the mess his predecessor had left him when he assumed office on Jan. 20, 2009. He then recited the litany of Democratic initiatives he was responsible for in his 14 months in office: the second stimulus bill, the healthcare bill, etc.

The president's self-congratulatory conclusion: "This has been the toughest year-and-a-half since the 1930s."

Oh, really?

Granted, the U.S. president has shown himself in that last year and a half to be shockingly ignorant of American history (for most leftists, American history started in the streets of Chicago in 1968). but has this president had a tougher go than:

• FDR in 1933-34 confronting not only an economic depression but the near collapse of a monetary system, as well as a natural disaster that left much of the nation's breadbasket a parched wasteland? 
• Harry Truman coming to grips with a devastated and vanquished Nazi Europe, a stubborn enemy in the Pacific that refused to yield, and the soul-wrenching decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan? 
• Jack Kennedy navigating by Braille through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, only to be taken to the nuclear woodshed the following year by the more experienced Soviet leaders? 
• Lyndon Johnson trying to bind the nation's wounds after JFK's assassination while trying to get his arms around that thing called Vietnam? 
• George W. Bush confronting a stateless, invisible enemy that  perpetrated the most significant attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor? 

Mr. Obama is much taken with his own accomplishments in the face of what he sees as adversity. But quite frankly, a lot of that adversity was of his own making. And while he views his legislative conquests as a lasting accomplishment, it may instead be a phyrric victory. Because if the president leaves any lasting accomplishments it appears that they will be the destruction of American initiative, the death of American exceptionalism, the end of America as a counterweight to the forces of tyranny in the world, and the permanent re-classification of the U.S. as a debtor nation.

You want to talk about a tough year and a half? That will be the first 18 months of whoever replaces him in the White House and has to untangle this mess.

Just thought you might like to know.

Persecution of Coptic Christians on the Rise

  Copts are Egyptian Christians descended from among the first Gentiles who embraced Christianity two thousand years ago. The religion of Jesus Christ was brought to Egypt by no less than St. Mark, the author of one of the four Christian Gospels.

   By the third century Coptic Christians were the majority in Egypt, and remained so until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. From then on, for the most part, Copts, along with Jews, were relegated to the status of dhimmi, or inferior, by their Arabic Muslim rulers. Today about 12% of Egypt is Coptic.

   Throughout history there have been many famous Copts ranging from Maria al-Qibtiyya, wife of the Prophet Mohammed to Boutros Boutros Ghali, the 6th secretrary-general of the United Nations.

   But today, Coptic Christians in Egypt are as persecuted a minority as the first Christians were at the hands of the Roman empire. Several weeks ago in Marsa Matrouh, a crowd of 3,000 Muslims, whooped into a war frenzy by an angry Imam, descended on the Christian community in order to "cleanse the city of its infidel Christians," democracy advocate Moheb Zaki wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.

   The result: 18 homes, 23 shops, and 16 cars destroyed while the Coptic community barracaded itself in its church for 10 hours until the Muslim fury died out.

   Over the last year there have been more than a dozen such instances of religious "cleansing" in Egypt. In Naga Hamadi a drive-by shooting at a Coptic church, following Christmas Eve mass, resulted in the massacre of seven Christians and the wounding of 26 more.

The following disturbing video was taken with a mobile phone shortly after the shooters did their work:



   Egyptian Copts have been forced to flee their homes by the thousands. Police, writes Mr. Zaki, arrive conveniently late to the scene after reported attacks on Copts. Often, he reports, the result is police pressure on Copt victims to "reconcile" with their Muslim attackers.

   Far from being the product of a few bad actors, this violence is being condoned and supported by a government that looks the other way, and a Muslim religious leadership that feeds the frenzy. One Sunni Islamic institution, according to Mr. Zaki, has declared the Bible to be corrupt and Christianity a pagan religion. And despite the dramatic rise in these attacks, no Muslim has yet been convicted of any crime.

   For all this talk, we continually hear that Islam is a religion of peace. Good luck finding many Egyptian Copts who agree with that. The plain fact is that if there are any peaceful Islamic leaders-religous or secular-now is the time for the big talkers to come forward and walk the walk: Unequivocally denounce this terrorism.

   Until that happens, most non-Muslims, rightly or wrongly, will continue to view Islam as a violent cult stuck in a time warp and a threat to civilized society the world over.

   Just thought you might like to know.

  

 

State-Run Media Applauds...Well, State-Run Media

   This blog has for some time decried the actions of the federal government in taking over commercial enterprises--nationalizing whole industries with the aplomb of a third world dictator. The mad dash to remake American society before anyone figures it out has been as breathtaking as it has been effective. A few examples:

• The nationalization of two-thirds of the domestic auto industry. This includes the dismantling of personal property rights engineered by the Obama administration when it rendered worthless the bonds of secured creditors and gave 55% of Chrysler to the administration's union masters.
• The federalization of the student loan industry. This has all but guaranteed that college tuitions will keep rising unchecked. As academia, which has its first member in the Oval Office since Woodrow Wilson, keeps raising the price of its product, the federal government compliantly will keep shoveling more and more money into student loan furnace. There will be no market force to push back. Pres. Obama will be able to keep its friends in academia fat and happy behind their ivy-covered walls
• The nationalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy represented by the so-called healthcare reform bill. Should this law ever go into effect, and we pray it doesn't, the end game will be a single-payer--the government--system of healthcare

   Following on this impressive rush to socialism comes a just released a draft report by the Federal Trade Commission entitled "Potential Policy Recommendation to Support the Reinvention of Journalism." The purpose of the report is to float some ideas on how the federal government can "support" the newspaper business.

   This is a business with few exceptions (News Corp. properties like the Wall Street Journal or New York Post) that has, for the most part, been in the tank for Barack Obama since he began his improbable ascendancy to the White House. But newspapers are a dying technology. We need them to know what's going on about as much as we need buggy whips to get to the general store. Fewer and fewer people read newspapers on a daily basis, and those who do mostly focus on features and opinion content. And the number of people under the age of 30 who read a daily paper is miniscule.

What is not miniscule to the the 20 and 30-something crowd is the Internet--social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook; You Tube and the like. But the administration doesn't much like this social media stuff because they can't control it like they can the newspapers.

   A conservative president like George Bush fails to visit Louisiana during the Hurricane Katrina clean up and every major daily editorializes on how out of touch the Republican president is with the troubles facing Louisiana. Barack Obama waits weeks before visiting the same state to view the site of the worst oil spill in the nation's history and the papers bury the story.

But the story's not buried on the blogosphere. Neither was Scott Brown's improbably takeover of what mainstream media poobah David Gergen sonorously pronounced "the Kennedy seat" in Massachusetts. Nor the stories of how administration policy is being shaped by policy payoffs to Friends of Barack.

But administration wants to keep its journo friends employed and writing nice things about Barack. So the FTC, acting as an agent of the Democratic National Committee, decides to re-invent newspapering to prop it up against the market forces that are sending it the way of parchment scrolls and quill pens. How? In two ways: First by making it easier for newspapers to assert rights over its product and charge the "Internet freeloaders" (read: conservative bloggers) for content. And second (this is the really the sneaky part), by federalizing the newspaper business through direct financial support.

That's right: take from your opponents and give to your friends. Tony Soprano would be proud.  The FTC justifies confiscating your money through fees and taxes and giving it to the Friends of Barack this way: "The federal government has supported journalism through indirect means since the founding of the Republic."

   Some of its suggestions? For one, create a "journalism" branch of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is the federal boondoggle that provides payoffs to Obama supporters to train their youngsters to be community activists. Not exactly the Hitler Youth, but nevertheless a subsidy whose ultimate goal is to skew public opinion the president's way largely by registering people most likely to vote Democratic, or by informing the public debate from the left.

   For another, increase funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Of course, the crown jewel of the CPB is National Public Radio, the dependably left-leaning news organization favored by liberals.

   Other proposals include establishing a "federal fund for local news," and granting newspapers a tax credit for every journalist they employ. Is there a managing editor alive who would dare sic his journo-dogs on the Joe Sestak-take-an-election-dive allegation against the White House if his profit margin relied on the quarterly check from Uncle Sam?

   And as for tax-credits-for-journos, who gets to decide who is a journalist and who isn't? Sounds like a new federal bureaucracy needs to be created. Would a senile embarrassment like Helen Thomas get her J-card, but the world's most powerful blogger, Matt Drudge, not?

   The FTC goes on to cite what it calls precedents in having government support a private industry, as if that would be a justification. There is a difference between a fourth-class manuscript postage rate and the wholesale propping up of a superfluous industry about to fall.


   This may be the most insidious of the Obama plans to remake the U.S. as a European socialist system. It's one thing to nationalize Chrysler. They were third in a three-horse race when the feds took them over, and they're still third. Student loans only affect students. But by economically weakening his opposition, and showering your tax dollars on newspapers whose policy is to fawn over the president and look the other way when he stumbles, President Obama is using the reins of government to tighten the leftist grip on the U.S. and shape public opinion by restricting the flow of information.

And the historical precedents for that are found not in the Postal Service or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as the FTC maintains, but in Germany, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela.

Just thought you might like to know.

Election Day

  Today is Primary Election Day in Pennsylvania. I've just finished casting my ballot. I voted in the Republican primary (we have closed primaries here in the Keystone State). I am conservative by nature and Republican by convenience, since the Grand Old Party seems to support more of the positions I favor.

   Pennsylvania is drawing national interest today because Democrat-turned-Republican-turned Democrat  again Arlen Specter is being challenged by insurgent Joe Sestak, a congressmen from suburban Philadelphia. Sestak has an unimpeachable liberal voting record in two House terms; however, he's run afoul of the Obama administration by alleging that the White House tried to bribe him with a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet appointment in return for dropping out of the race against Specter, the endorsed candidate. An inconvenient breach of federal election law.

   The political Wise Men are framing this as yet another referendum on the Obama administration, similar to Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

   The weather here today is cold and rainy which should favor Specter, who is endorsed (bought and paid for might be a more accurate term) by Big Labor. Expect Labor to mobilize the vote for Specter, while the suburgan latte liberals who support Sestak probably will want to keep their Coach bags dry on a day like this and stay home.

  On the Republican side, things are a bit more civilized. Former congressman Pat Toomey, is expected to easily win the nod to be the GOP Senatorial candidate. I voted for Toomey, who nearly defeated Specter in the 2004 Republican primary.

   In the race for governor I voted for the tea party candidate Sam Rohrer. The endorsed establishment candidate Tom Corbett, current attorney general, is a competent candidate, but part of a system where Democrats and Republicans can be a little too cozy. If you have two business partners who think alike you have one partner too many. And if you have two parties that cut too many back room deals you've got a one-party state. Count me as one voter who's not too concerned when the needle gets pegged on the volume of our polical debates.

   I also voted for my local state representative Chris Ross. Chris understands constitutent service, and that all politics is local, as Tip O'Neill famously said.

  Also on my ballot was incumbent Congressman Jim Gerlach, a fiscally conservative back bencher. Gerlach is a former businessman, and Lord knows we need more of them in Congress. If even a quarter of the Congress had ever had to make payroll in their lives the national fisc would look a lot different than it does now.

   Primaries are generally categorized by low turnout. I try to never miss an election, even if I have to vote absentee. I count myself in that first generation who benefitted from the 26th Amendment to the Constitution. I remember how special it felt to walk into my polling place as an 18-year-old and cast my first ballot. I remember it clearly: The polling place was a small town barber shop in Ohio. The booth was a curtain set up around one of the three chairs. I voted by Xs on a paper ballot. How times have changed.

   One thing that hasn't changed: No matter how inconsequential the election is, whenever the election worker hands me my ballot, the hair still stands up on the back of my neck as much as it did that first time I voted, .

Just thought you might like to know.

Pennsylvania Looking for Descendants of African American Civil War Soldiers

   Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is known for many things. It is the capital of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is home to one of the most splendid and historic state capitols. Abraham Lincoln's funeral train stopped there in 1865, bearing the body of the nation's 16th president back to Springfield, Illinois. In 1901William McKinley's funeral train stopped there bearing the president's body back to Washington, DC, accompanied by his successor Theodore Roosevelt. (However, the new president refused to be photographed with the local Pennsylvania politicians, so bad was the national reputation for corruption by the Keystone State's sordid solons back in the day.)

  And this November it will be notable for another historic achievement: a re-enactment of an 1865 celebration march by black Civil War soldiers.

   At the end of the Civil War thousands of victorious blue coats marched through the city of Washington in what was called the Grand Review of the Armies. But none of the more than 180,000 black troops who fought in the war was invited to march.

   So black troops staged their own march in celebration of the end of the war. It took place in Harrisburg in November 1865. Troops representing more than 24 states marched through the streets of the city.

   This November Pennsylvania will commemorate that historic march with a re-enactment in the state capital.  As part of the plan, the state wants to identify descendants of the soldiers who took part in the march. The African-American Historical Society  of South Central Pennsylvania will be holding a workshop in Lancaster to help people identify ancestors who may have fought with the U.S. Colored Troops.

   The Pennsylvania Tourism Office is heading up the event in Harrisburg. For more information on the march, or identifying troops who took place in the original event, contact either organization.

   Should be a great event.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Bear in the Woods Returns

   Lost in the swirl of events over the past few days was a story out of Central Asia, where a coup d'etat has driven the recognized leaders of Kyrgyzstan from office. The new leaders of the former Soviet republic are decidedly pro-Russia.

While the leader of the Free World was staging his Kumbaya photo op in the U.S. this week, Russia continued its recent practice of re-establishing its former cordon sanitaire around the motherland.


   The revolutionary blitzkrieg and flawless execution of the coup could not have been engineered by the rabble that had been protesting the former government. Stratfor calls it a "pre-arranged revolution." Clearly the Kyrgyz rebels had a helping hand. And that hand was Moscow. According to Stratfor:

• Revolutionary leaders visited Moscow in the days prior to the coup and had a sit down with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
• Spooks from the Russian spy service were seen snooping around Kyrgyzstan in the weeks prior to the revolution
• Russia had 150 elite paratroopers staged and ready to go to give assistance to its new ally

Russia is unique among world powers in that it lacks natural borders such as mountains, rivers or oceans to protect it from countries that would do it harm. Historically it has relied on its dense forests or its devastating winters to repel invaders. Look in the encyclopedia under Hitler or Napoleon. So a succession of Russian leaders, such as the czars, the Communists or now Vlad "the Impaler" Putin have made human fences out of neighboring countries.

   But this invasion-by-proxy is different. Moscow is nearly 2,000 miles from the Kyrgyz capital. Simply put, Russia is moving the goalposts to its advantage.

   Readers of this blog know that it often advocates connecting the dots to see the whole picture in any issue. So connect the dots on Russian expansion:

• In January Russia finalized an EU-type reintegration of the economies of former Soviet republics Kazakhstan and Belarus into Mother Russia
• A pro-Russian government was installed in Ukraine
• Russia, through its incursion into Georgia, has already proclaimed its own "Monroe Doctrine," establishing its own sphere of influence in Central Asia
• Russia engineers a regime change in the sovereign country of Kyrgyzstan

  In 1984, President Ronald Reagan was pilloried by the left for challenging the Democrat Party's realpolitik approach to dealing with the Soviet Union. Pres. Reagan believed that appeasing dictators like the Soviet bosses wasn't a real defense at all, but lunacy. History has proven his "peace through strength" stance towards the Soviet bear to have been correct. That stance was summed up in his "Bear in the Woods" TV commercial during the 1984 presidential race.

   Today we have a president who is serving out the second term of Jimmy Carter. His answers to Georgia and now Kyrgyzstan has been to stage a charade of a nuclear summit, the single accomplishment of which was an agreement by world powers Ukraine and Chile to get rid of their enriched uranium. A president who keeps drawing lines in the sand which the Iranian nuclear wannabes keep crossing.

   Meanwhile the Russian Bear in loose in the woods again.

   Just thought you might like to know.

  

Riders of the Purple Sage

   It began as the brainchild of common carrier Russell, Majors & Waddell. The plan was simple: Launch an express mail service that would connect east to west. A 19th century FedEx, it would cut the delivery time for a letter to California from months to days.

   It owns a place in American lore, an archetype of American ingenuity, drive and hard work. It typifies the taming of the West. But it was plagued with problems from the start:

• The cost of sending a letter via courrier was about five bucks--a week's wages for a workingman in the day
• Although it is linked inextricably with the history of the West, it lasted little more than one year
• It drowned its owners in a sea of red ink

   By all measures it was an abominable failure. Perhaps its biggest failure is one that continues to plague American industry: underestimating new technology. Within 15 months of its launch it was obsolete: replaced unceremoniously by the transcontinental telegraph in 1861.

   But unlike other technologies like the steam engine it refused to ride quietly away. A 19th century huckster named Buffalo Bill Cody made a living for four decades playing off of it as a symbol of the old West.

   Millions of school children studied it, with myth replacing facts over the years

   The American movie director John Ford included it in his great Western epic, Fort Apache, even though the movie events take place a full 15 years after it shut down.

   As those generations of American school children have, we remember it today for what it says about our national character, and ability to climb tall mountains-literally-to solve problems.

   150 years ago today, April 3, 1860, riders were up for the first time on the Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company--to be known forever as The Pony Express.

   Just thought you might like to know.