Interesting News - 17 January 2008

Rick Moran takes issue with the anti-conservative musings of the Ayatollah Huckabee. The essence of conservatism is freedom of thought. Huckabee is proposing his own mini-theocracy the precise opposite.

The Democrats get to jettison Dennis Kucinich from their debates, but Republicans still have to give air time to Ron Paul. The scales of justice are just not balancing on this one.

The Top Ten UN Slogans. My personal favorite: "If this is an emergency, please hang up and call America." Do read them all.

When did World War II end? Read this thoughtful post and decide for yourself.

Ex-GOP Congressman Mark Siljander has been arrested and charged with a bevy of offenses connected to terrorism financing.

The reverberations from the NIE on Iran’s Nuclear Weapon’s Program continue. As I indicated at the time, the only possible conclusion is that the declassified NIE was written in such a manner as to take Iran policy out of the hands of the executive and put it in the hands of the State Department. The reverberations of that act portend to grow ever louder with the passage of time.

Bill Rogio, Michael Ledeen and several other luminaries took part in a recent symposium on Iraq. Their depth of thought is a bit more illuminating than you are likely to hear at the average Democratic Presidential Debate. See here.

Free speech is once again under fire. The victim this time is the Pope who was censored by scholars at Sapienza, one of Europe's most prestigious universities. The scholars successfully argued that it was inappropriate for the Pope to speak at their University because he had supported the 17th century trial of Galileo for heresy arising out of Galileo’s own exercise of freedom of speech. The irony of censoring the Pope on these grounds apparently went wholly unnoticed by the leftist scholars. I for one wish I had but a tenth of the moral clarity of today’s left.

Arthur Brooks at the WSJ points out that our modern left is less rational and more intolerant than are conservatives. "The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked." The moniker of Bush-Hitler comes to mind. I disagree with Brooks’s labeling of the modern left as "liberal." They are "progressives" – having long ago progressed beyond the liberal traditions of intellecutal honesty and tolerance.

Stick and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Unless of course I happen to be a member of the religion of peace, in which case words pose a mortal threat to my identity and justify my own homicidal temper tantrum. Do read this story about Susan Winter down under. She has really, really pissed off the Salafists. Sheik Yer Mami has the story on this one.