Today's Lying Anti-american Times featured a rosy headline about how the children of illegal immigrants are learning English at a record clip. Imagine my surprise (not) when, while driving to my job as an ESL teacher in the public schools, I heard Laura Ingraham report that nearly identical articles had appeared in the NY Times and the Washington Post. I don't hold with conspiracists, but this is an awfully interesting coincidence.
For the record, immigrants' children are speaking English fairly well. Reading and writing, however, is another story. That's where I come in ... peddling not only nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the present perfect tense, but the idea that America is something other than the hellhole their history teachers describe.  Yesterday a student asked me what a "Senate" was. He can tell you all about why the war in Iraq is "wrong" -- he's been taught that -- but no one before me had ever told him about the three branches of government.

It was one thing to laugh at Arkansas' own Biggest Loser when this campaign first began. Bible as literal truth? Doesn't believe in evolution? Classic tax-and-spend RINO? It has been more and more difficult to pelt Huckabee with the ridicule he so richly deserves since he's become the MSM poster boy for everything they hate about the GOP. See? We told you that conservative is just another word for out-of-it hick nutball. Last week I saw Huckabee interviewed on the BBC; the interviewer could scarecely keep back her guffaws. This is exactly what the party of Hillary, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and Nancy Pelosi wants the world to see as the face of its opposition: an ignorant, uneducated, unsophisticated petty bureaucrat, with zero international experience and enough "values" baggage to fill a 747. Put plainly, the man is a nightmare.
Jimmy Carter was elected because he was a "fresh face," an "outsider" whose refreshing unconventionality would be a tonic for a malaise-stricken country. We are still paying for his blunders and deliberate snafus today. Carter turned out to be a bigot, a friend to our enemies, a hand-wringing wuss unable to kick even a housefly out of Washington, much less the ayatollah out of Iran. There is a direct line of causation from Carter to 9/11; in fact, one could fairly safely say that every American serviceperson killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 died thanks to the Carter administration and its cringing inability to nip the Islamofascist horror at its bud stage. Oh, but Carter was such a "nice guy"! He was so "likeable," so "self-effacing", so free of dreaded elitist-imperialist aggression! It was no accident that this fool came to the White House during the initial efflorescence of the feminist movement; this was the tip of the emasculation iceberg that has since upended most of the country and is threatening to turn us forever into a power on the level of, say, Portugal.
Huckabee is no different. Like Carter, he proclaims that he is "born again"; like Carter, he's all about compassion; like Carter, he has the unspeakable urge to protect America from itself. How to do that? Why, regulate, of course! More laws, more bureaucrats ... more taxes. I'm not saying I would ever vote for HC (I can't even bring myself to write out that witch's name) -- but there would definitely need to be a clothespin on my nose, before I'd ever punch my chad for Hucksterbee.  He is everything our party does not need. Let's make him disappear from public discourse -- soon!

Fred Thompson's been running into money problems. Here's an interesting defense from his camp:

“There has been some criticism that the testing-the-waters committee is not such a testing-the-waters committee and that he’s running some sort of campaign,” said a Thompson adviser.

“He’s raising enough to test the waters, not run a full-fledged presidential campaign. He’s not a candidate.”
The adviser said the figure was enough for Thompson to hire some staff, do some travel and work on his policy initiatives.  [from Politico]

Hmm, guess it all depends on what your definition of the word 'candidate' is.  And as for "running some sort of campaign" -- Thompson's not doing that, is he? After all, all of us ordinary folk spend our money on hiring staff, taking relevant trips, and working on our policies ... And I guess those daily pictures in the paper and online of him shaking hands and wearing various hats appear because, well, because he's not a candidate and isn't running a campaign
Anyone who approves word-pretzels like these when he's still "not a candidate" cannot be guaranteed to talk straight when in office. Note he still hasn't come up with an honorable answer on the lobbying issue.
What a difference from, for example, Rudy Giuliani.  You may not like his answers to your questions. But you will get answers, not syrupy-voiced doubletalk.  Didn't we have enough of that?

OF MICE AND MAHAGONNY AND SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE
    On Valentine’s Day, 1989, the terror-loving regime of the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini took a considerable gamble. What if, they reasoned, we select some unsuspecting public person who is not a citizen of our state – who is a citizen of a Western democracy – and declare, to all who listen, that we intend to kill this person for alleged crimes against our faith? What will the democracies do? Will they do anything?
Salman Rushdie is the canary shoved down the mine of state-sponsored terrorism. Thankfully, he isn’t dead – but if it weren’t for Great Britain’s Special Branch and the author’s own deep pockets, he might well be. America yawned, Britain raked him in the tabloids, and nobody, in short, gave a damn. The Ayatollah’s experiment worked. Now Tehran’s theocrats deny the Holocaust and speak wistfully of a world without America. What have we done? Have we done anything?
We have done something.  We have utterly failed – and the Bush administration, hobbled by political correctness, must take some responsibility for this – to connect the obvious dots that link Iran to a whole laundry list of horrors, most recently Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iraqi Shia “rebellion.” We have also failed –not demonstrated to the public with consistency and clarity – to place this hideous grouping within the larger context of global Islamism. Who threw Holocaust survivor Leon Klinghofer, and his wheelchair, off the deck of the Achille Lauro back in 1985? Who downed the plane over Lockerbie? Who puts ammo and camo on babies? Who was arrested in Buffalo and in Fort Dix? Who sends their ghoulish missionaries into our prison system, where they peddle violence to those already used to it – a pre-sold audience, as it were?
Rushdie himself said it best, in an op-ed piece shortly after 9/11 titled, “Yes, It Is About Islam.”  
    They always come for artists first. The Nazis let white mice loose in the theater where Bertold Brecht’s “Mahagonny” played (I heard this from my father, a German refugee). I read The Satanic Verses; it’s as good as Joyce or Nabokov, and much better than most Thomas Pynchon. How could any human being want to kill another such over a dream sequence? Or was it the part about the ayatollah-like character flushing the toilet that inflamed the faithful? Rushdie called Mrs. Thatcher “Mrs. Torture” and “Maggie the b*tch.” His characters put her wax effigy into a microwave and chanted, “Burn, Maggie, burn.” The English are derided as “cold fish,” whose climate makes it impossible for them to differentiate day from night and good from evil. Considerable harumphing and spluttering ensued, but look what happened in the end. The man’s alive, and knighted.  The English may be cold indeed, but, like God in the Depeche Mode song, they do have a sense of humor.   
    I’m looking for alpha atheist Christopher Hitchens to come to the defense of his old friend. Religion – one religion, at least – is ruining everything. We need to spread the bad, the awful news: have you heard? They want us dead. Otherwise, before too long, there might be mice beneath your feet.

Things are looking up for secular conservatives - I think we're becoming a movement. Today here comes my favorite raver, Christopher "I've Got a Headache from Thinking Down to Your Level" Hitchens, flogging his new book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Now, now, ye people of faith, put down those (metaphoric) knife sharpeners, leave those fantasies of disemboweling (verbally, of course) the obscene infidel. Hitchens is a bona fide intellectual with a thorough education. I love NASCAR, but he ain't NASCAR. We need people like him on this side of the aisle: thinkers, writers, recent converts whose zeal spilleth over. As long as the left's got us pegged as anal compulsives, toothless hooch-brewers, icky ladies who say "That's not nice," and all the other stereotypes, we won't make headway in the states with large numbers in the Electoral College.
This has nothing to do with Republican positions. Most Democrats don't know their party's positions (even when their party has positions), let alone ours -- if they thought that much, they'd probably switch sides. (By the way, last time I looked, the Democrats had a position: supine). This is about public relations and the management of perception. As Bush and Rumsfeld learned to their (and our) chagrin, all that stuff -- soft, silly, emotional, irrational stuff -- does matter. It's a dog-manipulates-dog world.
     Disagree with Hitchens all you want, attempt to change his views, pray for him if you like -- but please, no public outcry, no spluttering indignity, no calls for the author's head. He is good for us, and we need more like him.
Thanks for reading - Sylvia Weiser Wendel

Why My Kid Attends a Canadian University
(a personal anecdote with a political point)
Three reasons.
1.    Cost. A year of tuition and room and board at the University of British Columbia, in beautiful Vancouver, costs about 2K more than at a University of California, in-state tuition, and $15,000 less than a private college.
2.    Admittance Policies.Canadian schools weigh junior and senior year grades very heavily, unlike U.S. colleges where, if you’re not a 4.0 by junior year, you’re toast. My beloved offspring, for all his high test scores and extracurriculars, didn’t get the correlation between work and grades until second semester of that year.
3.    NO PC PIFFLE.The first book we purchased in his college search was the conservative Thomas Sowell’s Choosing the Right College, which I highly recommend. Like everyone else who’s politically conscious, I had been hearing horror stories of PCism on campus since the 80s. After 9/11, the horror began to bear more and more overtly anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic overtones. I read campuswatch, standwithus, frontpagemagazine, and many others, for a jolt of sickening reality from time to time. Since we are not observant Jews, a religious university was not going to work. At our UCs and Cal State universities, the nincompoops are everywhere; since my son would be a humanities major (film production), I knew he was fated to endure years of swill. Worse than that, I worried that his native good sense and level-headed thinking might be injured, or killed off altogether, in the process. The only thing worse than some of the courses offered in the Cal State universities (“Gay [not "gay", but the q-word which townhall does not allow] Film Theory” was a mild one) were the resumes of the instructors, which read like a sad account of the decline of the American intellect. Not one of these people, often themselves products of the special-interest “studies” programs, had ever taught anything like an honest, rigorous course, what Sowell refers to as part of a “core curriculum.” In their classes, there would be no solid history, no pleasure in literature for its own sake, no getting to the heart of art of any stripe. All the rain up in Vancouver could not be half as dreary as this prospect.

Stephen Hunter notwithstanding, Canada is plenty liberal, at some times even wackily so, and they seem to think Pat Robertson is the president of the United States, but their issues are their issues. In the US, in California in particular, the instruction my son would have heard in the classroom might well have amounted to nothing more than a sophisticated version of the taunt the tough gang-bangers on the school bus used to use: “white boy!” By not being gay/black/female/Hispanic/transgender/from a dysfunctional and stunted family, Beloved Offspring would, in his professors’ eyes, be not only a second-class citizen, a sort of dimmi: he would be automatically suspected, if not groundlessly accused, of negative isms towards any or all of the groups above.
UBC is one of the “Canadian ivy” schools (the others are UToronto, McGill, and Queens in Ontario), and I believe the education that my son is getting there is just as thorough, comprehensive, and skillfully taught as any in the States. They do have a curriculum which is very sensitive to the needs of First Nations peoples (native Americans), and no doubt the university contains fewer conservatives than liberals, but they just don’t push a particular agenda. Yes, I know – Canadians are too <nice> to inflict politics on the unwilling – but I am glad of it. With everything one has to fear when a child’s away at school, at least I am not worrying that one of his professors might be a wanted terrorist (Florida int’l U.), that an invitation to a speaker will cause a nasty riot with overtones of the pogrom (UC Irvine), or that my son – or any student -- might be singled out for abuse based on the color of his skin, his religion, or his personal beliefs (SF State, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and many more).
That’s what we’ve come to, America. If there are other U.S. parents with kids in Canadian schools, I’d love to hear your comments. Thanks for reading.

Robert Tracinski, over at The Intellectual Activist (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_secular_right.html), takes up an issue most of us don’t like to talk about, possessing as it does the potential for an ugly internecine squabble. Being secular and right should not be an oxymoron, any more than being Jewish and Republican. I’m all those things, and I exist.

As a Jewish Republican, I welcome evangelicals’ support for Israel, as should everyone who’s not an anti-Semite. Jewish Democrats, however, hear “faith” and think “KKK.” They’re wrong; they’re out of date; but we consign those voters to ice floes when we let our leaders and our spokespeople trot out their Christianity on all occasions. Take the “war on Christmas” – please. Turning December 25 into “the holidays” was one of the best things to happen to American Jews (not to mention Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians and Ba’hais) in the last sixty years. I’d love to send our servicepeople a Spring basket – but when it’s called an Easter basket, I take my hand off the phone. Intelligent, well-educated talk show hosts lose listeners like me in droves when they discuss New Testament theology or Chronicles of Narnia. It’s inside baseball at its dreariest.

Robert Tracinski of the The Intellectual Activist (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_secular_right.html) takes up an issue most of us don’t like to talk about, possessing as it does the potential for an ugly internecine squabble. Being secular and right should not be an oxymoron, any more than being Jewish and Republican. I’m all those things, and I exist.

As a Jewish Republican, I welcome evangelicals’ support for Israel, as should everyone who’s not an anti-Semite. Jewish Democrats, however, hear “faith” and think “KKK.” They’re wrong; they’re out of date; but we consign those voters to ice floes when we let our leaders and our spokespeople trot out their Christianity on all occasions. Take the “war on Christmas” – please. Turning December 25 into “the holidays” was one of the best things to happen to American Jews (not to mention Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians and Ba’hais) in the last sixty years. I’d love to send our servicepeople a Spring basket – but when it’s called an Easter basket, I take my hand off the phone. Intelligent, well-educated talk show hosts lose listeners like me in droves when they discuss New Testament theology or Chronicles of Narnia. It’s inside baseball at its dreariest.
I am not trying to be harsh. I’d like to think I speak for thousands, if not millions, who have figured out by now that the Democratic party doesn't have its interests at heart. Nonetheless, they continue to vote blue, terrified that if they vote their conscience (not to mention their pocketbooks), storm troopers will come bursting through the door and separate us into lines. Most American Jews have had little, if any, face-to-face contact with evangelicals. The preconceptions have been formed by parents and grandparents who remember housing tracts and country clubs and businesses and universities where we were not admitted till the sixties; by the MSM’s and Hollywood’s kneejerk pigeonholing, in which only cranks and hicks were Christians; by their expensive educations (“four legs good! Two legs bad!”); and by their social circles, which although they may be multicultural and polyethnic share one trait in common: detestation of the “fundamentalist” “religious right.”  

And things do happen …sometime in the 1990s a stone-sober partygoer told my husband he would “give him all the money in [his] wallet” if said spouse would consent to read the New Testament.  Okay, okay, one nut at a party .. but this is how most Jews see Christians, evangelical amazed-by-grace Christians: humorless, one-tracked proselytizers who hear “Jew” and think “money.”

The secular Jews can be part of the secular right. They should be, and they might be, if we who have already, heh, passed over can convince them that Republicans are not all “a bunch of Pat Robertsons,” as I once heard a friend say. The secular Jews, and the secular right, will return the GOP to office in 2008, if we have the simple good sense to pick a nominee people want to vote for. Put Rudy Giuliani in the big tent, and watch it expand.

I'm pushing the cart around at my local Ralphs in the San Fernando Valley, and between the magazine rack, the Italian cheese and sausage section, and the chilled case where they keep the lox, I overhear this conversation between two store employees:.
BLUE-EYED BOY, around 17: Yo .. yo se llame, no ...
HISPANIC WOMAN, around 23:  Oh come on!  You gotta learn Spanish.
BOY (embarrassed, but chuckling a little): Why do I have to learn Spanish?
WOMAN (with the wisdom of maturity, and a little of the weariness of one stating the obvious): So you can understand when people talk to you! (with a laugh) So you can be biiingual ... and mingle.

 "So you can understand when people talk to you" ... after all, you can't expect peole to speak English here.

Funny (she meant it well), but the chill I felt was't coming from refrigerated fish. .

First we had news.
Then we had news with commentators.
Somewhere on the side around this time, we also began to have infotainment.
With the rise of new media, yesterday's commentators--learned pundits, professorial soothsayers, ex-Congresspeople of various stripes--have morphed into commentainers. O'Reilly, Hannity, Dick Morris, Michelle Malkin: they are accessible, funny, spout some memorable lines, infuriate even their fans at least once a week, but we watch them with grins on our faces. We hush other conversations, even lay down the knife and fork, so we won't miss any zingers. Each has his/her tics, tropes, fetish objects. We know what to expect; and like the professionals they are, commentainers deliver.
Ann Coulter, though, always the bad kid in the play group, has stepped outside her character, and that is not professional. Politainment, of which commentainment is a subgroup, does not present the ideal venue for going through the fourth wall, let alone driving a Mack truck through the plywood. Coulter lost perspective on her --oh well, let's call it what it is, her shtick. Like the too-clever kid in the classroom, who just can't resist passing that note although she knows the teacher's on to her and is already steaming up the aisle, detention slip in hand, Coulter showed she is too much in love with her own witty-wacky self to think about who might be listening. She couldn't help it. She's not in control.
I find this scary, because people who cannot control themselves are mostly drunk (Mel Gibson), on drugs (Britney Spears), or afflicted with some form of mental illness (diaper'd astronaut). These are not people one wants talking on TV. They are not those I'd like to represent my causes. Their antics may amuse and entertain, oh sure, but when they let the mask drop, things get ugly. Coulter's claim that she was simply making an Isiah Thomas/rehab joke is disingenuous: she might have called Edwards all sorts of things, but the word that came out was the word caught on tape. "Bozo", "sphincter", "phony", "airhead" -- all of those describe John Edwards just as well, and have no connotation other than as insults. If she said (Latin word for bassoon) on purpose, she's got problems; if it, gosh, I don't know, just slipped out -- she's got problems.
I say let's exile Coulter from the Commentainer's Guild; three months ought to be enough, while she goes somewhere to learn about perspective and humility (Judeo-Christian virtues, after all). Perhaps, after all, her "rehab" crack was simply a veiled but desperate plea ... where are her parents? Did she get a tattoo that same day? Ann, we're here to help.