Here's one more reason to stamp out the Islamofascist scourge that has spread so much terror, misery and death around the world:

 Taliban blocks UN polio treatment in Pakistan

It may not be immediately obvious to you why this is such a terrible thing—but then you've probably never suffered from polio. I have.

I contracted the disease in 1956, during one of the last great polio epidemics to sweep over America. I was six years old. Though eventually I made a full recovery, the memory of that dark time remains in my memory. Some things you don't forget, even if you were just a little boy when it happened. And to read now what these Taliban bastards are doing—in the name of religion!—to hundreds of thousands of innocent children makes me furiously angry. Preventing kids from being vaccinated against polio—how's that for a crime against humanity?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:12 PM EDT

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Happy Earth Day!

Oh, and by the way, did you know that today is also Lenin's birthday? What was the expression so often used by Pravda? "It is not by accident…"

Posted by tmg110 at 8:54 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 22 April 2009 9:03 AM EDT

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I wasn't particularly surprised to hear that this year's United Nations World Conference on Racism (reviewed here for the Weekly Standard by Joseph Loconte) included a vicious anti-Semitic diatribe by the Holocaust-denying president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That the United States even considered attending this farce is something of a scandal. A US delegation participated in the preparatory meetings, but the likely course and outcome of the conference was too much for even the morally lackadaisical Obama Administration to stomach. Delegates from the European Union did attend—but upon hearing Ahmadinejad's rant, the EU delegates walked out in protest. (With the honorable exception of the Czech delegation, the EU contingent returned to the conference later in the week.)

Eventually the conference produced a final document full of ringing phrases about the need to combat racism—rather an amusing outcome in view of the behavior of its guest of honor, not to mention the actual policies of so many of its signatories.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:12 AM EDT

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As of today, 42 US Catholic bishops have denounced the University of Notre Dame's invitation to President Barack Obama to deliver its 2009 commencement address. This list is here. Among them is my own bishop, John D’Arcy of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, which includes Notre Dame. He said:

President Obama has recently reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred. While claiming to separate politics from science, he has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.

This will be the 25th Notre Dame graduation during my time as bishop. After much prayer, I have decided not to attend the graduation. I wish no disrespect to our president, I pray for him and wish him well. I have always revered the Office of the Presidency. But a bishop must teach the Catholic faith “in season and out of season,” and he teaches not only by his words—but by his actions.

My decision is not an attack on anyone, but is in defense of the truth about human life.

I have in mind also the statement of the U.S. Catholic Bishops in 2004. “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” Indeed, the measure of any Catholic institution is not only what it stands for, but also what it will not stand for.

Bishop D’Arcy's full statement can be read here.

Will Notre Dame listen to the voice of reason and authority? Frankly, I doubt it. The university may go on pretending to be a Catholic institution—but one it has conferred an honorary degree on Barack Obama, no Catholic with a conscience could accept that claim.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:46 AM EDT

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I'm no admirer of Barack Obama, but he is the President of the United States, and it's disquieting to see how tamely he submits to then insults of such creatures as Hugo Chavez and the Iranian mullahs.

Since the first hours of his presidency, Obama and his foreign policy team have been making conciliatory statements with the object of luring Iran into negotiations. And the mullahs who run the Islamic Republic have repeatedly spit in Obama's eye. Each and every American overture has drawn a contemptuous response from Tehran. Nothing daunted, though, the President and his people keep trying. They really do seem to believe that if they're nice enough and patient enough, the mullahs will come around.

Yesterday, after a one-day "trial," a US citizen of Iranian origin was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison. There's no doubt that the charges against Roxana Saberi are bogus. Quite clearly, this is the Iranian regime's way of testing the Obama Administration. How badly does the US president want talks—badly enough to abandon an innocent American citizen to the dubious mercies of a brutal dictatorship?

Evidently. Faced with this blatant Iranian provocation, Obama denied that Saberi was a spy—and left it at that. As for our tough-as-nails Secretary of State, the redoubtable Hillary Clinton, she professed herself "deeply disappointed." Not as disappointed as Roxana Saberi, I'll bet—but still, one must feel the SecState's pain. Why won't these mullahs just listen to what Obama and Hillary and everybody on the US side have been saying? Don't they understand where the US government is coming from?

But that's just the trouble, Hillary. They have been listening. And the understand you and the man you work for all too well.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:42 PM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 21 April 2009 8:09 PM EDT

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Here's a useful resource for those who may agree with Barack Obama that the Iranian regime can be sweet-talked out of its desire to (1) obtain nuclear weapons and (2) accomplish the destruction of Israel. Some samples:

"They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets."

"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury."

"Israel is a rotten, dried tree that will be annihilated in one storm."

"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

That was President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Barack Obama implies that when he says things like this, we shouldn't take him at his word. Of course, the United States is a long way from Iran, so maybe it would be easier to go along with Obama's supine policy. But suppose your were a Jew living in Israel? How would you feel about Ahmadinejad's threats in that case?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:38 AM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 21 April 2009 8:10 PM EDT

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President Obama's persistent embrace of the world's most loathsome tyrants and despots began as a distasteful spectacle. But his chummy little encounter with the Mussolini of South America, Venezuela's own Hugo Chavez, we have moved on into the realm of farce.

Indeed the whole Summit of the Americas, where the encounter took place, was a farce. There sat Obama, bland and passive in the face of yet another bash-America hatefest. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O'Grady remarked sarcastically: "If President Barack Obama's goal at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend was to be better liked by the region's dictators and left-wing populists than his predecessor George W. Bush, the White House can chalk up a win."

Probably the Obama Administration does think that receiving compliments from a lowlife thug like Hugo Chavez constitutes progress. But if you can judge a person by his enemies, George W. Bush, who was reviled by Chavez, comes out looking a whole lot better than the Chicago Messiah.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:18 AM EDT

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While President Obama's Department of Homeland Security wrings its hands over the (largely nonexistent) threat of radical right-wing domestic terrorism, the FBI has been busy pursuing actual domestic terrorists, e.g. fanatical animal-rights activists. Daniel Andreas San Diego is a 31-year old computer specialist from—where else?—the People's Republic of Berkley, California. The FBI has added him to its "Most Wanted" terrorist list; he's wanted for the 2003 bombings of two corporate offices in California.

Hmmm, now what are the odds that San Diego is a disgruntled Iraq War vet with a Second Amendment fetish and a grudge against Barack Obama…?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:10 AM EDT

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Over the weekend I happened to catch a Fox News interview with military commentator Ralph Peters, who pointed out something about the repugnant DHS “right-wing extremism” report that I overlooked. While the Obama Administration is super-solicitous of our Islamofascist enemies, rebranding their terrorist attacks as “man-caused disasters” and the war on terror as “overseas contingency operations,” it isn’t at all shy about smearing its domestic critics (veterans explicitly included) with the words “terrorist” and “terrorism."

Posted by tmg110 at 9:26 AM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 21 April 2009 8:10 AM EDT

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It's easy enough to show that President Obama's domestic policies are the economic equivalent of the Flat Earth Theory. The estimable Charles Krauthammer does it here, and there's no arguing with his conclusions. Barack Obama's policies will drive this country's economy over the cliff. Why don't the American people see this?

Well, though I'm not the first to observe that most Americans are ignorant of economics, the point bears emphasis. But ignorance of economics is merely the entry argument. It makes possible people's fatal belief that they want it badly enough, can get something for nothing—healthcare, for instance.

Barack Obama knows well how to harp on those strings of ignorance and desire. What he doesn't know (as Krauthammer makes clear) is how he's ever going to make good on all the promises he's made. And what he doesn't know will hurt not only him, but us.  

Posted by tmg110 at 8:51 AM EDT

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