Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Monday, July 29, 2013
Sunday, July 28, 2013
"Bud" Day Passes, May he find comfort in the arms of Angels
Col. George "Bud" Day, Medal of Honor recipient, dies at 88
In this Sept. 2, 2008, file photo, retired Col. George "Bud" Day waves to the crowed at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. / AP Photo
MIAMI Retired Col. George "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient who spent 5.5 years as a POW in Vietnam and was Arizona Sen. John McCain's cellmate, has died at the age of 88, his widow said Sunday.
Day, one of the nation's most highly decorated servicemen since Gen. Douglas MacArthur and later a tireless advocate for veterans' rights, died Saturday surrounded by family at his home in Shalimar, after a long illness, Doris Day said.
"He would have died in my arms if I could have picked him up," she said.
Day received the Medal of Honor for escaping his captors for 10 days after the aircraft he was piloting was shot down over North Vietnam. In all, he earned more than 70 medals during service in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
He was an enlisted Marine serving in the Pacific during World War II and an Air Force pilot in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
In Vietnam, he was McCain's cellmate at one camp known as the Plantation and later in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, where he was often the highest-ranking captive. During his imprisonment, the once-muscular, 5-foot-9 Day was hung by his arms for days, tearing them from their sockets. He was freed in 1973 — a skeletal figure of the once dashing fighter pilot. His hands and arms never functioned properly again.
"As awful as it sounds, no one could say we did not do well. (Being a POW) was a major issue in my life and one that I am extremely proud of. I was just living day to day," he said in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. "One really bad cold and I would have been dead."
In a statement Sunday, McCain called Day a great patriot and said he owed his life to the man. "He was the bravest man I ever knew, and his fierce resistance and resolute leadership set the example for us in prison of how to return home with honor," McCain said.
Born Feb. 24, 1925, in Sioux City, Iowa, where the airport is named for him, Day joined the Marines in 1942 while still in high school. He returned home, graduated law school and passed the bar exam in 1949. He entered the Iowa National Guard in 1950 and attended flight school. He was called to active duty in the Air Force the next year and did two tours as a bomber pilot in the Korean war.
In Vietnam, Day was shot down over North Vietnam on Aug. 26, 1967. He bailed out, but the landing broke his knee and his right arm and left him temporarily blinded in one eye.
In the spring of 1968, Day's North Vietnamese captors opened his cell door and brought in McCain, who was wearing a full body cast and was nearly dead. McCain had been in isolation for seven weeks and could not wash or feed himself, Day wrote in "Return With Honor," his 1989 autobiography.
"We were the first Americans he had talked to. ... We were delighted to have him, and he was more than elated to see us," Day wrote. They helped nurse McCain.
After the war and his release, Day retired to the Florida Panhandle in 1977 and practiced law, becoming a crusader for veterans' health care benefits. He took his fight to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 lawsuit that alleged the government reneged on its promise to provide free lifetime health care to hundreds of thousands of Korean and World War II veterans.
The high court declined to hear an appeal of the case brought on behalf of two Panhandle retirees, but the legal action was credited with prompting Congress to pass legislation in 2000 expanding the military's TRICARE health insurance program to include veterans over age 65 who had served at least 20 years or were medically retired.
In his later years, Day also took on Iraq war cases. For example, he represented Army Maj. John Nelson, a medical officer who was wounded when a bomb exploded at a mess hall in Mosul in 2004. Nelson suffered short-term memory loss and spoke with permanent stutter. The Army initially said his injuries merited a 40 percent disability rating. Day, however, persuaded an evaluation board to award full benefits.
"People would stop us in the airports and all over, and we had no idea who they were, and they would say, `Thank you, you saved my husband's life,' or, `You saved my wife's life,"' Doris Day said. The couple celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary in May.
Day was active in McCain's failed 2000 and 2008 Republican presidential bids and in 2004 campaigned against fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry. Day called Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, a turncoat who lied to Congress in 1971 about alleged war atrocities.
"I draw a direct comparison to General Benedict Arnold of the Revolutionary War to Lt. John Kerry," Day said in 2004. "Both went off to war, fought, and then turned against their country."
Day's political activism again caused controversy in 2010 when he supported Gov. Charlie Crist in his failed Senate bid. Day called Crist's primary opponent Marco Rubio "a Hispanic who can run his mouth." He referred to President Barack Obama as "the black one."
Day retired from the Air Force at the rank of colonel, never attaining his general's star. He said he believed he wasn't promoted further because he "told it like it was."
"When I returned from prison, there was a huge amount of the Air Force leadership that were not combat-oriented. They were quasi-political managers," he said.
It said it was his tendency for tough talk that kept him out of politics.
"I probably could have been more tempered in some of my remarks but when they asked, I told them," he said.
He and McCain remained close since they first shared that 9 foot by 15 foot cell, and years later he advised the younger Navy man against running for the U.S. Senate.
"When he first said he was going into politics, I said politics is compromise and John had almost zero ability to compromise," Day said.
He said he told McCain politics was like prostitution.
"You have to do a whole bunch of things and then there is a paycheck," he said.
But Day said his friend later changed his mind by becoming a reformer in Congress.
Campaigning for McCain in his 2008 presidential bid, Day drew comparisons between the lessons of Vietnam and the dangers of an early pullout from Iraq.
"They cut off funding to the South Vietnamese Army and we ended up being defeated, and that's really very relevant to what's happening right now," Day said.
Day worked throughout his life, accepting an appointment to head the 35-employee Okaloosa County Public Defender's Office in 2009 at the age of 83 after the Panhandle circuit's newly elected public defender asked him to take the job as a personal favor.
© 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.Day, one of the nation's most highly decorated servicemen since Gen. Douglas MacArthur and later a tireless advocate for veterans' rights, died Saturday surrounded by family at his home in Shalimar, after a long illness, Doris Day said.
"He would have died in my arms if I could have picked him up," she said.
Day received the Medal of Honor for escaping his captors for 10 days after the aircraft he was piloting was shot down over North Vietnam. In all, he earned more than 70 medals during service in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
He was an enlisted Marine serving in the Pacific during World War II and an Air Force pilot in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
In Vietnam, he was McCain's cellmate at one camp known as the Plantation and later in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, where he was often the highest-ranking captive. During his imprisonment, the once-muscular, 5-foot-9 Day was hung by his arms for days, tearing them from their sockets. He was freed in 1973 — a skeletal figure of the once dashing fighter pilot. His hands and arms never functioned properly again.
"As awful as it sounds, no one could say we did not do well. (Being a POW) was a major issue in my life and one that I am extremely proud of. I was just living day to day," he said in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. "One really bad cold and I would have been dead."
In a statement Sunday, McCain called Day a great patriot and said he owed his life to the man. "He was the bravest man I ever knew, and his fierce resistance and resolute leadership set the example for us in prison of how to return home with honor," McCain said.
Born Feb. 24, 1925, in Sioux City, Iowa, where the airport is named for him, Day joined the Marines in 1942 while still in high school. He returned home, graduated law school and passed the bar exam in 1949. He entered the Iowa National Guard in 1950 and attended flight school. He was called to active duty in the Air Force the next year and did two tours as a bomber pilot in the Korean war.
In Vietnam, Day was shot down over North Vietnam on Aug. 26, 1967. He bailed out, but the landing broke his knee and his right arm and left him temporarily blinded in one eye.
In the spring of 1968, Day's North Vietnamese captors opened his cell door and brought in McCain, who was wearing a full body cast and was nearly dead. McCain had been in isolation for seven weeks and could not wash or feed himself, Day wrote in "Return With Honor," his 1989 autobiography.
"We were the first Americans he had talked to. ... We were delighted to have him, and he was more than elated to see us," Day wrote. They helped nurse McCain.
After the war and his release, Day retired to the Florida Panhandle in 1977 and practiced law, becoming a crusader for veterans' health care benefits. He took his fight to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 lawsuit that alleged the government reneged on its promise to provide free lifetime health care to hundreds of thousands of Korean and World War II veterans.
The high court declined to hear an appeal of the case brought on behalf of two Panhandle retirees, but the legal action was credited with prompting Congress to pass legislation in 2000 expanding the military's TRICARE health insurance program to include veterans over age 65 who had served at least 20 years or were medically retired.
In his later years, Day also took on Iraq war cases. For example, he represented Army Maj. John Nelson, a medical officer who was wounded when a bomb exploded at a mess hall in Mosul in 2004. Nelson suffered short-term memory loss and spoke with permanent stutter. The Army initially said his injuries merited a 40 percent disability rating. Day, however, persuaded an evaluation board to award full benefits.
"People would stop us in the airports and all over, and we had no idea who they were, and they would say, `Thank you, you saved my husband's life,' or, `You saved my wife's life,"' Doris Day said. The couple celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary in May.
Day was active in McCain's failed 2000 and 2008 Republican presidential bids and in 2004 campaigned against fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry. Day called Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, a turncoat who lied to Congress in 1971 about alleged war atrocities.
"I draw a direct comparison to General Benedict Arnold of the Revolutionary War to Lt. John Kerry," Day said in 2004. "Both went off to war, fought, and then turned against their country."
Day's political activism again caused controversy in 2010 when he supported Gov. Charlie Crist in his failed Senate bid. Day called Crist's primary opponent Marco Rubio "a Hispanic who can run his mouth." He referred to President Barack Obama as "the black one."
Day retired from the Air Force at the rank of colonel, never attaining his general's star. He said he believed he wasn't promoted further because he "told it like it was."
"When I returned from prison, there was a huge amount of the Air Force leadership that were not combat-oriented. They were quasi-political managers," he said.
It said it was his tendency for tough talk that kept him out of politics.
"I probably could have been more tempered in some of my remarks but when they asked, I told them," he said.
He and McCain remained close since they first shared that 9 foot by 15 foot cell, and years later he advised the younger Navy man against running for the U.S. Senate.
"When he first said he was going into politics, I said politics is compromise and John had almost zero ability to compromise," Day said.
He said he told McCain politics was like prostitution.
"You have to do a whole bunch of things and then there is a paycheck," he said.
But Day said his friend later changed his mind by becoming a reformer in Congress.
Campaigning for McCain in his 2008 presidential bid, Day drew comparisons between the lessons of Vietnam and the dangers of an early pullout from Iraq.
"They cut off funding to the South Vietnamese Army and we ended up being defeated, and that's really very relevant to what's happening right now," Day said.
Day worked throughout his life, accepting an appointment to head the 35-employee Okaloosa County Public Defender's Office in 2009 at the age of 83 after the Panhandle circuit's newly elected public defender asked him to take the job as a personal favor.
Victor Davis Hanson on Race
Posted on
Last week President Obama weighed in again on the Trayvon Martin episode. Sadly, most of what he said was wrong, both literally and ethically.
Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws. It was not a white-on-black episode. The shooting involved a Latino of mixed heritage in a violent altercation with a black youth.
Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin — and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.
Barack Obama knows that if non-African-Americans were to cease all inordinate scrutiny of young African-American males, the latters’ inordinate crime rates would probably not be affected — given other causation for disproportionate incidences of criminality. Yet should their statistical crime profiles suddenly resemble those of other racial and ethnic groups, the so-called profiling would likely cease.
The president, I think, spoke out for three reasons: 1) He is an unbound, lame-duck president, with a ruined agenda, facing mounting ethical scandals; from now on, he will say things more consonant with being a community organizer than with being a nation’s president; 2) he knows the federal civil-rights case has little merit and cannot be pursued, and thus wanted to shore up his bona fides with an aggrieved black community; and 3) as with the ginned-up “assault-weapons ban” and the claim that Republicans are waging a “war on women,” Obama knows, as a community activist, that tension can mask culpability — in his case, the utter failure to address soaring unemployment in the inner city, epidemic black murder rates, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the ways his failed economic policies disproportionately affect inner-city youth.
Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial. His oration was likewise not aimed at binding wounds. Apparently he wanted to remind his anguished audience that because of the acquittal of Zimmerman, there still is not racial justice in America.
Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males. Apparently, Holder believes that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny.
In my case, the sermon — aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race — was very precise.
First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.
I think that experience — and others — is why he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.
It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.
Holder, of course, knows that there are two narratives about race in America, and increasingly they have nothing to do with each other. In one, African-Americans understandably cite racism and its baleful legacy to explain vast present-day disparities in income, education, and rates of criminality. Others often counter by instead emphasizing the wages of an inner-city culture of single-parent families and government dependence, and the glorification of violence in the popular media.
In the old days of the Great Society, we once dreamed of splitting the difference — the government would invest more in the inner city, while black leadership in turn would emphasize more self-help and self-critique.
Not now. Both sides have almost given up on persuading the other. Eric Holder’s speech to the NAACP might as well have been given on Mars. It will convince zero Americans that stereotyping of young African-American males and Stand Your Ground laws are the two key racial problems facing America.
Again, Holder may offer his 15-year-old son the same warning that his father gave him about the dangers of racist, stereotyping police. Yet I suspect — and statistics would again support such supposition — that Holder privately is more worried that his son is in greater danger of being attacked by other black youths than by either the police or a nation of white-Hispanic George Zimmermans on the loose.
Besides, two developments over recent decades have made Holder’s reactionary argument about black/white relations mostly irrelevant. First, America is now a multiracial nation. The divide is not white versus black. And as the Zimmerman trial reminds us, it is no longer a nation where most of the authority figures are white males. We saw a female judge, a female jury, and an Hispanic in confrontation with an African-American; today those of various racial pedigrees and different genders interact in ways that transcend the supposed culpability of white males.
Second, the attitude of the so-called white community toward racial challenges is not so much political as class driven. White liberals have largely won the argument that massive government expenditure must be infused into the black community. Yet they have probably lost the argument that such vast government investments have done much to alleviate the plight of urban black youth.
Stranger still, there is no evidence in our increasingly self-segregated society that white liberals stand out as integrationists. The latter increasingly have the capital to school their children far from the inner city, to live largely apart from inner-city blacks, and in general to avoid the black underclass in the concrete as much as they profess liberal nostrums for it in the abstract.
No one seems to care that the children of our liberal elite, black and white, go to places like Sidwell Friends rather than to Washington public schools, where the consequences of 50 years of liberal social policy are all too real. If Chris Matthews wishes to apologize collectively for whites, then he should have long ago moved to an integrated neighborhood, put his children in integrated schools, and walked to work through a black neighborhood to get to know local residents. Anything else, and his apology remains what it is: cheap psychological recompense for his own elite apartheid.
Just as Eric Holder preferred anecdote to statistics, so too I end with an unscientific vignette of my own. Last week I was driving in northern California with the attorney general’s speech playing on the car radio. North of San Francisco I stopped to buy coffee and two local newspapers.
In one, there was a gruesome story of a young African-American male charged with ransacking a San Francisco jewelry store and murdering two employees, Khin Min, 35, of San Francisco, and Lina Lim, 51, of Daly City. The owner of the shop, Vic Hung, fought back and survived, despite receiving gunshot and stab wounds in the attack.
The suspected attacker had a prior record of violent assault. The victims were all of Asian ancestry. I don’t think their families would agree with Eric Holder that self-defense laws were the cause of such interracial violence. Nor would the six policemen who were fired upon by the suspect agree that stereotyping prompted this sort of mayhem.
Barack Obama will never suggest that the suspected killer physically resembles himself some three decades ago — and there would be no point in doing so. Nor will he admit that if Barack Obama owned an urban jewelry store and needed its profits to send his daughters to Sidwell Friends, he too might have become apprehensive when a young black male entered his store.
In the other paper, there was a strangely similar tale. Not far away, in Santa Rosa, at about the same time, two African-American youths in hoodies attacked another jewelry store, also had a shoot-out with the owner, and also failed to evade the police — though in this case none of the employees or customers was injured.
In such cases, too many Americans find there is a sort of tired sameness. The victims were white or Asian. The murder and robbery suspects were young African-American males. The violence was aimed not at acquiring food or clothing, but at stealing luxury goods. The armed small-business owners tried to defend themselves by firing back at their attackers. Had they been unarmed, both would have probably perished. In one case, the police were fired upon. The suspects had prior arrests.
And on and on and on across America each day, this same tragedy is played out of a small percentage of Americans committing violent crimes at rates far exceeding their proportion of the general population.
The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people — and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race — will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general — but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.
I offer one final surreal footnote to this strange juxtaposition of reading the real news while listening to the mytho-history that a Eric Holder constructed from the death of Trayvon Martin to indict both the police and the public.
What were the names of two of the men suspected of being the ones who last week shot it out with the Santa Rosa jeweler as Eric Holder demagogued the Trayvon Martin shooting?
Traveon Banks-Austin and Alexander Tyvon Brandon.
And so the tragedy continues.
Young black males are at greater risk from their peers than from the police or white civilians.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review OnlineLast week President Obama weighed in again on the Trayvon Martin episode. Sadly, most of what he said was wrong, both literally and ethically.
Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws. It was not a white-on-black episode. The shooting involved a Latino of mixed heritage in a violent altercation with a black youth.
Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin — and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.
Barack Obama knows that if non-African-Americans were to cease all inordinate scrutiny of young African-American males, the latters’ inordinate crime rates would probably not be affected — given other causation for disproportionate incidences of criminality. Yet should their statistical crime profiles suddenly resemble those of other racial and ethnic groups, the so-called profiling would likely cease.
The president, I think, spoke out for three reasons: 1) He is an unbound, lame-duck president, with a ruined agenda, facing mounting ethical scandals; from now on, he will say things more consonant with being a community organizer than with being a nation’s president; 2) he knows the federal civil-rights case has little merit and cannot be pursued, and thus wanted to shore up his bona fides with an aggrieved black community; and 3) as with the ginned-up “assault-weapons ban” and the claim that Republicans are waging a “war on women,” Obama knows, as a community activist, that tension can mask culpability — in his case, the utter failure to address soaring unemployment in the inner city, epidemic black murder rates, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the ways his failed economic policies disproportionately affect inner-city youth.
Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial. His oration was likewise not aimed at binding wounds. Apparently he wanted to remind his anguished audience that because of the acquittal of Zimmerman, there still is not racial justice in America.
Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males. Apparently, Holder believes that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny.
In my case, the sermon — aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race — was very precise.
First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.
I think that experience — and others — is why he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.
It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.
Holder, of course, knows that there are two narratives about race in America, and increasingly they have nothing to do with each other. In one, African-Americans understandably cite racism and its baleful legacy to explain vast present-day disparities in income, education, and rates of criminality. Others often counter by instead emphasizing the wages of an inner-city culture of single-parent families and government dependence, and the glorification of violence in the popular media.
In the old days of the Great Society, we once dreamed of splitting the difference — the government would invest more in the inner city, while black leadership in turn would emphasize more self-help and self-critique.
Not now. Both sides have almost given up on persuading the other. Eric Holder’s speech to the NAACP might as well have been given on Mars. It will convince zero Americans that stereotyping of young African-American males and Stand Your Ground laws are the two key racial problems facing America.
Again, Holder may offer his 15-year-old son the same warning that his father gave him about the dangers of racist, stereotyping police. Yet I suspect — and statistics would again support such supposition — that Holder privately is more worried that his son is in greater danger of being attacked by other black youths than by either the police or a nation of white-Hispanic George Zimmermans on the loose.
Besides, two developments over recent decades have made Holder’s reactionary argument about black/white relations mostly irrelevant. First, America is now a multiracial nation. The divide is not white versus black. And as the Zimmerman trial reminds us, it is no longer a nation where most of the authority figures are white males. We saw a female judge, a female jury, and an Hispanic in confrontation with an African-American; today those of various racial pedigrees and different genders interact in ways that transcend the supposed culpability of white males.
Second, the attitude of the so-called white community toward racial challenges is not so much political as class driven. White liberals have largely won the argument that massive government expenditure must be infused into the black community. Yet they have probably lost the argument that such vast government investments have done much to alleviate the plight of urban black youth.
Stranger still, there is no evidence in our increasingly self-segregated society that white liberals stand out as integrationists. The latter increasingly have the capital to school their children far from the inner city, to live largely apart from inner-city blacks, and in general to avoid the black underclass in the concrete as much as they profess liberal nostrums for it in the abstract.
No one seems to care that the children of our liberal elite, black and white, go to places like Sidwell Friends rather than to Washington public schools, where the consequences of 50 years of liberal social policy are all too real. If Chris Matthews wishes to apologize collectively for whites, then he should have long ago moved to an integrated neighborhood, put his children in integrated schools, and walked to work through a black neighborhood to get to know local residents. Anything else, and his apology remains what it is: cheap psychological recompense for his own elite apartheid.
Just as Eric Holder preferred anecdote to statistics, so too I end with an unscientific vignette of my own. Last week I was driving in northern California with the attorney general’s speech playing on the car radio. North of San Francisco I stopped to buy coffee and two local newspapers.
In one, there was a gruesome story of a young African-American male charged with ransacking a San Francisco jewelry store and murdering two employees, Khin Min, 35, of San Francisco, and Lina Lim, 51, of Daly City. The owner of the shop, Vic Hung, fought back and survived, despite receiving gunshot and stab wounds in the attack.
The suspected attacker had a prior record of violent assault. The victims were all of Asian ancestry. I don’t think their families would agree with Eric Holder that self-defense laws were the cause of such interracial violence. Nor would the six policemen who were fired upon by the suspect agree that stereotyping prompted this sort of mayhem.
Barack Obama will never suggest that the suspected killer physically resembles himself some three decades ago — and there would be no point in doing so. Nor will he admit that if Barack Obama owned an urban jewelry store and needed its profits to send his daughters to Sidwell Friends, he too might have become apprehensive when a young black male entered his store.
In the other paper, there was a strangely similar tale. Not far away, in Santa Rosa, at about the same time, two African-American youths in hoodies attacked another jewelry store, also had a shoot-out with the owner, and also failed to evade the police — though in this case none of the employees or customers was injured.
In such cases, too many Americans find there is a sort of tired sameness. The victims were white or Asian. The murder and robbery suspects were young African-American males. The violence was aimed not at acquiring food or clothing, but at stealing luxury goods. The armed small-business owners tried to defend themselves by firing back at their attackers. Had they been unarmed, both would have probably perished. In one case, the police were fired upon. The suspects had prior arrests.
And on and on and on across America each day, this same tragedy is played out of a small percentage of Americans committing violent crimes at rates far exceeding their proportion of the general population.
The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people — and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race — will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general — but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.
I offer one final surreal footnote to this strange juxtaposition of reading the real news while listening to the mytho-history that a Eric Holder constructed from the death of Trayvon Martin to indict both the police and the public.
What were the names of two of the men suspected of being the ones who last week shot it out with the Santa Rosa jeweler as Eric Holder demagogued the Trayvon Martin shooting?
Traveon Banks-Austin and Alexander Tyvon Brandon.
And so the tragedy continues.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
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Sunday, July 21, 2013
First Family goes on vacation.
First family returns to Martha's Vineyard for summer vacation, while furloughs kick in
Published July 21, 2013
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President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will arrive August 10 and stay through August 18, the White House said earlier this month.
The vacation is drawing some criticism about the president relaxing among the rich and famous while drastic cuts to the federal budget known as sequester kick in with full force, including the start this month of furloughs for 85 percent of the Defense Department’s civilian workforce.
The family is reportedly staying near Chilmark pond in a “veddy private, veddy secluded and veddy posh island retreat,” writes Boston Herald columnist Gayle Fee.
Among the closest neighbors will be Hollywood couple Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, whom Fee describes as “ardent” Democrats and friends of President Clinton and wife Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state.
Still, at least one local merchant is excited about the first family’s return.
“It’s nice to have the president of the United States,” Robert Breth, owner of Martha’s Bike Rental, told FoxNews.com on Sunday. “It puts the word out about Martha’s Vineyard.”
Breth downplayed the inconveniences of the visit, saying the presidential motorcade can create some traffic problems, “but it’s quiet for the most part. They’re not here to make a ruckus.”
The White House says the first couple has no public events scheduled that week. Daughter Sasha and Malia have joined their parents on the previous vacations.
The Obamas didn’t vacation on the island during the 2012 election season but spent the first three trips at the Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, which overlooks Tisbury Great Pond.
However, the 28-acre retreat was bought in 2011 for $21.9 million by British architect Lord Norman Foster.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/21/first-family-returns-to-martha-vineyard-for-summer-vacation/print#ixzz2Zj9iXwn7
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Friday, July 19, 2013
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Pilot's names are broadcast.
Barry's Pals get Briefing (Talking Points?)
White House holds Obamacare background briefing with liberal reporters
Posted By Patrick Howley On 5:06 PM 07/12/2013 In Politics | No Comments
The White House held a background briefing Friday to discuss Obamacare implementation with a handful of journalists from liberal and progressive outlets.
Slate blogger Matthew Yglesias posted a photograph to Instagram Friday featuring himself and other liberal journalists at the White House, with the caption “#thistown.”
Yglesias’ photograph features American Prospect staff writer Jamelle Bouie and MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin attending the briefing.
Yglesias, who publicly cheered the death of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, is known as a member of a tight-knit circle of progressive bloggers that includes Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein and low-rated MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
Klein and Hayes garnered conservative criticism in 2011 for attending an off-the-record White House briefing at which Obama disclosed his strategy on the temporary payroll tax holiday. Klein also set off a round of controversy in November 2011 for briefing Senate Democratic staffers on the super committee.
BuzzFeed reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro first tweeted about the meeting Friday afternoon. Yglesias did not respond via email to a request for comment. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.
As The Daily Caller reported, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor plans to introduce legislation before the August recess that would ban the scandal-plagued Internal Revenue Service from implementing Obamacare, which would pose a severe liability to the health care law’s full implementation.
The Daily Caller was not invited to Friday’s background briefing.
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Slate blogger Matthew Yglesias posted a photograph to Instagram Friday featuring himself and other liberal journalists at the White House, with the caption “#thistown.”
Yglesias’ photograph features American Prospect staff writer Jamelle Bouie and MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin attending the briefing.
Yglesias, who publicly cheered the death of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, is known as a member of a tight-knit circle of progressive bloggers that includes Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein and low-rated MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
Klein and Hayes garnered conservative criticism in 2011 for attending an off-the-record White House briefing at which Obama disclosed his strategy on the temporary payroll tax holiday. Klein also set off a round of controversy in November 2011 for briefing Senate Democratic staffers on the super committee.
BuzzFeed reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro first tweeted about the meeting Friday afternoon. Yglesias did not respond via email to a request for comment. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.
As The Daily Caller reported, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor plans to introduce legislation before the August recess that would ban the scandal-plagued Internal Revenue Service from implementing Obamacare, which would pose a severe liability to the health care law’s full implementation.
The Daily Caller was not invited to Friday’s background briefing.
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Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com
URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/12/white-house-holds-obamacare-background-briefing-with-liberal-reporters/
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Thomas Sowell on Poverty
Good intentions, few results.
Comments
145
Thomas Sowell 
The political left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid is this claim?
Leaders of the Left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?
If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much of a relationship to reality?
“Poverty” once had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify welfare-state spending.
Most Americans with incomes below the official poverty level have air conditioning and television and own a motor vehicle; and, far from being hungry, are more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers’ money.This kind of “poverty” can easily become a way of life, not only for today’s “poor,” but for their children and grandchildren.
Even when they have the potential to become productive members of society, the loss of welfare-state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit “tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax on a millionaire.
If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?
In short, the political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that some people are predestined to be poor, the Left’s agenda is a disservice to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of money wasted are by no means the worst of it.
If our goal is for people to get out of poverty, there are plenty of heartening examples of individuals and groups who have done that, in countries around the world.
Millions of “overseas Chinese” emigrated from China destitute and often illiterate in centuries past. Whether they settled in Southeast Asian countries or in the United States, they began at the bottom, taking hard, dirty, and sometimes dangerous jobs.
Even though the overseas Chinese were usually paid little, they saved out of that little, and many eventually opened tiny businesses. By working long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn tiny businesses into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it that their children got the education that they themselves often lacked.
By 1994, the 57 million overseas Chinese had created as much wealth as the one billion people living in China.
Variations on this social pattern can be found in the histories of Jewish, Armenian, Lebanese, and other emigrants who settled in many countries around the world — initially poor, but rising over the generations to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually avoided politics on their way up.
Such groups concentrated on developing what economists call “human capital” — their skills, talents, knowledge, and self-discipline. Their success has usually been based on that one four-letter word that the Left seldom uses in polite society: “work.”
There are individuals in virtually every group who follow similar patterns to rise from poverty to prosperity. But how many such individuals there are in different groups makes a big difference for the prosperity or poverty of the groups as a whole.
The agenda of the Left — promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for “rights” to what other people have produced — is a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world.
This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the Left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Leaders of the Left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?
If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much of a relationship to reality?
“Poverty” once had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify welfare-state spending.
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Even when they have the potential to become productive members of society, the loss of welfare-state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit “tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax on a millionaire.
If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?
In short, the political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that some people are predestined to be poor, the Left’s agenda is a disservice to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of money wasted are by no means the worst of it.
If our goal is for people to get out of poverty, there are plenty of heartening examples of individuals and groups who have done that, in countries around the world.
Millions of “overseas Chinese” emigrated from China destitute and often illiterate in centuries past. Whether they settled in Southeast Asian countries or in the United States, they began at the bottom, taking hard, dirty, and sometimes dangerous jobs.
Even though the overseas Chinese were usually paid little, they saved out of that little, and many eventually opened tiny businesses. By working long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn tiny businesses into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it that their children got the education that they themselves often lacked.
By 1994, the 57 million overseas Chinese had created as much wealth as the one billion people living in China.
Variations on this social pattern can be found in the histories of Jewish, Armenian, Lebanese, and other emigrants who settled in many countries around the world — initially poor, but rising over the generations to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually avoided politics on their way up.
Such groups concentrated on developing what economists call “human capital” — their skills, talents, knowledge, and self-discipline. Their success has usually been based on that one four-letter word that the Left seldom uses in polite society: “work.”
There are individuals in virtually every group who follow similar patterns to rise from poverty to prosperity. But how many such individuals there are in different groups makes a big difference for the prosperity or poverty of the groups as a whole.
The agenda of the Left — promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for “rights” to what other people have produced — is a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world.
This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the Left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Chicago Shootings, Supreme Gun Control?
Chicago Shootings: 3 Killed, 12 Wounded As Long Fourth Of July Weekend Begins
Three people were killed and 12 wounded Wednesday afternoon into early Thursday in Chicago as the long Fourth of July weekend began.
According to the Chicago Tribune, all three people killed in shootings were males in their 20s. One of them, a 26-year-old, was shot in the head in the 6600 block of South Champlain Avenue about 7:25 p.m. Wednesday in the West Woodlawn neighborhood. Two other men were wounded in the shooting but their conditions have stabilized.
The Chicago Sun-Times identifies the Woodlawn victim as Ernest McMullen.
Less than an hour earlier, in the South Shore neighborhood, Rayford Brown, 24, was shot in the back while standing in in the 2400 block of East 79th Street, according to the Sun-Times. He was pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital shortly thereafter, at 7:38 p.m.
Earlier Wednesday afternoon, William Jones, 26, was fatally shot while sitting in a car in the 8700 block of South Loomis Street in Auburn Gresham just after 1 p.m. According to DNAinfo Chicago, Jones, the father of a 7-month-old boy, was pronounced dead on the scene.
In other non-fatal shootings, at least 12 people were wounded citywide. Among them, a 29-year-old man and two 25-year-old women were all wounded in a shooting in the 0-100 block of North Leclaire Avenue in the Austin neighborhood. According to the Sun-Times, one of the women was hospitalized in critical condition after being hit in the neck and backside.
No one is in police custody in any of the shootings as of Thursday morning as investigations continue.
According to the Chicago Tribune, all three people killed in shootings were males in their 20s. One of them, a 26-year-old, was shot in the head in the 6600 block of South Champlain Avenue about 7:25 p.m. Wednesday in the West Woodlawn neighborhood. Two other men were wounded in the shooting but their conditions have stabilized.
The Chicago Sun-Times identifies the Woodlawn victim as Ernest McMullen.
Less than an hour earlier, in the South Shore neighborhood, Rayford Brown, 24, was shot in the back while standing in in the 2400 block of East 79th Street, according to the Sun-Times. He was pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital shortly thereafter, at 7:38 p.m.
Earlier Wednesday afternoon, William Jones, 26, was fatally shot while sitting in a car in the 8700 block of South Loomis Street in Auburn Gresham just after 1 p.m. According to DNAinfo Chicago, Jones, the father of a 7-month-old boy, was pronounced dead on the scene.
In other non-fatal shootings, at least 12 people were wounded citywide. Among them, a 29-year-old man and two 25-year-old women were all wounded in a shooting in the 0-100 block of North Leclaire Avenue in the Austin neighborhood. According to the Sun-Times, one of the women was hospitalized in critical condition after being hit in the neck and backside.
No one is in police custody in any of the shootings as of Thursday morning as investigations continue.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
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