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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | July 10, 2003 | Vol. IV - No. 9 | ||
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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | July 10, 2003 | Vol. IV - No. 9 | ||
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[ News & Views ]
- Columnist Bruce Bartlett
"No matter how big a prescription drug subsidy is enacted into law, it will never meet the outsized expectations of today's 'Gimme Generation' of elderly, who feel they are owed unlimited benefits simply for living through World War II and the Great Depression. Therefore, they are guaranteed to be disappointed by the results and will chafe at any limitations on the government's largess.
"When Mr. Bush refuses to expand the program to their liking, Democrats will be more than happy to say they will. And should Republicans ever suggest anything in the future to restrain the inevitable growth of the prescription drug program, Democrats will predictably attack them for slashing it and killing untold numbers of seniors by denying them life-saving drugs. These attacks will work, leaving Republicans as the bad guys once again, even though no prescription drug plan would exist without Republican support.
"In short, the political calculation is penny-wise/pound-foolish in the extreme. Any prescription drug plan will be an albatross around the Republican Party's neck for generations to come. It's a bad deal."
Liberals on both sides of the aisle planning their 2004 campaign around expanded government control of health care may need to consider going back to the drawing board. The mess they are currently creating is not going to win them the votes that AARP assured them it would. In fact, it appears from this poll, that the opposite is true.
[ THE WASHINGTON TIMES ]
Congressional investigators have targeted extremist Muslims in America, those described as members of the Wahhabi movement who have become increasingly influential throughout the United States - buoyed by foreign state-sponsored doctrines and a wellspring of cash used to recruit and train international terrorists.
"The extremist ideology is Wahhabism, a major force behind terrorist groups like al Qaeda," said Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, whose Senate Judiciary subcommittee on technology, terrorism and government information held recent hearings on the terrorist threat in the United States.
"It is widely recognized that all 19 of the [September 11] suicide pilots ... were Wahhabi followers," he said. "Since then, many questions have been asked about the role in that day's terrible events and in other challenges we face in the war against terror of Saudi Arabia and its official sect, a separatist, exclusionary and violent form of Islam known as Wahhabism."
Mr. Kyl noted that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi subjects, adding that Wahhabism is the source of the "overwhelming majority of terrorist atrocities in today's world."
The congressional probe, according to Capitol Hill sources, has focused on unpublished U.S. intelligence information stating that Wahhabi agents from Saudi Arabia have been responsible for terrorist attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. It also has focused on government documents showing that the Wahhabi movement has stepped up its efforts to penetrate the United States.
Federal law enforcement authorities believe cash from Saudi Arabia has been a significant source of funding for global terrorism, particularly the al Qaeda network founded by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire.
The authorities also said al Qaeda "sleeper cells" working in the United States have begun recruiting operatives who might be harder to detect in an effort to defeat the country's heightened state of security since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Potential operatives include U.S. citizens with valid passports, they said.
Part of the effort, the authorities said, also has targeted black Muslims in this country believed to be sympathetic to Islamic extremism - using mosques, prisons and universities throughout the United States.
The Wahhabi movement seeks to advance a global agenda of holy war, or jihad, and to impose Wahhabism on the international Islamic community, the authorities said.
They also noted that the movement continues to seek a U.S. base to fund recruitment and tactical support of terror operations in this country and overseas.
Mr. Kyl noted during a recent hearing that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a former top al Qaeda lieutenant captured in Pakistan last March, had "reached deep into the heartland," lining up agents in Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; and Peoria, Ill.
Authorities believe that terrorists operating in this country include groups committed to international jihad and that they have demonstrated a keen ability to withstand numerous and significant setbacks. Since the September 11 attacks, they said, al Qaeda terrorists have been involved in at least a dozen terrorist attacks around the world directed against the United States and its allies.
"To examine the role of Wahhabism and terrorism is not to label all Muslims as extremists. Indeed, I want to make this point very, very clear," Mr. Kyl said.
"Analyzing Wahhabism means identifying the extreme element that, although enjoying immense political and financial resources thanks to support by a sector of the Saudi state, seeks to globally hijack Islam, one of the world's three great Abrahamic faiths.
"It means understanding who our worst enemies are and how we can support the majority of the world's Muslims, ordinary, normal people who desire to live in a safe, secure and stable environment in their own effort to defeat terror," he said. "In the end, Islamist terror must be defeated to a significant extent within Islam, by Muslims themselves."
Mr. Kyl noted that without oil and the creation of the Saudi Kingdom, Wahhabism would have remained "a lunatic fringe." The ruling House of Saud in Riyaddh belongs to the Wahabbi clan.
Since the September 11 attacks, the authorities said the FBI has investigated more than 4,000 terrorist threats to the United States and that the number of active FBI investigations and the potential terrorist activity has quadrupled.
More than 35 potential terrorist incidents inside the United States have been disrupted by the FBI since the attacks through preventive actions, arrests, the seizure of funds and disruption of terrorist recruiting and training efforts, they said.
[ NewsMax ]
As the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Texas' sodomy law continues to generate controversy, Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute reveals a disturbing new element.
The high court used foreign precedents in formulating its decision.
In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy referred to a "Friend of the Court" brief submitted by former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.
"This Court should not decide in a vacuum whether criminalization of same-sex sodomy between consenting adults violates constitutional guarantees of privacy and equal protection," said Robinson.
"Other nations with similar histories, legal systems, and political cultures have already answered these questions in the affirmative. This Court should pay due respect to these opinions of humankind."
Robinson warned also that "To ignore these precedents virtually ensures that this Court's ruling will generate controversies with the United State's closest global allies."
In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia expressly condemned this apparent reliance on foreign precedent, writing, "Constitutional elements do not spring into existence ... as the Court seems to believe, because foreign nations decriminalize conduct."
Scalia argued that the high court "should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans."
Warns Ruse, "If the Supreme Court continues to be guided by the decisions of the U.N. and the [European Union], U.S. recognition of same-sex marriage could eventually follow suit."
***TCN Comment: When the Supreme Court pays more attention to global political winds than to the US Constitution it is time for a change. Sign every petition you see promoting impeachment of this traitorous bunch.
The Supreme Court is there to enforce the US Constitution, NOT make up new laws and precedents as they go.
[ WorldNetDaily.com ]
In a rare appearance on a television news show, Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer questioned whether the U.S. Constitution, the oldest governing document in use in the world today, will continue to be relevant in an age of globalism.
Speaking with ABC News' "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos and his colleague Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Breyer took issue with Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in a dissent in last month's Texas sodomy ruling, contended the views of foreign jurists are irrelevant under the U.S. Constitution.
Breyer had held that a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that homosexuals had a fundamental right to privacy in their sexual behavior showed that the Supreme Court's earlier decision to the contrary was unfounded in the Western tradition.
"We see all the time, Justice O'Connor and I, and the others, how the world really - it's trite but it's true - is growing together," Breyer said. "Through commerce, through globalization, through the spread of democratic institutions, through immigration to America, it's becoming more and more one world of many different kinds of people. And how they're going to live together across the world will be the challenge, and whether our Constitution and how it fits into the governing documents of other nations, I think will be a challenge for the next generations."
In the Lawrence v Texas case decided June 26, Justice Anthony Kennedy gave as a reason for overturning a Supreme Court ruling of 17 years earlier upholding sodomy laws that it was devoid of any reliance on the views of a "wider civilization."
Scalia answered in his dissent: "The court's discussion of these foreign views (ignoring, of course, the many countries that have retained criminal prohibitions on sodomy) is ... meaningless dicta. Dangerous dicta, however, since this court ... should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans," he said quoting the 2002 Foster v. Florida case.
Scalia's scathing critique of the 6-3 sodomy ruling was unusual in its bluntness.
"Today's opinion is the product of a court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct," he wrote. Later he concluded: "This court has taken sides in the culture war."
Both O'Connor and Breyer sought to downplay antipathy between the justices - no matter how contentious matters before the court become. O'Connor said justices don't take harsh criticisms personally.
"When you work in a small group of that size, you have to get along, and so you're not going to let some harsh language, some dissenting opinion, affect a personal relationship," she said. "You can't do that."
Breyer agreed.
"So if I'm really put out by something, I can go to the person who wrote it and say, 'Look, I think you've gone too far here.'"
O'Connor, too, seemed to suggest in the ABC interview that the Constitution was far from the final word in governing America. Asked if there might come a day when it would no longer be the last word on the law, she said: "Well, you always have the power of entering into treaties with other nations which also become part of the law of the land, but I can't see the day when we won't have a constitution in our nation."
Asked to explain what he meant when he said judges who favor a very strict literal interpretation of the Constitution can't justify their practices by claiming that's what the framers wanted, Breyer responded: "I meant that the extent to which the Constitution is flexible is a function of what provisions you're talking about. When you look at the word 'two' for two representatives from every state in the United States Senate, two means two. But when you look like a word - look at a word like 'interstate commerce,' which they didn't have automobiles in mind, or they didn't have airplanes in mind, or telephones, or the Internet, or you look at a word like 'liberty,' and they didn't have in mind at that time the problems of privacy brought about, for example, by the Internet and computers. You realize that the framers intended those words to maintain constant values, but values that would change in their application as society changed."
In an unrelated matter, O'Connor indicated on "This Week" that she would likely serve out the next term on the court, dismssing speculation that she was about to retire.
The current court is split between Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas and Scalia, who tend to hold the traditional constitutionalist approach to rulings, and the majority of O'Connor, Breyer, Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginzburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens, who tend to believe in the concept of a "living Constitution" subject to changes in public opinion and interpretation.
TCN Comment: What we at TCN want and what the people of the US deserve is nine justices, or even a simple majority, that would put the US Constitution and its original intent ahead of political correctness, and preparing the US for globalism.
"Okay, Iraq didn't win the war. It was a tie";
"Iraq's weapons scientists were secretly developing our own Hulk"
"Tariq Aziz had Botox"
"Saddam Hussein's not the innocent angel everyone thinks he is"
"Dr. Germ looks really hot when she's synthesizing VX gas"
"You picked the right guy for the 'Queen of Clubs,' if you know what I mean"
"Howard Dean will win the 2004 election"
"Uday Hussein's birth name -- Gary"
"I've been offered a job as editor of 'The New York Times'."
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