Someone's Going to Get Yelled At

Jacob Sullum's latest article is about immigration - and he takes the odd approach of arguing that racial profiling is unconstitutional and, well, just plain wrong.

A few years ago, David and Jessica Rodriguez were leaving Arizona's Bartlett Lake with their two children when they accidentally headed down a road that had been closed because of rain damage. They were stopped by deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, who demanded documentation from David Rodriguez, including his Social Security card, and cited him for failing to obey a road sign.

Although several other motorists made the same mistake around the same time, the deputies simply warned them about the washed-out road and let them go. Unlike David and Jessica Rodriguez, who are U.S. citizens of Latino descent, the other drivers were white.

Sullum seems to see harrassing American Citizens for being Latino as a bad thing. Let's see what Townhall Readers have to say.

Middle Americans JUST LIKE YOU have stopped scamnesty so far, but it is an ongoing challenge against moneyed, powerful, organized special interests!

As Mexifornia residents can attest, we risk losing America soon due to the ILLEGAL alien incursion and morphing ineluctably into a third world welfare state as they vote it in.

The left is not waiting for them to become citizens-- why be bothered by that mere technicality?! They load them up in vans and hand them instructions in Espanol on how to vote.

Many RINOS/CINO'S are utter FOOLS to speak of capturing some of their votes because of purported "conservative social values."

Yeah - I don't know. In fairness most of them ignore the question of how racial profiling hurts American Citizens, but that could just be choosing not to argue the unarguable. Or it could be that they don't consider Latino Americans to be real Americans. Let's be charitable and assume it's the former.

Romney's Miscue

Two responses to Romneys speech on faith from last week, the first from Townhall.

In a December 6-9 Gallup poll, nearly half of the respondents endorsed an even stronger anti-atheist statement, saying they would refuse to vote for "a generally well-qualified person" of their own party "who happened to be an atheist." The corresponding number for a Mormon candidate was 17 percent, about the same as before Romney's speech.

Romney tried to build on this advantage, wrapping together all religions, except for "the religion of secularism," in a warm, fuzzy package. "Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me," he said. "We do not insist on a single strain of religion; rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith."

Americans who have never "knelt in prayer" clearly should not bother auditioning for the "symphony of faith." Romney conspicuously failed to address the question of whether they also are excluded from his circle of friends and allies.

That's by Jacob Sullum, who brings up a pretty obvious question, one which Romney should answer. I mean if he believes that Freedom Requires Religion, what does he think of the non-believer?

The second is from Slactivist, who you should be reading regularly anyway.

Romney's gambit here comes straight from the school yard. As a Mormon, he is an outsider, getting picked on by the bullies of the religious right. Instead of standing up to the bullies, he sucks up to them, trying to prove his loyalty and win their approval by acting like them and picking on the other outcasts and outsiders. "You guys want to pretend that 'secular' and 'profane' are synonyms? I can do that. Look, I'll even beat up this atheist kid for you. See? I'm just like you guys!"

This desperate, canine obsequiousness infuses his sniveling speech with fearfulness and flopsweat. Romney is pleading, begging to be allowed to serve as the bullies' toady. As far as that goes, he has probably succeeded. Eager-to-please toadies can come in handy, so the bullies will probably be willing to accept him in that capacity.

But as useful as they may sometimes be, toadies are never liked, respected or admired by the bullies. Nobody likes or respects or admires an unprincipled coward. And the characteristics of a successful toady don't fit with anybody's notion of the characteristics of a potential president. A toady can't get elected president (the best he can hope for is a Connecticut senate seat).

I don't think he's wrong.

The Bush Policy of Secrecy

Good article by Jacob Sullum over at Townhall on the bush administrations reflexive need for secrecy, as embodied by the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnel. He gets to the heart of why Bush needs/requires secrecy.

Judging from this example, Bush administration officials feel duty-bound to withhold information when it might be useful to critics of the president's anti-terrorism policies, because those policies are necessary to protect national security. But they believe the very same information can -- indeed, should -- be released at a more opportune time, when it will help the president pursue his policies.

There it is. Secrecy is important because it protects the President and his Policies. Very cynical but seemingly accurate.

Bush's NSA Program to Get Information On Everybody that Everybody has Called: two Conservative views

The newest manufactured brouhaha -- over the National Security Agency (NSA) creating a database of phone records to track terrorist phone patterns -- was just the latest in a long string of stories trumped up to make Bush look not just incorrect, but dictatorial, even evil. USA Today hyped the story, and the media pack lapped it up, but it failed the first test of newsworthiness: Is it new? No. USA Today's scoop was mostly a retelling of what the New York Times reported last Christmas Eve, that the phone companies had given the NSA "access to streams of international and domestic communications."

. . . It's only when Republicans hold the White House that the networks fear an "imperial presidency." But the problem for Americans is an imperial media, so assured of its own self-congratulatory role as defender of America's freedoms, but such an emperor with no clothes of fairness or balance.

From Brent Bozell, "The database double standard."

The NSA's defenders cite Qwest's refusal, which shows supplying the data was voluntary, as evidence the program is legal. In fact, it indicates just the opposite: Had Qwest been presented with a lawful subpoena or court order demanding the data, it almost certainly would have complied, and if it hadn't the government could have forced it to do so.

Instead, the NSA resorted to extra-legal methods, pressuring the phone companies to divulge the data through appeals to patriotism, warnings about terrorism and (according to USA Today) threats of lost government contracts.

. . . seeking statutory authority should not be considered optional: Whether he likes it or not, the president is not above the law.

From Jacob Sullum, "Is the NSA's phone call database legal because the President says so."

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to determine which of these two men is a "real" conservative.

Clones

Well it's hard to write an article about cloning. It's the sort of subject that invites grandiose soul searching--but that's not for me. I vacuum my soul twice a week so its hard to find anything there. But in my attempts to understand cloning I've come to one conclusion. It's very very annoying now, and it will get worse.

Make a list in your head of the people you know who think the most of themselves. Now consider a list of who you think the most likely to clone themselves might be. I stipulate that list A will look a lot like list B. Just what the world needs, more people who are stuck on themselves. (On a related note, Blogspot, which powers my weblog, has just pased the 1,000,000 mark.)

It does pose troubling questions. One position, taken by Jacob Sullum, is largely that if the technology exists it will happen. He cautions against thinking a clone inferior to a human. We already have examples of people with identical DNA in identical twins--many of whom turn out quite different. He states, "As Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey has observed, a person and his clone would in fact be less alike than identical twins, since they would be separated in time, probably by a generation or more, and would therefore have quite different experiences. In any case, there is no question that they would be distinct individuals, each with his own rights and his own life to lead."

James Carroll takes a more pessimistic track--asking what does cloning say about the age old question--what does it mean to be human? Some people might feel that that question is a new one, but it isn't. It goes back to our earliest times, when villages looked at other villages down the river and asked "Ughh Ughhhh Argghhh ughhhhh." Or to put it another way, do those people down the river--are they basically like us? Or are they totally different? Do our laws and accepted mores apply to them? Or, if they aren't human, what does it matter if we cheat them or lie to them or kill them?

Or to shift gears--are Muslims human? Are Iraqis?

El Islam

Two good articles the last couple of days defending Islam. Both writers published at the Conservative Townhall.com. Both were responding to Pat Robertson’s comments of some weeks ago (that Islam is not a religion deserving any respect), as well as the increase of Islam bashing since the incidents in Nigeria. (For an example of Islam bashing, take the ever dependable Ann Coulter. "Recently, the Religion of Peace suffered a PR setback when Muslims in Nigeria welcomed the Miss World beauty pageant by slaughtering Christians in the street and burning churches to the ground.")

Pat Buchanan is the more famous of the two writers; he takes a more political view. His argument is that the Islamic world is undergoing a revivalist period, and that America’s best strategy is that employed during the Cold War. “. . . we can outlast this Islamist revolution. What we must avoid is a war of faiths, a war of civilizations between Islam and America. And those who propagandize for such a war are the unwitting or willful collaborators of Osama bin Laden.” I have to say that while I disagree with a lot of what Pat Buchanan stands for, on affairs in the middle east he has acted as a voice of reason.

Jacob Sullum takes issue with Pat Robertson’s statements that a proper reading of the Koran leads one inescapably to the conclusion that conflict between the Islamic and non-Islamic world is inevitable. Sullum points out that there are equivalent phrases in the Bible, calling for the elimination of “heathen nations.” Do such phrases make Christianity a violent religion? Or, to be more clear, do they require Christianity or Judaism to be aggressive against other nations?