Tag Archives: United States

Commentary

Mark Steyn writes on the West’s failure to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions

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From National Review. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

In Iran, the self-declared nuclear regime announced that it was now enriching uranium to 20 percent. When President Obama took office, the Islamic Republic had 400 centrifuges enriching up to 3.5 percent. A year later, it has 8,000 centrifuges enriching to 20 percent. The CIA director, Leon Panetta, now cautiously concedes that Iran’s nuclear ambitions may have a military purpose. Which is odd, because the lavishly funded geniuses behind America’s National Intelligence Estimate told us only two years ago that Tehran had ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Is that estimate no longer operative? And, if so, could we taxpayers get a refund?

[…]On the other hand, when it comes to “keeping you safe” from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. There aren’t going to be any sanctions, because China and Russia don’t want them. That means military action, which would have to be done without U.N. backing — which, as Greg Sheridan of the Australian puts it, “would be foreign to every instinct of the Obama administration.” Indeed. Nonetheless, Washington is (all together now) “losing patience” with the mullahs. The New York Daily News reports the latest get-tough move: “Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town-hall meeting in Tehran.”

[…]It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody-else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

The rest of the article talks about what a nuclear-weapon-empowered Iran will mean for Europe and the world.

Videos

Marco Rubio’s speech at the conservative CPAC convention

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Video is right here, from Breitbart.tv: (26 minutes)

Great speech. This is who we are. This is what we believe.

News

Federal judge awards German homeschooling family political asylum

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The Romeike Family, formerly of Germany

Story here from the UK Telegraph. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The case of the homeschooling couple from Germany who were granted political asylum in the United States, about which Ed West blogged recently, becomes even more interesting if one reads the remarks of the man who granted the Romeikes asylum, Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman, of Memphis, Tennessee.

[…]Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

[…]The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. The same would apply in British state schools, where pornographic sex education is increasingly being made compulsory.

Next to unilateral “no-fault” divorce, this opposition to parental rights is what prevents me from considering marriage and parenting, no matter how good of a match I find. And make no mistake, the idea that children are the property of the state is totally at home among today’s Democrat party. The system of ineffective government-run public schools, which are partially funded by homeschooling and private-schooling families who don’t even use them, is anti-family and anti-liberty.

Consider this radical feminist Democrat:

“We really don’t know how to raise children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality. […]In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”
(Mary Jo Bane:  Former Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services of the Clinton administration)

I wrote about the problem of state intrusion into the family here: Are marriage and family compatible with single-payer health care?

But sometimes Christians cause their own problems by being ignorant about economics. I have talked to fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers who actually favored single-payer health care, yet simultaneously opposed things like taxpayer-funded abortions. The problem is that many Christians are not informed about economics. They think that they can empower a secular-leftist state to achieve “social justice” through wealth redistribution, without having their own religious liberty impacted.

But the same government that can confiscate wealth from “the rich” to nationalize health care can also force pro-life nurses at government-run hospitals to perform abortions. The best defense of religious liberty is a free market. If a government-run school discriminates against you in the free market, you can always homeschool or use private schools. That is, if you can afford to homeschool or pay for private schools after the government is done using your taxes to indoctrinate the other children.