Saturday, June 09, 2007

A Failure of Leadership.

But not as the New York Times asserts. The real failure of leadership in the immigration reform effort was the astonishing lack of common sense in enforcment provisions, the lack of focus on the principal goal of the reform - national security, the insult it delivered to those resident aliens who have followed the letter of the law in applying for citizenship, and the arrogance displayed by the backroom bill crafters toward the legitimate concerns of citizens. The Times editorial explicitly calls out the Cornyn amendment with an accusation against it that is just nonsense. (The Times calls the amendment to establish a permanent bar for gang members, terrorists, and other criminals "strip[ing] confidentiality protections for immigrants who apply for legal status, making them too frightened to leave the shadows." Ye Gods - what bombast).

Sunday, June 03, 2007

The Four Freedoms.

It is important to remember what the promise of freedom means to the people of the world. Here is a clear articulation of what this struggle is all about:

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.


The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.


The second is Freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way — everywhere in the world.


The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.


The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.


That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."


— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excerpted from the Annual Message to the Congress, January 6, 1941












Believe It Or Not!

These guys were Democrats, and they did not cower when threatened by totalitarianism!