While President Bush takes his time deciding how or whether to change course in Iraq — collecting ideas and promising a speech on the issue next month — people are dying in Iraq, impatiently notes a New York Times editorial: “Mr. Bush has no more time to waste on ‘listening tours’ and photo ops. The nation is in a crisis, and Americans need to hear how he plans to unwind the chaos he has unleashed in Iraq.” The president needs to get it right, but urgency is in order, too.
Meanwhile, the Times reports that Iraq wants Iraqi troops to be given most of the responsibility for security in Baghdad in early 2007, which would put U.S. troops in the suburbs. This proposal seems a good test of the administration’s policy of standing down when Iraqis stand up.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, back on the presidential campaign trail in Iowa Tuesday, said there’s room in the Republican Party for candidates who support gay rights, though they can expect resistance from social conservatives.
“It’s a big-tent party and has been for a long period of time, particularly since Ronald Reagan talked about this being a party of different viewpoints,” he said. “If somebody agrees with you 80 percent of the time, he’s not your enemy.”
Such welcoming talk will sound a little hollow to many, given that Brownback still hasn’t lifted his hold on the nomination to the federal bench of Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Janet Neff. He chaired her Senate hearing but is upset that she attended a gay commitment ceremony four years ago and wants her to promise not to hear same-sex marriage cases. As the Detroit Free Press editorializes today, “So much for the GOP contention that each of the president’s nominees deserves an up or down vote.” It goes on: “Brownback’s actions show outrageous disregard for the U.S. system of three separate branches of government. Neff, the president and Michigan’s senators need to stand up to him.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Brink Lindsey, the director of research at the libertarian Cato Institute, argued in an essay in the New Republic that the “alliance between traditionalists and libertarians appears, at long last, to be falling apart.” And he argued that libertarians should leave the GOP and join with Democrats.
Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby noted that libertarians and Democrats are certainly more alike on moral questions such as abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. But probably not on economic issues.
“Just as Republicans want government to restore traditional values, so Democrats want government to bring back the economic order that existed before globalization,” Mallaby wrote. “As Lindsey puts it in his New Republic essay, Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s while Democrats want to work there.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The dump site of a house at 10th and Volutsia is worthy of protest. Legal action, too, which is why the city recently filed suit against the owner. But Sunflower Community Action crossed a line of civility Saturday in taking its crusade for action on the run-down house to the home of City Manager George Kolb. Activists reportedly chanted with a bullhorn and held up picket signs to Kolb’s windows, also trespassing on a neighbor’s yard. Kolb wasn’t home, so his wife, Sandy Kolb, asked the demonstrators to leave and also called the police, who arrived to find the activists gone but their signs left on the porch and elsewhere. “My concern is that they pretty much terrorized our street,” Sandy Kolb told The Eagle editorial board. Such tactics get attention, but at what cost to the group’s credibility and worthy causes? Besides, Kolb hasn’t been idle in fighting blight generally.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It’s not so remarkable to see hecklers at a presidential speech. But if the protesters are Iranian students and the one heckled is the loose-cannon Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps it’s a hopeful sign.
According to the BBC, hundreds of students chanted “death to the dictator” and burned a portrait of Ahmadinejad as the Iranian leader spoke at a college campus on Sunday.
Anti-government protests are rare in Iran, particularly since Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005. Whether the protest represents a trend is impossible to say, but from a Western perspective, a little domestic pressure on the Iranian president would be coming at a very good time.
Posted by Dave Knadler
As expected, presidential wannabe Sam Brownback’s compassionate approach to illegal immigration is getting bad reviews in some conservative quarters. “He has tossed aside law and order and, like Ted Kennedy, has sold out the American middle class in the hope of pandering to 20 million illegals,” wrote William H. Calhoun of NewsBlaze.com, who also called “Amnesty Sam” a “liberal globalist” who “should be avoided like the plague.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
