Friday, June 05, 2009

Karl's Weekend Reading

Two big events this week: GM's bankruptcy & nationalization, and Obama's speed in Cairo. Plus the Sotomayer nomination is gaining speed.

Obama Cairo Speech - Hanson at NRO, The Age of Middle East Atonement:

His speech essentially amounted to: “We did that, you did this, tit-for-tat, now we’re even, and can’t we all just get along?” He should be congratulated for expressing a desire for peace and for gently reminding the Muslim world of the way to reform, even if he did so while inflating Western sins.


Obama Cairo Speech - Krauthammer at Townhall, The Settlements Canard:

In his much-heralded "Muslim world" address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people's "situation" is "intolerable." Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations -- Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas in December 2008 -- rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders -- Fatah and Hamas alike -- built no schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no institutions that would relieve their people's suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that.


GM Nationalization - Hewitt at Townhall, Stopping Government Motors:

President Obama's decision to seize General Motors and convert it into Government Motors is as shocking as it is unpopular. Polling shows, like the president's stubborn insistence that Gitmo be closed and its terrorist prisoners brought stateside, the president's insistence that GM be nationalized is appalling to large majorities of Americans. The socialization of America's biggest brand is not the sort of decision that can be cloaked in head-faking rhetoric. What had been a private company on the verge of bankruptcy is now a government actor competing against private sector companies and using the federal treasury as an enormous unfair advantage in the marketplace. Even if the cost itself was not so staggering, the idea of the federal government declaring itself on the side of one of many competitors is as distasteful as it is unprecedented. It must be reversed.


Sotomayer - Sowell at NRO, Harlem, Then and Now:

There were standards for getting into the projects of those days and, if you didn’t live up to those standards, they put you out. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was quoted as saying, “When kids played on the grass, their parents would get a warning.” That seems almost quaint when you think of what has gone on in the housing projects of a later era.

Since there has been so much talk of putting some of Sonia Sotomayor’s inflammatory words “in context,” perhaps we should put her personal life in context, if the media insist on making her personal life a factor in her nomination to the Supreme Court. While she grew up in a public housing project, the words “housing project” in that era did not mean anything like the housing projects of today.


Sotomayer - Hanson at NRO, Sotomayor's Mistake:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has scolded Americans for being “cowards” and not talking more about race. Now, Holder is getting that “dialogue” with the recent controversy surrounding President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.
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Aside from Sotomayor’s notion that federal jobs should be parceled out on the basis of race, what exactly does she mean in an America that is intermarrying, integrating, and assimilating as never before?

And why were the same people who now hold up Sotomayor’s background as a qualification for the Supreme Court so quick, when George W. Bush was president, to rally to deny Miguel Estrada a court-of-appeals judgeship?


Have a great weekend!

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