• The State of the Union Message delivered by President Bush on Monday was so effective in drawing a straight line between the last few years and the future that some liberal media ignored it completely (eg. the NBC Today show), while others were tongue-tied in regurgitating the same ol' same ol'.  This President's biggest mistake was Don Rumsfeld and "loyalty".  But he is not going to ride quietly into the sunset. 
• John McCain wins Florida, proving that not all Republicans have a death-wish.  Meanwhile, the carbon monoxide from his cigars must be getting to Rush Limbaugh's brain. 
• Mitt Romney criticizes McCain for his efforts at needed election financing reform; he criticizes McCain for trying to inject reason and common sense into the Immigration debate; and he indirectly criticizes McCain for doing anything cooperatively with the Democrats.  All good reasons for him to keep losing. 
• And, dealing with "cooperation": the constant tug of war in the balance of power between the Federal Legislature and the Executive is one of the legitimate reasons for limited "cooperation".  That's how the Founding Fathers intended it; and that's why they wrote it into the U.S.Constitution that way. 
• "Recession"; "Stimulus Package"; marked increase in foreign investment in the ownership of our national family jewels.  It would do well for our leaders to remember  the motto of the Medical Profession: "Primum, Non Nocere" ("First, Do No Harm").
  

• At long last, Connecticut has decided to get tough, somewhat , with crime.  But the touchy-feely Democrats just couldn't bring themselves to consider seriously a "three strikes" provision.  Connecticut's version appears in another article, in which a Judge finally sentences a seven-time felon (including four armed robberies) to 40 years.  And what were the victims sentenced to? 
• The Democrats in Congress are still trying to make the "stimulus package" a give-away.  Wait a little longer, and the economy won't need anything at all.
• The South Carolina Primary has unearthed all the racist "usual suspects", making it a black - and  - white issue.  Be careful, folks.  The vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of all this race-baiting, almost entirely by Black "leaders". 
• Israel and Palestine: like two trains in the night, on a collision course.  Two letters in The Day today again demonstrate this: just serial monologues.   
• "Choat Students Protest Selection Of Rove To Speak At Graduation"  The parents of these dummies should demand their tuition money back!
• When free speech purists and cynics of the democratic process take issue with the McCain - Feingold attempt to rein in election spending, they should contemplate the mischief that the major donors (Wall Street and other business entitles) create: recurring efforts to open vast tracts of national forests and wilderness lands to unbridled development.  What if Teddy Roosevelt had been subject to such pressures? 
• Despite the fact that I am a physician and Senator John Edwards was a plaintiffs' trial lawyer most of his life, I have had no animus toward him.  Now comes the article in today's The Day (www.theday.com) by Charles Krauthammer, enumerating the many issues that he has evidently taken both sides of.  As law students, we have to learn to argue both sides of any case; but - if true - this is ridiculous. 
• "Say it ain't so!"  The highly vaunted New England Patriots play the rough game of Football better than anyone.  But playing Dirty?  That's what several of the Patriots proudly assert in the article by Howard Ulman (AP) entitled "Working Dirty?", in The Day today.  We have the uncivilized spectacles of Hockey, of "American Gladiators" and of other "extreme" fighting.  Do we need to do this to Football too, to get our jollies?  Another of the many signs of decline of the American empire.

• The "Recession" Panic.  In the current new and debilitated American society, everybody's a victim.  Actions should have no consequences.  Unbridled greed...and stupidity.  Nothing about "living within one's means", and "I Fight Poverty...I Work".  Everybody wants a bailout, paid for by those of us who still have some common sense.  And the problem is global.  America is holding up the world's economy.  How?  On "consumerism" and on credit...with the Chinese and many other countries holding our IOU's.  WHAT WE NEED IS A DOSE OF CASTOR OIL.  THEN, PAY AS YOU GO...AND SAVE. 
• There is little or no news being reported by the major media on Iraq, Arghanistan, and Pakistan.  That can only mean good news. 
• There's plenty of news...or rather hare-brained ideas...about health care delivery.  A classic case of ignoring the diagnosis of the PAIN, and simply offering a nostrum...like "universal health care".  But wait: there's more!  The geniuses are about to worsen the problems with initiatives begun by Medicare: "Insurers Stop Paying For Care Linked To Errors" (by Vanessa Fuhrmans, WSJ Jan. 15, pD1).  They allege that this will only refer to the most egregious errors (like operating on the wrong side of the brain).  But things like "infection from indwelling urinary catheter" and "bed sores" already are on some lists.  Disregard the fact that the catheter was placed to avoid the development of bed sores in the first place.  This approach promises to bankrupt some hospitals, followed by a massive gaming of the system.  It is reminiscent of the draconian approach the government chose in dealing with the thousands of "Superfund Sites" and the "Proposed Responsible Parties" since the mid-1980's, having resulted in a minimum of sites having been cleaned up in the intervening 20 years.  "Is anybody there?  Does anybody care?

Author Unknown:

Subject: A GERMAN'S POINT OF VIEW ON ISLAM

Dr. Emanual Tanay is a well known and well respected psychiatrist.

A German's point of view on Islam

A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

'Very few people were true Nazis ' he said,' but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.

It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the 'peaceful majority', the 'silent majority', is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
            Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
            Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that
            the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
           Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have    died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

• Islam.  the more I read about it, the less I understand.  See the several articles in the Sunday Jan. 6 issue of the NYTimes Book Review, the entire review entitled "Islam".  One essay reinforces my underlying belief that The Koran lends itself to many interpretations, with no central, authoritative source of doctrine ("Reading The Koran", by Tarik Ramadan, p6).  But, as with most religions, Islam does have both "moderate" and "fundamentalist" traditions and followers.  That is problematic within a religion.  It is corrosive to understanding and cooperation between and among religions.  There is a lesson here, if peace is ever to come to the human family. 
• Another article from a NYTimes Book Review talks not at all about Natural Law, and just a little about Morality, preferring a more politically correct title: "What Makes Us Want To Be Good?" (Jan. 13, p32).  At least the subject is being studied and discussed...a far cry from the "value neutral" education that an entire generation of children had to survive...barely.  Just in time for the annual flurry of articles on the most pervasive immoral of human activities: Abortion, on another anniversary of Roe v Wade, a judicial decision based on neither legal nor medical or moral grounds. 
• And another anniversary: Martin Luther King Day.  Now there was a man of whom it can be said: he issued a second Emancipation Proclamation that directly enabled this country to end 100 years of hypocracy and criminality on the matter of race relations.  Yet there are those, not only White cretins but also Black demagogues, who continue to bang the drum of "racism" as if nothing ever happened to race relations in this country.  This is best expressed by Dr. Shelby Steele, as quoted in Tom Brokaw's recent book, "Boom!  Voices of the Sixties" (Random House, 2007). "Steele takes direct aim at his critics, whom he calls 'these yammering blacks out there - the Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, the Dick Gregorys'.  He claims 'racism is valuable to blacks now because it keeps whites owing us.  In other words, racism is the single greatest source of power blacks in America have today...the more you think that, the more you're gonna be open to our demands.  It all began in 1968.  White America lost its moral authority.  That's the price it paid for being good, for acknowledging it was wrong.  Whites could be stigmatized, and they've been living in terror ever since.  The worst thing that can happen to a white person is to be labeled a racist.'" (pp324-5).   That is not the legacy that Martin Luther King lived and died for.

• Israel and the Palestinians;  Dumb and Dumber.  Hamas continues to send rockets into Israel.  It gets hammered for its trouble.  Then a Right-Wing Israeli Party leaves the government of Mr. Olmert...predictable in view of Olmert's rercent comments regarding Jewish settlements and Jerusalem.  Predictable, but still Dumb.
• Egypt's Mubarak supports President Bush's efforts for peace and for a Palestinian State.  But can he be trusted?  In that part of the world, nothing is as it seems. 
• Then we hear an interview on NPR with Strob Talbott, former deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, a man who just published a book whose subtitle includes the words "...Quest For A Global Nation".  At the same time, we read of tribal conflicts in Kenya and throughout Africa, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India....  Mr. Talbott, you and all the other "America Second" Internationalists  are OUT OF YOUR MINDS!

• Michiganders cannot be blamed for seeking hope amid worsening economic news.  But it looks like they also want to be lied to. 
• After "fourty days and fourty nights in the wilderness", will Rudy Giuliani emerge viable? 
• All this talk about a Recession reminds us of the fateful words of President Roosevelt: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself".  For fear is the indispensable ingredient for a recession to occur.
• Once again, the excessively thin skin among the Black "leadership" gets everybody into trouble.  Taken in context, Hillary Clinton said nothing wrong.  And she should be the last person to accuse of a racist remark...she, whose husband has been called "The First Black President in America.

• Here are two "blasts from the past"; they are "oldies" but not "goodies".  Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State under the Clinton administration, answers "10 Questions" in the Jan. 21 issue of Time Magazine.  "Question 1: How will President Bush be judged when he leaves office?"  "I wrote my book 'Memo to the President Elect' for the next President because they are going to have a very hard job to do.  Our reputation is the lowest that it has ever been.  This presidency has done a great deal of damage, and I'm very glad that it will end".  This follower of the great "Moistened Finger In The Wind" President takes credit elsewhere for "Kosovo".  Will she also take credit for the years of equivocation during the ethnic cleansings of Chechnia, Bosnia and Serbia?  Madam, you were more accurately Secretary of State for the European Union than for the United States.  And this most recent comment cements your loyalties.  And then there is George McGovern, former candidate for President, who today calls for the impeachment of both the President and the Vice-President (in The Day Sunday, Jan 13, Perspective, pE1).  Here he also uses the outrageous and unfounded claim that "the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an 'imminent threat' to the United States".   
• Iraq.  Having done a terrible job of prosecuting the war, thanks to the arrogant and inept Donald Rumsfeld, with the misplaced "loyal" acquiescence of the President, this administration is starting to get it right: finally working to establish security with more troops and air power, and with the carrot of interpersonal relations with the Iraqi people; convincing the Sunni people that al Qaida is its real enemy; and maintaining good relations with the Kurds.  Now, we must call in the chips of our good will with the Kurds to convince them that their future lies with a united Iraq...and not with the pipe-dream of an independent Kurdistan that will not be permitted by their neighbors to the North, the East and the South.  In this effort, we must not equivocate.  Finally, the President is making clear to all that we will be physically in that region for at least a decade, and probably longer...notwithstanding the Sunday editorial of the NYTimes that continues to report approvingly the demands of the Democrats for full withdrawal within two years.  At least on this issue, Republicans remain united. 
• That brings up a related matter.  Should unaffiliated citizens have the right to vote in Party primaries?  The editorial in The Day Sunday, Jan 13 is a reasoned analysis which, I believe, nevertheless comes to the wrong conclusion.  Our system of campaiging, campaign financing, and elections are grounded in a Party system...generally but not always a two party system.  Even our system of governance relies on group consensus and on compromise between and among groups - rather on the actions of individuals acting alone.  Party identity, Party loyalty and Party positions are integral to this process.  Meanwhile, as acknowledged in the editorial, unaffiliated voters have more than one means of participating in all levels of the process...while having their choice in how to participate.  What do you think?

• "Voter-Fraud Showdown": WSJ, Jan. 9, pA15;
• "What We Want In a President", WSJ, Jan 2, pA11
• "The 16-Year Itch", WSJ, Jan. 4, pA11
• "The Seinfeld Campaign", WSJ, Jan. 3, pA13;
• "President Bloomberg?", WSJ, Jan 3, pA12;
• "Protecting America From Pakistan", by Scott Bates, The Day, Jan 4, pA9;
• "Olmert: Israel is not living up to road map", by Amy Teibel, The Day, Jan 5, pA2;
•  "Liberty Theology", WSJ, Dec. 31, pA12;
• "Heil Woodrow!", by David Oshinsky, NYTimes Book Review, Dec. 30, p10;
• "Arizona Law A Study In Inhumanity", by tom Teepen, The Day, Jan 1, pA7.

In the Wall Street Journal, Iowa resident and freelance journalist Michael Judge complained that the caucuses encouraged candidates to pander to Iowans, 90 percent of whom were unlikely to show up at caucuses.

"Even if you're a died-in-the-wool (sic) Democrat or Republican, you have to be a certain kind of person to do the caucus thing," he wrote.

The caucuses kick off the state-by-state process by which Democrats and Republicans will select their nominees to face off in the November presidential election. Fewer than 250,000 people are expected to take part in the voting on Thursday.

The winners can expect a tremendous wave of publicity and flood of contributions that can boost their campaigns for the next, crucial stage of the nomination battles.

Those who do badly could be out of the race within days. Both major parties' nominees are expected to be selected by mid-February.

SAME OLD

There is nothing new in criticism of Iowa and New Hampshire, the state that holds the first presidential primary vote next Tuesday. It happens every four years. This time, Iowa scheduled its vote earlier than ever before to stay ahead of other states seeking to cast ballots earlier in the process.

Defenders of Iowa say the state's citizens take their role in winnowing the presidential field extremely seriously and force the candidates to do on-the-ground, personal campaigning instead of relying on television advertisements.

"Sorry, but that's not good enough," the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in an editorial. It noted that the state's largest city of Des Moines had a population less than half the size of Oakland, California.

"The system favors enthusiasts with the time to attend a caucus for several hours, a process that screens out those with family duties, conflicting work hours, travel plans or disabilities," the newspaper wrote.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins agreed:

"The identity of the next leader of the most powerful nation in the world is not supposed to depend on the opinion of one small state. Let alone the sliver of that state with the leisure and physical capacity to make a personal appearance tonight at a local caucus that begins at precisely 7 o'clock. Let alone the tiny slice of the small sliver willing to take part in a process that involves standing up in public to show a political preference, while being lobbied and nagged by neighbors."

Washington Post columnist David Broder joined the attack, saying the peculiar procedures in Iowa favored conservative Christian and anti-abortion groups among Republicans and organized labor among Democrats who were best organized and able to get their members to the caucuses.

The result, he wrote, was "a double distortion mirror."

(Reporting by Alan Elsner, editing by Doina Chiacu)

• That the Israel of the political world can never be the Israel of the Bible...so, compromise;
• That "Palestine" will never re-emerge in any form until the Arabs and Muslims accept the existence of Israel and make a permanent peace;
• That the Iraqi government earn its name and form a unity government with Shia, Sunni and Kurds - its only hope for nationhood and peace;
• That the intelligent and cultured people who populate Iran realize that Islamic fundamentalism under the clerics has wasted 30 years of their past and continues to endanger their future;
• That the entire world of Islam realize that it can hope for only wars and defeat if it does not turn away from radicalism and terrorism and back to the true teachings of The Prophet...and that only Muslims can make that happen;
• That V. Putin realize that the Russian people are much greater than he gives them credit for, and that Russia can thrive as a full member of the world community without the rule of fear, repression, dictatorship and robber-barons...and that he is making Russia more "oriental" than the old Chinese;
• That Afghanistan's leaders once and for all convert their opium economy to a legitimate world economy - with a lot of help from their friends;
• That Pakistanis seek and earn democracy as a consequence of long-term stability, and not as a substitute for it; 
• That the great nation of China, in its drive into the mainstream of world society, follow the better lessons of America and not repeat its historic failures;
• That India can never be a "great democracy" until it makes peace with itself...Hindu and Muslim;
• That Europe carry its legitimate burden in its own self-defense and in the  promotion of world peace and prosperity, and that it stops playing its new form of colonialism in the Third World;
• That everyone realize that the U.N. as currently constituted can only serve at best as a pressure-release valve to world conflict...and no more;
• That American voters choose representatives worthy of themselves, wise men and women who will work only for the national interests of America, Americans, and Peace. 
• That God, in His many names, give substance and success to these prayers.