It does no harm to keep reminding ourselves of the nature of the Islamism that now seeks to destroy the West.

”The Anglo-Spanish Brains nursery and primary school looked an unlikely al-Qa'eda target yesterday, yet Spanish police said it had been marked for destruction by the terrorist cell responsible for the Madrid commuter train atrocity.”

Targeting a nursery school? Holy warriors indeed.

Every now and again there’s a story in the press that's a reminder that the heart of this country is still in the right place:

"PLATTSMOUTH, Neb. -- Some Americans this Fourth of July plan to get a bang out of blowing Osama bin Laden's head off. The bin Laden Noggin, a cone-shaped pyrotechnic device with a cartoon of bin Laden's face, has been a hot seller at some fireworks stores around the country. When lit, the bin Laden cone erupts in blood-red flames and screeches for 60 seconds. Two shots blow his head off..."

Of course, there’s always a catch, and in this case it comes in the form of one Lisa Myer, who was reported as having had the following to say (yes, yes, we all know what’s coming next..., wait for it, wait for it):

"What are we trying to teach our children?"

Ah, the children. Of course.

Well, Ms. Myer, it teaches them that Americans are inclined to wish for the death of those who would destroy them – and that they will celebrate those moments when they occur.

Got a problem with that, Lisa?

The status of Estonia’s Russian minority continues to cause problems within the now liberated Baltic state. Here the Independent takes a look at the case of an ethnic-Russian schoolteacher dismissed for his inadequate grasp of Estonian. Language rights in Estonia are a complex controversy, but these remarks from Tass should not be allowed to pass without further comment:

“The Russian news agency Itar-Tass said this was the first time that a Russian-speaking teacher had been sacked for having poor skills in the Estonian language, and poured scorn on the move. Russia's Foreign Ministry is also likely to wade in. Ethnic Russians make up almost a third of tiny Estonia's population of 1.5 million, and the agency said that Narva was an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking town. "The population of Estonia's third largest town [Narva] is 96 per cent Russian," it said. "It's extremely rare to hear Estonian spoken there."

Well, there’s a reason that Narva (a bleak, still heavily sovietized place when I visited in the mid-90s) is “96% Russian”. In 1944 Stalin’s forces flattened the place, pulverizing a city that had been one of the jewels of Baltic Europe. That wasn’t enough, of course. They then supervised the murder and deportation of a large number of the city’s surviving inhabitants, banned others from returning, repopulated the place with Russians, and transferred some of its surrounding territory to Russia, where it still remains today.

Perhaps that is something that Tass would like to mention next time they take up this story.

Jack Ryan, the GOP candidate hounded out off the Illinois senatorial race for, well, nothing, has been making the media rounds to discuss the disaster that befell his campaign. Regardless of the unfairness of his treatment at the hands of both the Chicago Tribune and the Republican Party, there’s another important point to be made. Interviewed on ABC by the always excellent John Stossel, Ryan had this to say about the degree of intrusion into his private life with which he has had to contend:

"I can't tell you how many calls I got in the last two weeks from people who said, 'I always thought about maybe going into public service. But not now, not, not after I've seen what's happened to you.' And so this cannot be the right standard now for entering into American politics…"

Ryan’s right to raise this. I suspect that this country loses the benefit of countless excellent candidates who don’t relish the prospect of a prurient press or priggish rivals rooting through their lives for some sexual peccadillo, or, heaven forbid, some slip into sin, which would somehow be used to discredit their campaign. In the absence of illegality or truly grotesque hypocrisy (a little hypocrisy, remember, is no bad thing: it helps the world go round), the sex lives of politicians should remain the concern of them and their families. It’s nobody else’s business, and, yes, the return of privacy might even help the rest of us out.

After all, who wants to be governed by an eternity of Jimmy Carters?

What a sense of justice and maybe even satisfcation it must give Saddam's Iraqi victims--especially for those with missing ears, hands and/or fingers--to see Saddam Hussein in the dock just like any other felon, to see him being tried by Iraqis not by a panel of Nuremberg judges. This is the first time we have seen a longtime dictator in a courtroom to face criminal charges. The history of other recent tyrants looks like:
Hitler= committed suicide.
Stalin==died in bed.
Mao Zedong=died in bed.
Mussolini=was lynched.
Pol Pot==died in bed.
Idi Amin= died in bed.
Slobodan Milosevic==alive and on trial.

Here and here.

Kerry's stance is remarkable, given that President Bush's own brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush strongly favored giving illegal aliens driver's licenses because "once they're here, what do you do? Do you say that they're lepers to society? That they don't exist? It seems that a policy that ignores them is a policy of denial."

The politics of this issue strongly favor Kerry's view, not Jeb Bush's. Former California Governor Gray Davis lost his office in part because of his endorsement of driver's licenses for illegal aliens.

Is Kerry planning to run to the right of President Bush on issues like language and illegal immigration? Perhaps, especially if Kerry chooses Iowa's Governor Tom Vilsack as his running mate.

From a reader (who's right about Lars):

...a local conservative radio talk show host, Lars Larson (larslarson.com). It was to a couple of thousand MM like minded people who were in his Portland audience. Entire audience heard Lars' recorded cell phone greeting give out his home phone number - he and his wife then started getting death threats at home. Nice crowd. Doesn't excuse what Dobson did but MM better not bitch....

[Name withheld]
Portland

P.S. Keep an eye out on Lars, could be another Rush.

From a reader:

Jonah,

And don't forget - Just recently some immigration group, I believe, showed up at Karl Roves house to protest. In some corners it was praised for its guerrilla tatics in protest politics.

James Dobson's Focus on the Family has apparently sent
out an email giving its members Michael Moore's home address. I think this is a terrible move, simply on principle. There are other addresses to send Moore mail. Why legitimate this sort of thing?

But, I should add, Michael Moore has zero-point-zero grounds to complain. After all, he did set up a webcam aimed at my parents' bedroom during the Clinton troubles and promoted it in on television, in an effort to show the whole world where my mom lived and invade her privacy. (My mom turned things around and sold ad space in the window to the National Inquirer) If I recall correctly I appeared on some show with him in which he proceeded to make an idiot out of himself on some nonsensical constitutional point. Also, if I recall correctly, any number of liberals and journalists thought Moore's stunt was hilarious. So let's not hear too much piousness about Dobson & Co. from that quarter either.

Still, I think it's just wrong to divulge home addresses for the puprose of harassing public figures.

WITH APOLOGIES TO BOB DYLAN ON HIS 60TH

Come gather round faculty wherever you teach
And condemn what the universities around you do preach
Or accept it that soon you'll have no one to reach
Is your integrity worth saving
Then you'd better start speaking or you'll end up alone
For the times, they are a changing


Come teachers and scholars who never say a word
Open your eyes, look around at the absurd
And speak out now, while others do spin
And there's no telling who they'll be blaming
Where the winners claim that they did lose
For the times, they are a changing


Come administrators, board members, heed the call
See beyond your doorway, "tear down the wall"
Our standards are hurt, is there quality at all
The culture war is a raging; power point will not save
Your buildings will fall
For the times, they are a changing


Come mothers and fathers all over this land
Begin to question what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughter need your hand
Your new role needs to be engaging
Please get out of the old world and take a stand
For the times they are a changing


The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast
Political correctness must not last
Affirmative action will soon be the past
The censors are rapidly fading
The first one now will actually be chosen
For the times, they are a changing

Harvey Shulman

When it comes to constitutional interpretation, Thomas is concerned almost exclusively with the original meaning of the text at the time of the founding (and sometimes the original intentions of the founders as well) or the original meaning of an amendment; Scalia is more willing to reshape this meaning in light of what our "tradition" which means how the Constitution came to be viewed from then until now. For Scalia, tradition after ratification plays a much more important role, in operation sometimes appearing to trump his concern for original meaning. I think this is because he is trying to find more definite content than he thinks is in the text, and root this content somehow in history rather than in what he views as judicial fiat. Thomas (like Lincoln) is more inclined to read the original meaning of the Constitution in light of the prior Declaration of Independence than subsequent tradition, perhaps because of his sensitivity about slavery.

More importantly, because of his commitment to "the rule of law as the law of rules" Scalia is quite willing to leave whole passages of the Constitution unenforced by courts (whatever their original meaning) because they do not seem "rule-like" enough to constrain the decisions of judges, e.g. the Ninth Amendment and Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th. Scalia views the proper function of judging as strict order taking from the political branches and, where the orders are not specific enough, he would have judges ignore them and leave the protection of these liberties to the political process. Thomas is much more willing to judicially apply the more open-ended provisions, especially the Privileges or Immunities Clause, and protect unenumerated liberties from the political process. Indeed, he has said they should be protected on a par with enumerated rights.

I should add that, while neither takes exactly the same approach to interpretation as I would, Justice Thomas comes far closer than Justice Scalia so I am sensitive to the differences between them. I do not think even Supreme Court Justices should ignore provisions of the text because they fail to meet their vision of the "rule of law" any more than passages should be ignored for failing to measure up to a Justice's vision of "justice."

I'm getting lots of email like this:

I feel exactly the same way about my experience with comics growing up. I count at THE reason I am such an avid reader today. My concern is that I may not want to pass that experience on to my son (or daughter, but who are we kidding?). Have you checked out the standard Marvel titles today? The are chock full of the worst kind of relativism, political correctness, and left-wing values. There was always a strain of this when I was reading, especially in titles like X-Men and The New Mutants, but it is worse than anything I've seen. Moreover, they are coming close to porn these days. Characters in bed together, sex being a regular topic, etc. I guess I will start collecting the classic editions.

From a reader:

Jonah,

Could it be as simple as our president's mind not being trapped into
thinking only in cliches, while Maureen Dowd's is?