Welcome To The Balkans

Right here in the good old US of A. The Senate is considering a bill to mandate a race-based government in Hawaii. There's a good chance this monstrosity will pass, too.

America's motto is "E pluribus unum," Latin for "Out of many, one." Some U.S. senators seem to be reading it backward. This week the Senate will consider legislation that would create an independent, race-based government for Native Hawaiians. If the bill becomes law, it would create a racial spoils system that would hand special privileges to up to one-fifth of the state's population–including many with only a trace of Hawaiian blood. It could inspire mainland groups such as Hispanic separatists to seek similar spoils, should they ever gain enough political leverage.

The notion is the obsession of Sen. Daniel Akaka, an 81-year-old Democrat whose 16-year Senate record has been so undistinguished that Time magazine listed him in April as one of the five worst senators calling him "living proof that experience does not necessarily yield expertise." Mr. Akaka, whose term ends this year, faces a tough challenge in the September Democratic primary from Rep. Ed Case, and is thus desperate to show he is still legislatively relevant.

This is outright insanity. Our politicians are completely dismantling the melting pot and encouraging separatism. Despite the fact that the majority of people in Hawaii do not want this to happen, the Senate will still try to force the issue down the voter's throats. Funny how the Democrats spout off about the majority needing to be heard then slam dunk the majority when it suits them.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a report earlier this year that destroyed the notion that the Indian tribe analogy is appropriate. Native Hawaiians, who freely voted in large numbers to join the U.S. as a state in 1959, have never asked to be recognized as an Indian tribe. They not only lack their own system of laws but are dispersed throughout Hawaii and have a high rate of intermarriage with other groups. "The Akaka bill would authorize a government entity to treat people differently based on their race and ethnicity," said Gerald Reynolds, the commission's chairman. "This runs counter to the basic American value that the government should not prefer one race over another."

In Hawaii, debate over the ramifications of the Akaka bill has been stifled, as almost all of its elected officials have signed on to it for fear of being branded insensitive or racist. But none of them want to test the measure by consulting the state's voters directly on the Akaka bill. A Grassroots Institute poll last week showed some two-thirds of Hawaiians oppose the bill, including a near-majority of Native Hawaiians.

This bill opens the door for even more Balkanization in the future.

Frankly, This Surprises Me

I honestly would not have believed the New York Times would publish a story about the mass graves being unearthed in Iraq where victims of Saddam Hussein were disposed of.

Together, in the late winter of 1991, at least 28 men were executed here, crowded together in a pit their killers scraped with a backhoe from the desert floor. Rounded up along the alleyways of their native city, they were forced aboard a bus or truck and driven out along an isolated highway.

After barely half an hour's journey, the grim caravan turned down a bumpy track, halting just far enough into the desert for gunfire to be muffled from passing traffic.

The end would have come quickly, the forensic experts said, victims stumbling out of the vehicle, herded into the pit, then pushed forward into a shallow cut not much wider or longer than a stretch limousine. At the last moment, judging by the pile of bodies, the victims surged backward, perhaps in terror at the sound of rifles being readied for fire.

Among the bodies, the experts have located at least 80 spent cartridges from Kalashnikov rifles, which were the weapon of choice among the killers of Mr. Hussein's secret police.

Michael Trimble, who is called Sonny, the leader of the mass-graves team that set up camp beside an escarpment in Iraq's western desert last month, is a 53-year-old forensic archaeologist from St. Louis. He is a veteran of other sites of mass killings around the world, on assignment from a civilian post with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Standing above the pit where the desert victims died, he said the 120-member team here, now in their third week of excavation and examination of two mass-grave sites, were sustained through days of punishing 130-degree heat by an urge to bring justice for the victims.

The Times reports that estimates of the number of people buried in mass graves range from 100,000 to 180,000. Not exactly the happy, kite-flying place Michael Moore likes to talk about, was it?

I’m Not Real Impressed

With this little bit of political strategy. Suddenly reintroducing the proposal to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage strikes me as a particularly weak move. First, I can't see it passing through Congress, second it smacks of trying to divert attention away from the real issue on voter's minds - illegal immigration.

Just two years ago, gay-marriage opponents like Rowlands were everywhere. Thirteen states passed constitutional amendments barring same-sex unions and, in Ohio, the marriage ban was widely credited with boosting turnout and propelling George W. Bush to a second term. But after Election Day, the issue faded. Now it's back, complete with all the activists, dire predictions and dueling poll numbers. But the landscape has changed since 2004. Democrats argue that gay marriage is just a diversion from rising gas prices, the ongoing struggle in Iraq and immigration reform. With so much else to worry about, will voters care?

Forget the hypocrisy of the Democrats about rising gas prices (which aren't rising at the moment at all) and the rest. I just can't see that this issue will translate to better results at the polls in November. The real thing most people want is real immigration reform. Not amnesty, reform and enforcement.

UPDATE: Sister Toldjah has a few words about pandering to the base. It's not always a bad thing, is it?

The Magic Hat - Redux

Thomas Lipscomb has a column up over at Real Clear Politics that, quite frankly, makes the New York Times look really bad. The story the Times ran on efforts by some people to address the charges by the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth is pretty well shredded.

Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernible effort to examine any of the charges in detail.

But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.

Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.

Zernike appears to have made no effort to look at any record besides listing Kerry's latest assertions with obligatory quotes from the usual Swiftie suspects to provide "balance." She doesn't appear to be aware of the hilarious inconsistency of the Kerry hat story she recites dutifully as if this was the very first time the hat had appeared in print. As the clips should have shown her, Kerry first pulled the famous hat out of a "secret compartment" for Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld's feature story in 2003. "My good luck hat," Kerry told Blumenfeld, "given to me by a CIA guy." Now he tells Zernike a "special operations team" member gave it to him on a secret "mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals" in February.

It's a longish article, but well worth the read. Personally, I think John Kerry has exactly zero chance of gaining the nomination again, but it would be interesting to see the Kerry defenders trying to address substantive issues like Lipscomb raises instead of just flinging the "they're lying" charges all over again. All Kerry has to do is allow his records to be examined if he wants to put this issue to bed once and for all, right?

UPDATE: I knew Bruce Kesler would have something to say about this, too!