Buckwheat Harvest

Well, the media hounds may not have been loosed on this, but locals sure voted. The candidate for office in Louisiana (a democrat) who called a black volunteer for her campaign "Buckwheat" has been defeated. Don Surber points out that the Associated Press buries that little detail until far down into their coverage of the election.

I doubt AP would have downplayed a Republican losing over a racist remark.

As a member of the MSM for most of my adult life, I should resent charges of a pro-Democrat bias in the media. Really, I should.

But then Melinda Deslatte of the Associated Press and her editors in New York do something like this: Downplay the election loss of a white Democratic State Representative in Louisiana who had called a civil rights leader “Buckwheat.”

The loss by Democratic Representative Carla Dartez, D-Morgan City, was briefly mentioned in the 7th paragraph.

It should have been the lead in the national story.

Don has the full text of the AP article. While the Democrats hold a majority in both houses of the legislature, the margin is very slim in the lower house. With a new Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, it could get interesting.

I'm glad that Carla Dartez, D-Morgan City, got cut loose by the voters, though. It shows that the voters have a bit more sense than some pols give them.

Cattle Punching Politician

Mayor Bill Boyd of Stoystown, Pennsylvania appears to be a full service politician. Not only does he do the mayoral duties, but he's also willing to round up a herd of cows.

Mayor Bill Boyd was first on the scene, honking his horn at the nine bulls, cows and calves that were plodding along, barely 100 yards from Main Street in the borough of just over 400 people about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

"Two of them had pretty good horns on them," Boyd told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. "It's the first time I've known a mayor to get involved in cattle wrangling."

Boyd got eight of the critters to stop, but the ninth just kept moseying toward the main drag.

Conemaugh Township Police Officer Nathan Claycomb joined the mayor in trying to head the stubborn animal off at the pass.

The article says that the owner of the cows has not been found. Sounds like time for a barbecue. I wonder if the mayor can cook?

Monkeying Around

Florida wildlife officials are informing the public that the reports of an orangutan on the loose in Baker county are untrue. They insist that it cannot be an orange-furred ape. Instead, they believe it is - wait for it - a fox squirrel. No, really.

The animal was probably an orange phase fox squirrel, Fish and Wildlife investigator Ken Holmes told The Florida Times-Union. The red-orange animals can grow to be about 2 feet tall and can climb in trees.

"I'll be astonished if it's an orangutan," Holmes said. "I can quite confidently say it's probably not an orangutan."

He said the animal's eating habits did not match with the patterns of a primate.

"I'm not discounting anything," Holmes said. "However, this creature, whatever it may be, simply isn't acting like a primate."

Residents of the area reported a "big orange ball of fur" hanging around in the trees. This is a fox squirrel:

(Photo credit: calibas)

On the other hand, this is an orangutan:

(Photo credit: Malene Thyssen)

I'm not seeing any resemblance here. One can't help but wonder how they decided that it must be a squirrel….

The Lines That Never End

A very interesting article in the Washington Post by Mark Winne, the former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System and a 25-year veteran of food bank programs. In it he explains how he came to recognize something awful about food handout programs: they don't work. The more the volunteers collect, the more they give away, the more demand increases. The lines never end.

We did our job well, and everything grew: Over 25 years, the food bank leapfrogged five times from warehouse to ever-vaster warehouse, finally landing in a state-of-the-art facility that's the equal of most commercial food distribution centers in the country. The volunteers multiplied to 3,000 because the donations of food, much of it unfit for human consumption, required many hands for sorting and discarding. The number of food distribution sites skyrocketed from five in 1982 to 360 today.

But in spite of all the outward signs of progress, more than 275,000 Connecticut residents — slightly less than 8.6 percent of the state's residents — remain hungry or what we call "food insecure." The Department of Agriculture puts 11 percent of the U.S. population in this category. (The department also provides state-by-state breakdowns.)

The overall futility of the effort became evident to me one summer day in 2003 when I observed a food bank truck pull up to a low-income housing project in Hartford. The residents had known when and where the truck would arrive, and they were already lined up at the edge of the parking lot to receive handouts. Staff members and volunteers set up folding tables and proceeded to stack them with produce, boxed cereal and other food items. People stood quietly in line until it was their turn to receive a bag of pre-selected food.

No one made any attempt to determine whether the recipients actually needed the food, nor to encourage the recipients to seek other forms of assistance, such as food stamps. The food distribution was an unequivocal act of faith based on generally accepted knowledge that this was a known area of need. The recipients seemed reasonably grateful, but the staff members and volunteers seemed even happier, having been fortified by the belief that their act of benevolence was at least mildly appreciated.

As word spread, the lines got longer until finally the truck was empty. The following week, it returned at the same time, and once again the people were waiting. Only this time there were more of them. It may have been that a donor-recipient co-dependency had developed. Both parties were trapped in an ever-expanding web of immediate gratification that offered the recipients no long-term hope of eventually achieving independence and self-reliance. As the food bank's director told me later, "The more you provide, the more demand there is."

Winne calls it a co-dependency between the people receiving the handouts and those providing the food. The volunteers want to feel goos about themselves and so they volunteer. The food bank programs become a self-sustaining program rather than a means to an end. There is no end in sight. Because the self-sustaining nature of the programs distracts from real solutions.

Food banks are a dominant institution in this country, and they assert their power at the local and state levels by commanding the attention of people of good will who want to address hunger. Their ability to attract volunteers and to raise money approaches that of major hospitals and universities. While none of this is inherently wrong, it does distract the public and policymakers from the task of harnessing the political will needed to end hunger in the United States.

The risk is that the multibillion-dollar system of food banking has become such a pervasive force in the anti-hunger world, and so tied to its donors and its volunteers, that it cannot step back and ask if this is the best way to end hunger, food insecurity and their root cause, poverty.

Winne's solutions are misguided, I think, because he's essentially calling for an even bigger self-sustaining handout - this time run by the government. Nevertheless, he is correct that the entire thrust of programs like these fail to address the real causes of the problem. Yet handing out more only leads to demand for still more, as Winne notices. What he appears not to see is that his "solutions" would simply multiply the lines yet again. Only this time it would be the government being asked to provide more and more, not volunteers.

It's interesting that Winne noticed the essential problem with handouts without following that insight all the way to the logical conclusion. That old, shopworn adage applies here: if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime. The way up and out of poverty is education and opportunity, not another handout. Because the lines just never end if you're giving it all away. "The more you provide, the more demand there is." That quote from the unnamed food bank director says it all.

Soft Underbelly

Mark Helprin writes about the strategic importance of Germany in today's Opinion Journal. For centuries, Germany has been the main crossroad for wars and power in Europe. It still is these days although the nations of Europe are doing their best to sleep through all the problems in the world. While threats are growing, Germany's (and virtually all of Europe's) military strength is waning. The west disarms, Russia rearms and new threats are on the horizon. Those new threats are quite real and quite good at calculating risk and reward.

Germany must fascinate the Jihadists, too–not for displacing America as the prime target, but as the richest target least defended. Though it will never happen, they believe that Islam will conquer the world, and so they try. Unlike the U.S., Europe is not removed from them by an ocean, and in it are 50 million of their co-religionists among whom they can disappear and find support. Perhaps out of habit, Europe is also kind to mass murderers, who if caught spend a few years in a comfortable prison sharpening their resolve before they are released to fight again. In July the French sentenced eight terrorists connected to the murder of 45 people to terms ranging from one year, suspended, to 10 years. In Spain, with 191 dead and 1,800 wounded, the perpetrators will spend no more than 40 years behind soft bars. Though in 2003 Germany found a September 11th facilitator guilty of 3,066 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced him to seven years (20 hours per person), he was recently reconvicted and sentenced to 43 hours per person, not counting parole.

But, more importantly, the variations in European attitudes and capabilities vis-à-vis responding to terrorism or nuclear blackmail are what make Germany such an attractive target. Unlike the U.S., France, and Britain, Germany is a major country with no independent expeditionary capability and no nuclear weapons, making it ideal for a terrorist nuclear strike or Iranian extortion if Iran is able to continue a very transparent nuclear policy to its logical conclusion. Though it is conceivable that after the shock of losing Washington or Chicago, the U.S.–or Britain after Birmingham, France after Lyon–would, even without an address certain, release a second strike, it is very unlikely that, even with an address certain, any nuclear power would launch in behalf of another nation, NATO ally or not, absent an explicit arrangement such as the dual-key structure during the Cold War.

Looking at Germany, then, Iran sees a country with nothing to counter the pressure of merely an implied nuclear threat. Jihadists see the lynchpin of Europe, easy of access and inadvertently hospitable to operations, that will hardly punish those who fall into its hands, and that can neither accomplish on its own a flexible expeditionary response against a hostile base or sponsor, nor reply to a nuclear strike in kind. Thus the German government should be especially nervous about cargos trucked overland from the east.

As was pointed out in the last post, Germany may be slowly waking up to the fact that they are in danger. But they are not helping themselves or the rest of the west by failing to recognize the threat a nuclear-armed Iran poses to them. Mark Steyn expressed it best:

In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there's no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide's usually up to your neck.

But not recognizing the threat until you're up to your neck in it is a trait that the west has become all too good at.

Though the West comprises the richest grouping of nations the world has ever seen, it has somehow come to believe not only that it is not entitled to its customary defenses but that it cannot afford them. And looking ahead strategically so as to outmaneuver crisis and war has, unfortunately, long been out of fashion.

I have pointed out, again and again that the way the west is handling, or not handling, the situation in Iran is making war more likely, not less. The way the west is sleepwalking right into the crisis is discouraging at best. The tide is rising, though.

Elephant? What Elephant?

Michael Goodwin points out what was missing from the last Democrat debate. While Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and the also-rans were talking one little topic, like the little man on the stair, just wasn't there at all. Call it the invisible elephant. The Democrats appear to exist in a place where terrorism doesn't exist. Or the sure spent a lot of time avoiding any mention of it.

Whew, that was a close one. We suffered a big attack and were in mortal danger for a while, but we are safe now. Thank God, the war on terror is over. There are no Islamic extremists. Homeland security is not an issue. The only problem in Iraq is how to get out.

Wait, this is news to you? Then you didn't watch the Democratic debate Thursday. Or maybe you did watch, but since those unpleasant topics were completely or mostly ignored, you assumed the war was over and went to bed believing peace is at hand and Santa Claus is busy making toys at the North Pole.

It's not your fault. It's the Democratic presidential candidates who are sleepwalking through history.

As befitting a scrum with too many people and too little time, the debate touched on everything and illuminated nothing. Sen. Hillary Clinton made headlines by defending herself and for finally taking a position against driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, but the gaping hole was the absence of any serious reference to the war on terror. It's long been that way on the campaign trail, and now Dem debates reflect the dangerous drift.

A New York Times language tracker tells the tale. Neither "homeland security" nor "war on terror" were mentioned. Osama Bin Laden was a no-show and Al Qaeda got one mention. "Terrorism" got three, two of them by audience members asking questions, as did "extremists," with two of those in a single answer by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. On the other hand, "health" got 45 mentions and "education" 20.

Let's do the time warp again. The Democrats are running in the 9/10 zone. But they fail to see that that strategy doesn't work in the post 9/11 reality. Germany just figured it out. It is a shock to the system:

Germany is giving its security authorities more power after a group of Islamists were charged with violent plots and a government report said 900 members of Hezbollah were in the country. The sudden sense of danger is a shock, with one woman telling USA Today that Germany's refusal to fight in Iraq lulled the country into thinking Islamic terrorists would focus elsewhere; "we assumed that if we behaved well in the world, nothing would happen to us," the woman said.

It is a strange, strange world these days, isn't it?