“America’s Interests and the U.N.”
by John Bolton

Jeane Kirkpatrick was frequently asked why the U.S. didn’t simply withdraw from the U.N., and her answer was, “Because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.” The fact is that the U.N., at times, can be an effective instrument of American foreign policy. Of course, to say this is heretical to the real devotees of the U.N., for whom the U.N. shouldn’t be an instrument of anyone’s foreign policy. But the fact is that everybody who participates in the U.N.—all of the 192 member governments, all of the non-governmental organizations, and all of the civil servants in the U.N. secretariats—try to advance their own interests. The only entity that gets criticized for that, needless to say, is the U.S. government. Although I want to talk about some of the U.N.’s failings in the international security area, I first want to mention an issue that doesn’t get as much attention, but which in many respects is more troubling and affects American interests in ways that could have a profound impact well into the future. MORE>

The Wisconsin Way means we’ll all pay
by Mark Belling

They ought to call it the Wisconsin Way: Create a tax that nobody knows about, hide it, expand it and give the money to somebody else. The new proposal to create a Wisconsin telephone tax is not only another expansion of the state’s massive tax burden. It’s part of a strategy by tax hikers at the state and local level to get money out of taxpayers without getting any blame for it. THE BACKGROUND: The Legislature and governor a few years ago created a tax on cell phones, purportedly to fund equipment upgrades to allow 911 call centers to locate calls coming in from cell phones. The tax, ranging between $5 and $9 per year, was to expire in late 2008, after all of the equipment upgrades had been made. THE PLOT: But in Wisconsin, there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary tax. Mayors of Wisconsin cities not only don’t want the phone tax to expire, they want to grab all the money. And, instead of letting the tax die, they want to expand and increase it. MORE>

Don't turn a tax that was set to end
into a costlier slush fund
by Steve Baas

They call it the Law of Unintended Consequences. It's when policies designed to address an issue in one area end up having disastrous side effects in another. The most recent example of this phenomenon is the proposal to tax telephone use in order to pay for local government services. Under a state mandate expiring Nov. 30, a 43-cent-per-month tax on cell phone bills is currently collected to help pay for upgrades to 911 technology. Now, however, City of Milwaukee officials are pushing to keep the tax in place forever. In addition, they would more than triple the tax and apply it to land lines as well as cell phones. That means that for every land line and cell phone your family or your business has, you would pay up to $1.50 a month. With multiple land lines and cell phones in every business, and even in many households, this tax will add up quickly. MORE>

Misery of others, cost for us all
by Patrick McIlheran

Dionny L. Reynolds, who killed a state agent in a hold-up and killed a young man at a bus stop, who grinned at his victims' families in court, has been put away. This necessity costs you at least $29,000 a year. His trial cost a pile, too, as did the police work that caught him. The toll of human misery aside, crime is expensive. And some of it must be tallied, a new report suggests, as part of the cost of fallen-apart families. Reynolds and four other members of his informal "crime crew" who went on a four-month spree of robbery, rape and homicide in Milwaukee in 2004 all grew up without fathers, investigators say. At sentencing, Reynolds' lawyer noted the part his "feral upbringing" played in his crimes. The same story emerges in one case after another. Not that this absolves Reynolds. That would insult the many more young men who, without fathers, nonetheless become law-abiding citizens. MORE>

Identifying 'clusters' helps
align funding priorities
by John Torinus

A decade after Harvard University's Michael Porter figured out that economies work in clusters, the concept is grudgingly taking root in strategic thinking in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. Other states and regions are using cluster strategies to organize their economic development strategies, such as Denver and Colorado, where business leaders have identified six clusters - aerospace, aviation, bio-science, energy, financial services and software - to focus allocations of energies and resources. Since Denver adopted its cluster strategy in 2005, it reports moving from 48th among the states in job growth to 14th. Colorado ranks third in new business growth, compared with 48th for Wisconsin. The concept of clusters is included in the strategic thinking of the Milwaukee 7 Advisory Council, on which I serve, and Gov. Doyle's "Grow Wisconsin" economic development document. But the word is seldom used. That means full understanding of the power of clusters as an organizing concept is not embedded. MORE>

The Speaker Unchecked
by Robert D. Novak

Operating outside public view, the House Democratic majority is taking extraordinary steps to maintain spending as usual while awaiting the arrival of a Democratic president. Remarkably, the supine House Republican minority hardly resists and even collaborates with its supposed adversaries. There has been little public Republican protest over the seizure of the appropriating process by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her clique. For the second year, no appropriations bill other than defense is scheduled for passage. Instead, spending details are crafted in the speaker's office, negating President Bush's veto strategy. In a little-noticed maneuver on April 23, Pelosi won passage of a bill preventing billions from being saved through Bush administration Medicaid regulations. Despite the GOP leadership's nominal opposition, House Republicans voted 2 to 1 for higher spending. MORE>

The Silent Scream of the Asparagus
Get ready for 'plant rights.'
by Wesley J. Smith

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated. A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain. A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." MORE>

Caution! You are bout to enter A Gun Free Zone
by Mike S. Adams

I don’t have to remind my readers that I spend a good bit of my time disagreeing with campus leftists. Nor do I need to remind them that most of these disagreements are with leftist professors. But, until now, I haven’t written about one of the subjects upon which we frequently disagree. That is the subject of whether deterrence theory “works.” Conservatives and leftists (I have a hard time calling them liberals because of their fascistic tendencies) have a fundamentally different view of human nature. Leftists see humans as innately good. That is why they think rehabilitation works. It is also why they think the United Nations is a good idea. If people are innately good then, surely, they can talk out their problems without resorting to war. But conservatives have a more tragic view of human nature. We believe that people with innately destructive tendencies must be held in check. MORE>

Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Figure'
by Harris R. Sherline

Let's face it, we're broke. Many of our cities, counties, states and the Federal government have more debts than assets and are spending more money than they take in. And, politicians and bureaucrats are often very good at hiding what they're doing. Even with audited numbers, the information in government financial reporting is generally presented in a way that is so confusing that both average readers and many professionals don't understand them. Mark Twain's famous quotation, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure," has never had greater meaning than when it is applied to today's politicians and government accounting. For example, the balance sheets of the City and County of Santa Barbara, the City of San Diego, the State of California and the Federal government do not include what are called "unfunded" obligations as part of their liabilities. MORE>

Iran Must Finally Pay a Price
by Fouad Ajami

We tell the Iranians that the military option is "on the table." But three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran's rulers. We have played by their rules, and always came up second best. Next door, in Iraq, Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time. They could fly under the radar, secure in the belief that the U.S., so deeply engaged there and in Afghanistan, would be reluctant to embark on another military engagement in the lands of Islam. This is all part of a larger pattern. As Tehran has wreaked havoc on regional order and peace over the last three decades, the world has indulged it. To be sure, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal war in 1980 against his nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That cruel conflict, which sought to quarantine the revolution, ended in a terrible stalemate; and it never posed an existential threat to the clerical state that Khomeini had built. MORE>

Disenfranchised Over There
Let's defend the voting rights of those who defend us
by Hans A. von Spakovsky & Roman Buhler

Over the past 40 years, starting with the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress has sought to guarantee the right of every American citizen to vote. But there is still a large and significant group of Americans who are needlessly disenfranchised: the millions of men and women who serve abroad in our armed forces. A survey by the Election Assistance Commission shows that of almost 1 million ballots requested in the last election by overseas and military voters, only about one third were successfully cast and counted. The most common reasons for this failure were that the requested ballots sent to voters were returned as "undeliverable" and that marked ballots were received too late to be counted. Military personnel based outside the United States are still dependent on the mail to receive and cast their ballots. When an election official sends a ballot overseas, it can take three weeks (or more) to reach a soldier in Iraq or a sailor on a ship halfway around the world. MORE>

No more silence; A day of education wasted
by Owen B. Robinson

This past Friday students at high schools around the country engaged in a Day of Silence. This has become an annual event. The Day of Silence began in 1997 as a way to highlight the harassment that gay and lesbian students have endured over the years at the hands of their classmates. The concept is pretty simple. Students spend the day completely silent. They refuse to speak. Many students will adorn their mouths with makeup or tape to indicate that they are participating. While I understand that gay and lesbian students have been harassed over the years, the Day of Silence is completely inappropriate in our schools. Furthermore, the administration and staff should be admonished for condoning it. In the pure abstract, the Day of Silence is a relatively benign event. The problem is that it is not an abstract event. It is very real and it has very real consequences. MORE>

Inside farm bill lobbyists' heads
by Joseph C. Geck

As the latest farm bill winds its way through the legislative process, it is clear there are still ridiculous handouts to rich landowners and further increases in subsidies for corn-based ethanol. One has to wonder what could be going through the heads of the lobbyists working to pass this bill. I imagine the thinking goes something like this: "There they go again. Complaining about pork in the farm bill. They are whining about rich landowners collecting government money to not plant rice at a time when there are rice shortages and the price is rising. They ask, 'Isn't it time to phase out paying non-farmers not to plant crops they have no intention of planting anyway?' "They are whining about subsidizing more corn-based ethanol plants, when it is clear that corn-based ethanol is not really saving much, if any, oil and is only driving the price of food through the roof. MORE>

“The Case for Terrestrial
(a.k.a. Nuclear) Energy”
by William Tucker

There have been a host of debates this year between the Democratic and Republican candidates for president. Many of these candidates believe that among our top priorities is to address global warming by reducing carbon emissions. All or most seem to agree that decreasing America’s energy dependence is another. Yet few if any of the candidates have mentioned that nuclear energy—or, as I prefer, terrestrial energy—could serve both these ends. Right now there are 103 operating nuclear reactors in America, but most are owned by utilities (which also own coal plants). The few spin-offs that concentrate mainly on nuclear—Entergy, of Jackson, Mississippi, and Exelon, of Chicago—are relatively small players. As for a nuclear infrastructure, it hardly exists. There is only one steel company in the world today that can cast the reactor vessels (the 42-foot, egg-shaped containers at the core of a reactor): Japan Steel Works. As countries around the world begin to build new reactors, the company is now back-ordered for four years. Unless some enterprising American steel company takes an interest, any new reactor built in America will be cast in Japan. MORE>

Limited Government:
Are the Good Times Really Over?
by Charles Kessler

Of all of the presidential contenders’ slogans this year, Barack Obama’s have been the most interesting. His campaign creed is: “Yes, we can.” To which any reasonable person would ask: “Can what?” The answer, of course, is: “Hope.” But again, a reasonable person might ask: “Hope for what?” To which the answer confidently comes back from the Obama campaign: “For change.” Indeed Obama’s signs say: “Change We Can Believe In,” as opposed, one supposes, to the unbelievable changes. But the elementary problem with this—which any student of logic might raise—is that change can be for the better or for the worse. Democrats in general, I would submit, confuse change with improvement. They fail to weigh the costs and benefits of change, to consider its unintended consequences, or to worry about what we need to conserve and how we might go about doing that faithfully. They ask Americans to embrace change for its own sake, in the faith that history is governed by a law of progress, which guarantees that change is almost always an improvement. MORE>