Center For A Just Society: Word on the street

China's Response to Bush: Don't Interfere in Our Affairs

By the Associated Press, Fox News

President Bush is eagerly awaiting the start of the Summer Olympics, making history as the first president to attend this world athletic competition on foreign soil.

But his arrival in Beijing Thursday night on the eve of the opening of the games came amid an atmosphere of tension with China's leaders over his high-profile speech in Thailand exhorting the growing world power to grant more freedom to its people.

Bush, first lady Laura Bush and their daughter Barbara came off Air Force One together, where they got a red-carpet greeting from Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and others, and then sped away in a motorcade.

Bush, an avid sports fan, has said he wants to enjoy the Summer Olympics competition, but also will talk to President Hu Jintao about human rights and a host of other bilateral issues.

Before his plane landed here, China's Foreign Ministry released a terse statement saying that no one should interfere with China's internal affairs.

Bush plans to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics on Friday night and go to a series of sporting events through Monday, including U.S. basketball and baseball games against China. Although he exhorted Beijing to improve human rights in a major speech in Thailand before flying here, Bush has said he is intent on making his Olympics visit about sports, not politics...

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Every day, the Center for a Just Society compiles interesting and timely articles from around the web and makes them available to our readers as the "Word on the Street." These articles are intended to encourage discussion and reflection about faith, law, and policy. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society, or any of its employees.

U.S. Troops May Leave by 2011, Iraqi Officials Say

By CNN News

Iraq and the United States are close to reaching a deal under which U.S. combat troops would leave by December 2010 and the rest would leave by the end of 2011, two Iraqi officials said Thursday.

One of the officials, Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Haj Mahmoud, said the two governments probably will reach a final deal within days.

He and Haider Al-Ababdi, a Shiite parliament member from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa Party, said that under the deal, U.S. troops would be restricted to their bases by June 30 instead of patrolling Iraq's streets.

Mahmoud, the head of Iraq's delegation negotiating a deal on how U.S. troops will operate there, also said the Iraqi government would be able to request that some troops stay longer.

Two senior U.S. officials said negotiators have made progress and are close to a deal. But they also said that some issues are unresolved and that troop withdrawals would be tied to conditions on the ground.

The U.S. military presence is spelled out by a U.N. mandate, which is to expire by the end of this year. Iraq and the United States want to replace that mandate with a status-of-forces agreement governing how U.S. troops will operate in Iraq.

The U.S. officials said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke with al-Maliki on Wednesday to try to resolve the issue of legal immunity for U.S. contractors working in Iraq...

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Obama�s View on Abortion May Divide Catholics

By John M. Broder, MSNBC News

Sixteen years ago, the Democratic Party refused to allow Robert P. Casey Sr., then the governor of Pennsylvania, to speak at its national convention because his anti-abortion views, stemming from his Roman Catholic faith, clashed with the party’s platform and powerful constituencies. Many Catholics, once a reliable Democratic voting bloc, never forgot what they considered a slight.

This year, the party is considering giving a speaking slot at the convention to Mr. Casey’s son, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who like his late father is a Roman Catholic who opposes abortion rights.

The likely shift reflects concern among Democrats that they need to do more to regain the allegiance of Roman Catholic voters, who broke decisively for President Bush in 2004 and could be crucial to the outcome in a number of battleground states this year. Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, lost the Catholic vote badly to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, like Mr. Obama, is a supporter of abortion rights, during the primaries in states like New Hampshire, Missouri and Ohio. In Pennsylvania, Catholic voters preferred Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama by a 40-point margin.

The Obama campaign is being close-mouthed about its convention plans and would not confirm whether Mr. Casey would be given a prime-time speaking slot. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that the call was Mr. Obama’s, but that a prominent speaking role for Mr. Casey would assist in the candidate’s efforts to woo Roman Catholic voters.

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No Tax Increase Needed

By Richard W. Rahn, Washington Times

Over the past 40 years, do you think the federal government has become relatively larger or smaller in relation to the size of the economy?

Please take a look at the table below and perhaps, surprisingly, you will see that the federal government, in terms of taxes and spending as a share of total gross domestic product (GDP), has remained almost constant for decades, even though it has grown steadily in absolute terms. (State and local governments, however, have been growing as a share of GDP, and burdensome regulations have been growing at all levels of government.)

Even though income tax rates by the end of the Reagan administration (1988) were less than half the rates of 1968, tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was actually a bit higher. Budget deficits have averaged about 3 percent of GDP for the last 40 years, and the government debt as a percentage of GDP (approximately 37 percent) is close to its historical average for the last half-century. As the numbers show, those who say disaster is upon us and we must increase taxes are just plain wrong!

There has been a big shift in spending by the federal government over the last few decades, from defense to "entitlements," specifically Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other welfare, medical and federal employee retirement programs. Many of those who insist that tax increases are needed argue that the entitlement programs will grow more rapidly than the economy and they must be funded. The problem with this argument is that tax increases will slow economic growth, and that no amount of tax increase can fund these programs if they are allowed to continue to grow faster than the economy. Fortunately, there are solutions that do not require any tax increase at all or substantial benefit cuts...

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Where is the Party of Small Government?

By G. Tracy Mehan III, Washington Times

I recently spoke with a Republican Hill staffer whom I had not seen since the Democrats took control of Congress. After joking with him about the shift from the strategic offensive to playing defense, I asked if Republican members were ready to refurbish their brand by opposing earmarks, controlling spending and even confronting the largest Death Star of all, federal entitlements - Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

I was treated to a discussion of the waste in our health system and government programs which support it. I was inundated with a drizzle of detail of how this or that program lost money due to mismanagement or venality.

My friend did not mention earmarks, spending or entitlements. Given his job, I have to believe he was avoiding a sensitive subject, having nothing to offer by way of encouragement.

David M. Walker, until recently Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is a modern-day Cassandra who sees clearly the fiscal crisis in our not-so-distant future. Mr. Walker argues that the country is facing "an explosion of debt" due to the baby boomers' retirement, spiraling health care costs, plummeting savings rates and increased reliance on foreign lenders, which present "unprecedented fiscal risks." He describes GAO's long-range simulations or projections as "chilling." In 1966, mandatory programs, mostly entitlements, amounted to 26 percent of total federal spending. In 2006, it was 53 percent. Add in net interest on the debt, and the numbers are 33 and 62 percent, respectively.

Discretionary spending, what most citizens would term "government" - defense, national parks, the weather service - has fallen from 67 to 38 percent of federal spending...

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Can America's Auto Makers Survive?

By Paul Ingrassia, Wall Street Journal

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used the term "defining deviancy down" to describe the acceptance of behavior that was once deemed intolerable. Now Detroit's car companies are defining disaster down.

In 1991, General Motors posted a then-amazing, full-year loss of $4.45 billion, and 10 months later CEO Robert Stempel was out. Last week, GM reported a $15.5 billion loss for just one quarter, and GM's board this week reaffirmed its support for CEO Rick Wagoner. GM's loss easily eclipsed the quarterly loss of $8.7 billion announced by Ford just a week earlier. As for Chrysler, pick a number. The company is owned by private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, and thus its results aren't public.

Whether all, or even any, of the three companies can survive has become a legitimate question. In truth, no one knows for sure. But other questions can be addressed with more certainty:

- Should Detroit have seen this disaster coming? Yes. Gasoline prices have been climbing steadily for more than three years now. The Bush-Bernanke debasement of the dollar didn't do Detroit any favors, because the dollar's collapse has contributed mightily to the soaring price of crude oil.

But the Detroit Three stuck with a business model based on leasing SUVs for way too long. The two things wrong with that model were, well, leasing and SUVs...

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Immigration Question

By Helle Dale, Washington Times

It never occurred to us that moving to Fairfax County from the District would be a bit like moving to a foreign country. During the week we have been in our new home, we have had maintenance crews from Mexico, and our garden has been done by an elegant Chilean garden service owner. The cable installation was done by a Venezuelan; our cleaning lady is from Bolivia; and the baby-sitter from Peru. To many Americans, this would not seem a surprising state of affairs as the country has gotten used to the luxury of plentiful manual labor from south of the border.

However, a conversation with the cable guy (no, not Larry) seemed to confirm the results of recent news reports - that the American dream is not what it used to be for people seeking a future in the United States. Having been here for 26 years and closing on 50 years of age, the cable guy said he was determined to return to Venezuela if he did not find a wife within the next few years.

Like other populations of immigrants - who have come to the United States in search of a dream and a better future, only to see a sizable minority return home after failing to achieve either - Hispanic immigrants are not automatically and inexorably attracted to the United States. They make rational choices, calculating pros and cons of making this difficult personal, and in some cases, dangerous journey.

A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that this is particularly true of the illegal population in the United States. Census data for May show that migration by less-educated Hispanics dropped off by 11 percent between last August and May. This would be the equivalent of a dropoff from 12.5 million to 11.2 million in the estimated illegal population. (Mind you, all these estimates are approximations, even though treated like facts carved in rock during the immigration debate.)

The authors of the report write, "The estimated decline of the illegal population is at least seven times larger than the number of illegal aliens removed by the government in the last 10 months, so most of the decline is due to illegal immigrants leaving their country on their own..."

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FBI: Hospital Used Homeless as 'Human Pawns'

By the Associated Press, MSNBC News

A hospital CEO was arrested Wednesday in what authorities said was a scheme to recruit homeless people as phony patients and bill government programs for millions of dollars in unnecessary health services.

Federal agents raided three medical centers and the city of Los Angeles sued the hospitals, saying they used homeless people as "human pawns."

More charges are expected, a federal prosecutor said.

Hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties submitted phony Medicare and Medi-Cal bills for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homeless patients — including drug addicts and the mentally ill — recruited from downtown's Skid Row, state and federal authorities allege.

While treating minor problems that did not require hospitalization, such as dehydration, exhaustion or yeast infections, the hospitals allegedly kept homeless patients in beds for as long as three days and charged the government for the stays.

Over four years, a mentally ill woman identified as "Recruit X" was admitted to all three hospitals for conditions she said she never had, such as shortness of breath and chest pains.

After her stays, she would be returned to Skid Row and use money she received for participating in the scheme to buy crack cocaine, authorities alleged. She was never treated for drug addiction...

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Bush Chides China over Human Rights

By CNN News

U.S. President George W. Bush expressed "deep concerns" over religious freedom and human rights in China on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in a wide-ranging Asian policy speech delivered Thursday in Bangkok, Thailand.

"America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates, and religious activists," Bush said.

"We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential," he said. "And we press for openness and justice not to impose our beliefs but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs."

Despite the harsh critique, Bush praised what has become a "constructive relationship" between the United States and China in trade and diplomacy. He also said that the association "has placed America in a better position to be honest and direct on other issues."

Bush spoke at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in Bangkok.

The trip to Asia is Bush's last as president, and he took the opportunity to shine a light on the well-publicized crackdowns on political dissenters in the "people's republic" -- a communist country that has emerged as a symbol of soaring capitalistic growth...

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Feeling the Needle of the Supreme Court Decision on Lethal Injections

By Lisa Wiehl, Fox News

In April, the Supreme Court ruled that executing inmates on death row by lethal injection does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Ten people have since been executed by lethal injection — a method involving a three-drug cocktail. Though the nation's 36 death penalty states keep their protocols secret, the lethal injection method is generally similar throughout those states. The first drug, sodium thiopental, is used as an anesthetic which puts the inmate to sleep. The second drug is pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the entire muscle system. Using this drug allows the third drug, potassium chloride, to work in a considerably shorter time. This last drug is what ultimately stops the person's heart.

Problems and botched attempts at using the lethal injection method are well documented and part of why the method was challenged in the courts. They include missing veins or incorrect doses of the chemicals which can result in an inmate waking up to extreme pain in the middle of the process.

Some problems stem from the fact that medical ethics preclude doctors from participating in the execution process. While doctors pronounce inmates dead, technicians and orderlies are the ones that place inmates on gurneys, strap them down, and administer the deadly drugs. On many occasions, these prison employees have taken up to 30 minutes to locate veins or they miss them completely. This is precisely what happened in the state of Florida.

Ángel Díaz was convicted for killing the manager of a Florida strip club in 1979. At his execution in December of 2006, the technician that was injecting Díaz thrust the needle clear through his vein and into the soft tissue of his muscle. He suffered severe chemical burns on his arm, and throughout his execution witnesses said they saw his face grimacing, and heard him ask at one point, "What's going on?" Díaz was pronounced dead 34 minutes after the procedure began, more than double the time an execution normally takes.

After the botched injection, Florida suspended all executions according to an order given by then Governor Jeb Bush. This turned out to be a fortuitous for Mark Dean Schwab, a death row inmate since 1992. In 1991, Schwab was released after only serving three years of an eight-year sentence for aggravated rape. A mere month after his early release, Schwab kidnapped, raped, and murdered Junny Rios-Martinez, age 11. Schwab's crime was so heinous that it led to the Junny Rios-Martinez Act of 1992 which prohibits sexual batterers from receiving early release from prison in Florida. Since 2006, Schwab's fate hung in the state court, and later even the Supreme Court...

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The Congressional Oil Embargo

By Ernest Istook, Human Events

Congress and America united when we suffered from an Arab Oil Embargo in 1973. Now we’re suffering from a Congressional Oil Embargo. This time, America is starting to unite on energy issues but Congress is not doing anything to solve the most urgent problem facing the country.

The Arab Oil Embargo only lasted six months. The Congressional Oil Embargo has lasted for decades and endures to this day.

Congress is now taking its summer six-week break, after months of doing nothing about energy prices (unless you count as action posturing and pretending). And recall that back in 1973, Congress passed legislation within six weeks of the Arab embargo.

A bipartisan group of ten senators, headed by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), claims they have a compromise proposal. But is it for real? One key Republican Senator privately said the group’s efforts were “fake negotiating.”

Their proposal includes a limited expansion of drilling off the shores of four states (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia), conspicuously excluding Florida, all the West Coast and Alaska, but at the price of spending untold billions to subsidize alternative fuels, at least $30-billion in new energy taxes, and what sounds suspiciously like banning internal combustion engines from cars.

Needless to say, their plan deserves scrutiny in addition to the initial praise heaped upon them by those who say we must “do something” rather than “do the right thing”.

Curiously dovetailing with what Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) suddenly say they desire, the Gang of 10’s plan is labeled a “comprehensive package.” As we learned in studying last year’s illegal immigration legislation, “comprehensive” is Washington code-speak for saying that a little bit of reform can be accepted if it’s dominated by enough liberal goodies. One sprig of broccoli becomes acceptable as long as it’s packaged with a ton of junk food...

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Tax Time for America

By the Washington Times Editorial Staff

With all the talk of the wars, gas prices, job losses and home foreclosures, and tax breaks, neither candidate is really talking about how their tax proposals are going to pay to fix these problems. John McCain asserts that Barack Obama is going to raise taxes on energy, businesses, investors and the rich. High income taxes are bad for everyone, particularly working-class consumers whose combined wealth and spending drives our economy. Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama say they are not going to raise "middle-class" taxes or in this case allow to expire the tax cuts already in place under President Bush. That's great news for the 220 million average joes in America who could be described as middle class, but it doesn't address how tax policies will affect the American way of life.

Mr. Obama will raise taxes for sure, in various ways, on the five percent of Americans making more than $250,000 annually. He will increase the capital-gains tax rate from the current 15 percent to about 25 percent. He will increase the top rate from the 35 percent now up to Clinton-era rates of 39 percent, and would impose an additional tax on such wage earners for Social Security when their wages exceed $250,000. He also wants to tax hedge-fund managers' earnings as income, even though they are derived from dividends and stock-price gains rather than a set salary. Everyone else will get variable breaks: Taxpayers who do not itemize and make less than $150,000 will get a $500 credit. Parents, including those with children in college, will get $4,000 cut from their tax bill. And seniors making less than $50,000 will pay no taxes at all.

Mr. McCain's plan is actually much more simple and more pro-business and investment. Everything would stay the same as it is right now under the Bush tax cuts - no marriage-tax penalty, keep the $1,000-child-tax credit, and the other tax breaks in place - making them permanent, but increase the dependent exemption from $3,500 to $7,000. And he would cut corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent. But there is a slight uncertainty to Mr. McCain's approach on Social Security and how he would alter taxes or the entitlement itself to keep the fund solvent. He supported President Bush's proposal to create private savings accounts within the system, but recently said his approach would be to have all options on the table, including payroll-tax increases. That is a serious conundrum for Mr. McCain to work through, considering his pledges not to raise taxes...

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Feel the Eyes Upon You

By Olivia Judson, New York Times

Imagine a photograph of the London skyline — the houses of Parliament, the clock tower of Big Ben. Now add, floating in the sky above, a large pair of eyes looking at you.

This image used to grace the inside walls of a bus I used to ride. It also had a caption: “Secure beneath the watchful eyes.”

Brrrr.

It wasn’t an advertisement for a creepy Orwellian film, but an effort to draw attention to the presence of closed-circuit television cameras.

But looking back, it seems to me that the designer of the poster may have been onto something. Several recent experiments have shown that people respond to pictures of eyes by altering their behavior in subtle ways, even when they haven’t consciously noticed the eyes are there.

For example, take a game beloved of economists, the dictator game. In its simplest form, you have two players. Player A (the dictator) is issued a sum of money; he or she gets to decide whether to share the money with player B, and if so, how much to give. The dictator gets to keep whatever’s left ... and that’s it. Game over. (What fun economists have!)

In anonymous versions of the game — played over the computer, so dictators and recipients can’t identify each other — most dictators don’t share. In one series of experiments, though the players were anonymous, the background computer screen was modified so that it sometimes included two eyespots. The results showed that dictators were much more likely to give money when the eyes were present. In a different set of experiments (using a more complicated economic game), the background screen sometimes included a picture of a robot with human-like eyes; here, too, players were more generous when the eyes were there...

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FBI Said to Have Stalked Ivins' Family

By the Associated Press, MSNBC News

Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.

The last thing the FBI needed was another embarrassment. Overreaching damaged the FBI’s reputation in the high-profile investigations: the Centennial Olympic Park bombing probe that falsely accused Richard Jewell; the theft of nuclear secrets and botched prosecution of scientist Wen Ho Lee; and, in this same anthrax probe, the smearing of an innocent man — Ivins’ colleague Steven Hatfill.

In the current case, Ivins complained privately that FBI agents had offered his son, Andy, $2.5 million, plus “the sports car of his choice” late last year if he would turn over evidence implicating his father in the anthrax attacks, according to a former U.S. scientist who described himself as a friend of Ivins.

Ivins also said the FBI confronted Ivins’ daughter, Amanda, with photographs of victims of the anthrax attacks and told her, “This is what your father did,” according to the scientist, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because their conversation was confidential...

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Doctors Within Borders

By Susanna Schrobsdorff, Newsweek

Sheila Fowler is 43. She has short brown hair, a soft, girlish voice and three grandchildren. What she does not have is teeth, or a way to pay for dentures. But Fowler is stoic; she jokes that she's got tough gums, adding that she can even eat pretzels if she sucks on them for a bit.

Fowler has made the hour-long journey from her home in Cleveland, Va., to the small town of Wise to take advantage of a huge annual medical and dental expedition set up by Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit organization that provides basic medical and dental care to people in the world's most inaccessible regions. This year, more than 1,800 volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and assistants descended on the small town near the Kentucky border, setting up enormous field-hospital-style tents in which they saw roughly 2,500 patients over the course of two and a half days in late July. The Wise operation is coordinated locally by a team of nurses with the Health Wagon, a tiny health care outreach program.

By the end of the weekend, the medical team, had extracted 3,857 painfully decayed teeth, administered 156 mammograms, screened hundreds of people for diabetes and heart disease, and given out 1,003 pairs of eyeglasses. About 30 people, chosen by lottery, were fitted for free dentures. Hundreds of people were turned away by volunteers who headed off cars at the main intersection when the clinic reached capacity.

RAM events such as the one in Wise—the Knoxville, Tenn.-based group runs about 15 similar clinics around the world every year, from Guyana to East Africa and rural parts of Appalachia—underscore the health-care dilemma of the poorest Americans. Fowler's case is a prime example: She has almost no income after an auto accident left her unable to do her restaurant job. She's covered by the state Medicaid program, but Medicaid doesn't cover any preventive or routine dental care for adults. It will pay for emergency extractions, but, for Fowler, as for
many others in areas where dentists are scarce, finding one that will take Medicaid payments isn't easy. That's why she came to Wise in 2003 to have her teeth pulled for free...

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Cancer's Unexpected Blessings

By Tony Snow, Christianity Today

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages—in my case, cancer.

Those of us with potentially fatal diseases—and there are millions in America today—find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence What It All Means, Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere...

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Religious Liberty

By the Washington Times Editorial Staff

California did more than just legalize same-sex marriages in June. Its decision has the potential to threaten one of America's greatest freedoms - religious liberty - by ruling that sexual orientation is a matter of discrimination.

The keyword is "discrimination," which equates sexual orientation to race, gender, age, etc. This categorization enables homosexuals, transgenders and others to cite their sexual tendencies as grounds for discrimination in lawsuits against employers, insurance companies and those administering such civil duties as granting marriage licenses.

Legal professionals bridging the political spectrum agree that if there is not careful lawmaking, vigilant voters and open dialogue, the ruling could lead to churches and other houses of worship, as well as religious nonprofits, losing tax breaks, rights to license marriages and preach on the issue of homosexuality.

Part of the problem is that most religious-based institutions receive some form of government funding (partly due to President Bush's faith-based initiative, which has been endorsed by John McCain and Barack Obama, who touts his own initiative on the campaign trail). The initiative seeks to strengthen faith-based and community organizations and expand their capacity to provide federally funded social services. The idea, of course, is that these community-oriented groups are better suited to deliver services to local families and individuals.

The question that arises now is how is the government going to rectify the fact that many Judeo-Christian organizations "discriminate" against same-sex individuals and couples by reinforcing, as the Bible does, that homosexuality is an "abomination," by refusing to rent their facilities to homosexuals and by denying the sacrament of holy matrimony to same-sex couples...

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Cops and the Mentally Ill

By Eugene O'Donnell, Newsweek

Barely concealing his anger, Chaplain Thomas Nangle told an overflow funeral mass for Chicago policeman Richard Francis that the 60-year-old officer did not give his life in the line of duty—rather, it was "taken" from him.

Days before, on July 2, Francis, a 27-year veteran of the force, responded to a call steps from the police station where he was assigned. An emotionally disturbed person—EDP in police parlance—had fought with another passenger on a city bus. Before Francis could calm the woman, she grabbed his gun and shot him in the head. All too predictably, family members of the woman, Robin Johnson, told reporters that they had tried to get the woman help as her life slipped downhill.

From coast to coast, mentally ill people, without reliable access to the costly on-demand care they need, are left to fend for themselves. In the aftermath of the movement in the 1970s to close large mental asylums, many of today's mentally ill are left to their own devices; they are often homeless and without full-time advocates. With government unable or unwilling to properly serve this population, the criminal-justice system is left to pick up the slack.

Contrary to what many assume, the mentally ill are most often the victimized, not the victimizers. A 2005 study by researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University suggested that persons with serious mental illnesses are 11 times more likely than the general population to be victims of violent crime, with perhaps as many as 1 million crimes committed against those with serious mental-health issues each year...

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Forcing Pro-life Doctors Out of Baby Business?

By Daniel Patrick Moloney and Peter Reed, Fox News

Should pro-life doctors and pharmacists be free to practice their profession according to the dictates of their consciences? Should a woman have the freedom to choose an obstetrician or gynecologist she trusts to provide care consistent with her beliefs?

Current federal law says yes. But many women may have that choice greatly restricted, and their doctors driven out of business, if a medical association is able to require that all doctors either perform abortions or make referrals for abortions.

In November 2007, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) announced that the ethical standards of the profession had changed. Its ethics committee stated that an ob/gyn who is unwilling to perform an abortion has an ethical duty to refer the patient to someone who will perform it. If the physician is unable to refer the patient in a timely manner, he would be required to perform the abortion himself.

This decision threatens the livelihood of pro-life doctors. Every ob/gyn who works in a hospital or clinic needs not only a license, but also certification that his skills are up to date and that he is aware of recent developments in the field. To be certified, he must follow the ethical standards of the profession, so under the new ethics policy a pro-life doctor risks losing his certification if his pro-life convictions don't allow him to perform or cooperate in an abortion. And if he loses his certification, a hospital or clinic won't let him deliver babies there.

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists has labeled the decision “a raw power play to cripple, and ultimately eliminate from practice, those doctors who hold a conscience conviction on the sanctity of human life.” Besides forcing current ob/gyns out of the profession, the policy would make any bright young pro-life student think twice about going to medical school for obstetrics or gynecology...

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Beijing Under Wraps

By Jen Lin-Liu, New York Times

While eating dinner at a packed Spanish restaurant one recent evening, I found myself sitting next to two scorekeepers for the International Olympics Committee who had just arrived here. They remarked that they found Beijing, with all its recent construction projects, to be a very modern place. They were able to surf the Internet freely from their hotel rooms. Apart from the crazy drivers, the city didn’t seem that different from the ones in their countries, New Zealand and Canada.

That’s the Beijing many visitors coming for the Olympics will see. But unrestricted Internet use is a rarity, even for foreign reporters covering the Games, who this week discovered that the Chinese government is limiting their access to the Internet. Even as China projects a new air of openness and tolerance as it rolls out the welcome mat for Olympics visitors, the government is cracking down on citizens.

Last week, Chinese officials ordered copies of The Beijing News removed from newsstands and censored the newspaper’s Web site after it published a photograph of victims wounded during the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. The authorities have barred distribution of the English version of Time Out Beijing, a magazine for which I write, for the past two months. A good friend who is an American professor had valuable political texts in Chinese seized when he arrived at Beijing’s airport. And a shipment of my recently published food memoir, which I intended to distribute to friends, was detained and sent back to the United States by Chinese customs officials, who explained that my books were not “approved materials.”

Officials have proclaimed that protesters will be able to demonstrate at locations around the city. In reality, they have rounded up numerous activists and put them under house arrest. I know of one case in which the government has locked up a dissident in a mental asylum.

Undesirables like beggars and migrant workers have also been pushed out of the Olympic spotlight, and many of them have been forced out of the city. New visa regulations have made it hard for tourists to enter the country and for long-time foreign residents like me to stay. Visa agencies estimate that thousands of foreigners have left the capital because of the new measures. The revised rules prompted my fiancé and me to move up our wedding day by several months, so I can remain in China on a spousal visa...

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Parenting a Lead Factor in Income Inequality

By Rob Moll, Christianity Today

It's no secret that the gap between the rich and the middle class has grown over the last decade. The rich are getting very, very rich while the poor and middle class are--while not worse off--certainly no better. (Depending on your time frame, however, the poor actually are doing worse.)

This graph shows the average annual income of the top one percent earners in 2005 was more than $1 million, while the middle 60 percent is just above $50,000 per year. That compares with the $500,000 the top one percent earned just ten years before, versus an average income of just below $50,000 for the middle 60 percent. In other words, while the top one percent doubled their income, the middle 60 percent only modestly improved.

More striking is that the average income of the bottom 20 percent seems not to have moved in the last 25 years. Factor in inflation, and the bottom 20 percent is doing much worse. (Women too, it seems, haven't done well. But instead of making less, they're just staying home. And interestingly, feminists are making arguments for doing so.)

There's plenty of debate over why the income of the top earners has so vastly outpaced that of everyone else. It's tempting to argue that the top one percent is making its money off the backs of those less well off. And America, being the nation of individualists it is, has been generally content to allow the rich to get much, much richer. Plus, globalization has brought millions of new laborers into competition with those already in developed economies.

But another argument seems compelling. New York Times writer Tyler Cowen summarizes it this way:

The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more.

Technological change has put a premium on workers who understand, can manage, and can profit from such advances. According to this argument, education--not abuse by the rich--makes the difference between advancing in the economy or falling behind.

But the difference between the educated and the un-educated is not a matter of wealth but of upbringing. After all, the poor can value education as much as the rich, and often do. And, education is not simply a matter of IQ, according to James Heckman, a professor at the University of Chicago and Nobel Laureate. Heckman says in his paper "Schools, Skills and Synapses" (available for download here) that "the workplace is increasingly oriented towards a greater valuation of the skills required for social interaction and for sociability." These skills are taught in the home, Heckman says...

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What Happened To Justice In America?

By Dana Rohrabacher, Human Events

What happened to justice in America? It certainly wasn’t served on July 28 when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the unjust convictions of Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. As it stands today, these two brave border protectors must now serve out their full 10-plus-year sentences for shooting and wounding a Mexican drug smuggler they encountered while he was carrying a million-dollar payload of narcotics along the Southern border in Texas. What started off as simple procedural mistakes by the agents has turned into an unimaginable travesty of justice unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years in Washington, D.C.

It’s difficult to reconcile why U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton would choose to seek out drug smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, in Mexico to offer him immunity, unconditional border-crossing cards and free medical care in exchange for his testimony against the border agents. Ramos and Compean did not wake up the morning of Feb.17, 2005, with the intention of committing a crime, unlike the illegal alien drug-smuggling “victim.” They put on their uniforms, strapped their weapons around their waists and pinned on their badges, as they had for five and 10 years respectively, with the intention of patrolling our borders to protect America.

It’s no secret our Southern border is a virtual war zone where our border patrol agents and local law enforcement officers are often outgunned and outmanned by the violent drug cartels. So when Agents Ramos and Compean testified they thought Davila pointed a weapon at them, wouldn’t that seem reasonable to assume given the dangerous conditions they face everyday along the border? Not according to U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, who decided to give the benefit of the doubt to a drug smuggler transporting a million dollars worth of drugs who said he was unarmed rather than siding with our law enforcement officers.

Sutton’s decision to throw the book at the agents by charging them with a federal civil rights violation under the color of the law and under the 924(c) statute (unlawful discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence, which carries a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence) is not only despicable, but a dangerous precedent to set for every law enforcement officer in America. There has never been another instance where this statue, originally intended as a sentence-enhancement for drug traffickers and criminals, has been used against law enforcement officers acting within their scope of official duties. Every policeman has now been put on notice: Discharge your weapon in a split-second, deadly force situation and you, too, could face 10 years in prison if an overzealous prosecutor decides your decision was the wrong one...

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Barack Obama's $439 Billion Secret

By Joseph Farah, Human Events

Last week, I blew the whistle on Barack Obama's secret $439 billion plan for a mysterious initiative called the "civilian national security force."

We don't know any more about this plan than we did when Obama announced it July 2 in a speech, with the relevant part covered by almost no media, with the exception of the Chicago Tribune and Congressional Quarterly.

Thanks, however, to talk radio and legions of bloggers, Obama's chilling call to create a "civilian national security force," with a price tag equaling the Defense Department's budget, is beginning to get more attention.

It was in the context of announcing a plan to expand rapidly and dramatically the size of the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps that Obama dropped this bombshell: "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

A few have suggested I am making too much of a benign proposal by Obama -- one that merely calls for a greatly increased commitment to the Foreign Service.

If so, why is it that the Obama campaign has gone mum on this proposal? Why is it that operatives keep promising us clarification that never is forthcoming? And furthermore, is an expansion of the Foreign Service to the size of the $439 billion Defense Department (in 2007 dollars) really such an innocent idea...?

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Remembering Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

By Lev Grossman, Time

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose novels chronicled the daily horrors of life in Soviet gulags, has died from heart failure on August 3 in Moscow at age 89, the Associated Press reported.

It was always Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's ambition to be a writer. He read War and Peace in its entirety when he was only 10. But as a young man he couldn't get his work published, and he wound up studying mathematics in college. Then he was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. If it weren't for Stalin, his ambition might have gone unfulfilled.

Solzhenitsyn was born in a resort town in the Caucasus mountains in 1918, the same year the last czar of Russia was murdered by the Bolsheviks. He never knew his father, an artillery officer who died in a hunting accident while his mother was pregnant. His mother was a typist. A zealous Communist, Solzhenitsyn served with distinction in World War II, but in 1945, in the teeth of the Red Army's march on Berlin, he was arrested for a personal letter that contained passages critical of Stalin and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. His life as a free man was over, but his life as a writer and a thinker had just begun.

Solzhenitsyn was eventually transferred from the camp to a prison with research facilities, and then in 1950 — when he would no longer cooperate with the government's research efforts — to a harsher camp in Kazakhstan. There he began to write on stray scraps of paper. Once he memorized what had written, he would destroy the scraps.

By the time he was released in 1953, Solzhenitsyn's belief in Communism was gone, but he had found a fervent Russian Orthodox faith and rediscovered his purpose as an author. At first he wrote for himself, but by 1961, when he was 42, the strain of remaining silent had grown unbearable, and the cultural climate had warmed enough that he was able to publish his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an account of an innocent man's experiences in a political prison camp, enduring brutal conditions without self-pity and taking solace from tiny pleasures, like a cigarette, or extra soup. It's a stunning work of close observation and simple description, and a devastating study of the psychology of oppression. It was also the first published account of life in a Soviet labor camp. Its appearance was a seismic event in Russian culture...

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What Is a 'Windfall' Profit?

By the Wall Street Journal Editorial Staff

The "windfall profits" tax is back, with Barack Obama stumping again to apply it to a handful of big oil companies. Which raises a few questions: What is a "windfall" profit anyway? How does it differ from your everyday, run of the mill profit? Is it some absolute number, a matter of return on equity or sales -- or does it merely depend on who earns it?

Enquiring entrepreneurs want to know. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's "emergency" plan, announced on Friday, doesn't offer any clarity. To pay for "stimulus" checks of $1,000 for families and $500 for individuals, the Senator says government would take "a reasonable share" of oil company profits.

Mr. Obama didn't bother to define "reasonable," and neither did Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, when he recently declared that "The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy." Really? This extraordinary redefinition of free-market success could use some parsing.

Take Exxon Mobil, which on Thursday reported the highest quarterly profit ever and is the main target of any "windfall" tax surcharge. Yet if its profits are at record highs, its tax bills are already at record highs too. Between 2003 and 2007, Exxon paid $64.7 billion in U.S. taxes, exceeding its after-tax U.S. earnings by more than $19 billion. That sounds like a government windfall to us, but perhaps we're missing some Obama-Durbin business subtlety.

Maybe they have in mind profit margins as a percentage of sales. Yet by that standard Exxon's profits don't seem so large. Exxon's profit margin stood at 10% for 2007, which is hardly out of line with the oil and gas industry average of 8.3%, or the 8.9% for U.S. manufacturing (excluding the sputtering auto makers)...

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