Dreams Into Lightning 2

Five Days in a DEA Cell

Remember, they're doing this to protect us.

An engineering student stepped forward with his lawyer Tuesday to say he was left alone in a federal holding cell for five days with no food or water, apparently forgotten by the federal drug agents who detained him.

Daniel Chong, 24, a UC San Diego senior, said he was swept up in a Drug Enforcement Administration raid near campus and was taken to the Kearny Mesa facility. After questioning, he was told he would be released.

Then the DEA left him locked inside a five-by-10-foot windowless cell. ...

“Sen. McCain chose not to fight.”

Via J. C. Adams at PJ:

There is an interesting story about the 2008 election coming out of Wikileaks. Memos from Stratfor released by Wikileaks say that widespread voter fraud occurred in Ohio and that “black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly.” The McCain campaign knew about the fraud but feared taking action because of the “possibility of domestic violence” if they challenged the results in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The memos say campaign staff urged candidate John McCain to act in court:

“Staff felt they could get a federal injunction to stop the process.”

One of the Wikileaked memos says: “Sen. McCain chose not to fight.” The reason?

The memo states:

“McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around, coupled with the possibility of domestic violence.” ...

Here's the original piece at Business Insider:

John McCain's 2008 campaign staff allegedly had evidence that Democrats stuffed ballot boxes in Pennsylvania and Ohio on election night, but McCain chose not to pursue voter fraud, according to internal Stratfor emails published by WikiLeaks.

In an email sent on November 7, 2008, and titled " Insight - The Dems & Dirty Tricks ** Internal Use Only - Pls Do Not Forward **," Stratfor vice president of intelligence Fred Burton wrote:

1) The black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio as reported the night of the election and Sen. McCain chose not to fight. The matter is not dead inside the party. It now becomes a matter of sequence now as to how and when to "out". ...

Mistakes ...

... were made. And somehow got past all those layers and layers of fact-checkers.

"Remarkable Reversal"

Excellent piece by The Economist's 'Democracy In America' on the Paul Ryan budget:

Moreover, Mr Ryan's conservatism largely eschews the odious cultural politics of social conservatives and focuses instead on a pragmatic, fiscally conservative market-oriented meliorism, the appeal of which is by no means limited to the hard right. He's an attractive politician offering an attractive comprehensive alternative to the administration's approach. And that's why it is a matter of urgent political necessity for Mr Obama to try to smear Mr Ryan's budget as a recipe for brutal, devil-take-the-hindmost injustice.

Indeed, the Ryan/Obama dialectic seems to me to represent a remarkable reversal of the usual pattern of American politics: Democrats offer serious, substantive policy proposal; Republicans respond with unhinged culture-war politics. This is not so surprising if one grasps that the Democrats are profoundly conservative about the New Deal/Great Society social-insurance state, upon which Obamacare is a sort of capstone. The New Deal is the modern Democratic Party's founding event, and the persistence of its institutions in their traditional mode is a matter of identity and meaning on the left as much as it is a matter of practical policy. I think that's why Democrats seem to relish linking Mr Romney fate to Mr Ryan's. It offers Mr Obama and his supporters the chance to fight a culture war on their hallowed home ground. But should they be so sure they'll win? ...

Read it all.

Living Under Terrorism

Hamden Rice on the legacy of Martin Luther King.

"The roads are getting safer, not more dangerous."

Mona Charen at the Washington Examiner:

The number of car accident fatalities has been dropping steadily for decades. In 1990, 44,599 people lost their lives in crashes.

In 2010, 32,885 were killed -- a decrease that is even more significant considering the rise in the total number of licensed drivers and cars on the road. According to the NHTSA, there were 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven in 1994, but only 1.14 in 2009, the lowest level in 60 years.

Alcohol related fatalities are also down. In 1999, 22,587 people died in crashes in which alcohol was a factor. By 2004, again, despite the increase in cars and drivers, the number was 16,694.

But here's an arresting statistic: In both years, men were almost three times as likely as women to be drunk drivers. Shall we ban men behind the wheel?

The NHTSA is panicking about cell phones. Yet another report from the NHTSA (there are so many) issued earlier this month found that only five percent of drivers have been observed holding cell phones to their ears while driving, and only .9 percent were seen to be "manipulating" a hand-held device. ...

Read it all at the link.

We're Lucky They Let Us Drive

Frank J. Fleming at the New York Post on our last dangerous freedom:

Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety. They had different equations related to human life then: We could lose 10,000 men in a single battle in a war and call it a victory.

We’re talking foolhardy people who eventually sent men to the moon strapped to a giant rocket that had less computational power than it takes to calculate the trajectory of an Angry Bird. Their kids dangled from jungle gyms over pavement.

Face it: We’re just not those people anymore. We don’t do dangerous things where lots of people could be hurt . . . even if they’re really cool and fun ideas. You can say we value human life more now, but it’s probably more apt to say we’re much sissier.

That’s why we have to be careful with driving, as it’s one of the last really dangerous freedoms we have. Anyone with a car can decide to head out the door and drive cross-country. That’s an extreme freedom our ancestors couldn’t even imagine, and don’t bet it will last. ...

Brilliant piece, and deservedly an instant classic. Go to the link to read the whole thing.

NY-9: Why Turner Beat Weprin

Ben Jacobs at Tablet has a solid take on what happened in New York's Ninth District:

David Weprin should have been a shoo-in to replace Anthony Weiner. New York’s 9th Congressional District, which straddles two Jewish enclaves in Central Queens and Southeastern Brooklyn, was gerrymandered for Jewish, Democratic victories. Weprin looked to be a triple threat: a Democrat, an Orthodox Jew, and a veteran New York politician. He’s a state Assemblyman, his father was the Assembly speaker, and his brother is a New York City Councilman. All of that matters in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 and where at least one-third of voters are Jewish. The last time a Republican won there was 1920.

But Tuesday night, voters decisively handed the seat to Bob Turner, an Irish Catholic Republican, by a margin of 54-46. ...

Read the rest at the link.

Government as Special Interest

Walter Russell Mead, writing at Business Insider, takes a look at pollster Stanley Greenberg's interpretation of eroding support for Democrats.

The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal. But in the conditions of late nineteenth and twentieth century America, the progressive vanguard fulfilled a vital and necessary social role.

The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role.

At bottom, that is what the populist revolt against establishments of all kinds is about. A growing section of the American population wants to think and act for itself, without the guidance of the graduates of ivy league colleges and blue chip graduate programs.

The fight for limited government that animates so many Americans today isn’t a reaction against the abuses and failures of government. It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite ...

Read it all at the link.

Sargent Shriver, 1915 - 2011

I remember him as the running-mate of my parents' favored candidate, the President of Massachusetts, in 1972, when I was 9 years old. But let's learn more.

Sargent Shriver - Wikipedia.

Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. (November 9, 1915 – January 18, 2011) was an American politician and activist. Known as R. Sargent Shriver or Sarge, he is best known as part of the Kennedy family, as the driving force behind the creation of the Peace Corps, and as the Democratic Party's candidate for U.S. vice president — having replaced nominee Thomas Eagleton, who resigned from the ticket — during the 1972 U.S. presidential election. Shriver died at the age of 95 on January 18, 2011.

I notice that among the many worthy programs he's credited with founding, there's Head Start. A certain little girl of my acquaintance is a beneficiary of the Early Head Start program, and I dare say she's the better for it.

Fox:

Shriver served as the first Peace Corps director in the administration of his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy. He also led President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and was Democrat George McGovern's running mate in 1972.

"He was a man of giant love, energy, enthusiasm, and commitment," the Shriver family said in a statement, noting that he was surrounded by his five children, five children in-law and his 19 grandchildren.

"He lived to make the world a more joyful, faithful, and compassionate place," the family said. "He centered everything on his faith and his family. He worked on stages both large and small but in the end, he will be best known for his love of others." ...

One of those five children, Maria Shriver, is married to California's outgoing Republican governor Arnold Shwarzenegger. She's also the author of several children's books, including What's Happening to Grandpa?, a story about a young girl and her grandfather, who has Alzheimer's disease. (Sargent Shriver announced in 2003 that he had AD.)

BBC has more.

CNN:

Shriver, whose full name was Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., was 95. He had suffered for years from Alzheimer's disease.

The family released a statement, saying Shriver died Tuesday "surrounded by his five children, five children in-law, and his 19 grandchildren."

"He lived to make the world a more joyful, faithful, and compassionate place," the family's statement said. "He worked on stages both large and small but in the end, he will be best known for his love of others. No one ever came into his presence without feeling his passion and his enthusiasm for them."

President Barack Obama said he was "deeply saddened" over the death of Shriver, whom he called "one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation."

Go read the rest.