Journal Sentinel to Readers: Drop Dead
by Mike Paisted

With all the buy-outs and shedding of talent going on at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I suppose it would be too much to ask them to hire or even let a volunteer act as an ombudsman to deal with their various, er, issues related to coverage, non-coverage, bias and incompetence. If you, dear reader, have an issue with the paper, you may only take it up with the editors through their laughable Ask the Journal Sentinel feature on occasional Sundays. If you don’t like the answer, well, too bad. This Sunday, the J-S’s right-wing managing editor George Stanley steps in to make excuses for exaggerated coverage of fluffy issues like Favre’s unretirement to the exclusion of more weighty matters like the recent exposure of more Lies of Still-President Bush. Using old standard phrases of defensive corporate double-speak, Stanley dances around the issue, blaming his selective use of the J-S’s shrinking news hole on the perceived interests of his short-attention-span readers. "We try to choose stories our readers will consider the most important, most relevant and most interesting," he writes. See, it's you, you stupid readers, not him. Not that he is going to give his readers the chance to get interested in a story like, say, the Bush administration sending White House stationary over to the CIA and ordering them to phony-up a Hussein-Atta link after-the-fact. The excellent question posed by an anonymous reader references that story, the full-of-holes case against the conveniently-suicided anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins and the ridiculous substance and result of the political show-trial of OBL’s driver, all of which were a) important, b) embarrassing to the Bush administration, and c) virtually ignored by the Journal Sentinel. MORE>

Revitalized Milwaukee requires law and order
by Rick Esenberg

In a recent issue of the New Republic, Alan Ehrenhalt writes about the return to the city. He claims that there is an increased desire on the part of families with children as well as young singles and aging Baby Boomers for an urban lifestyle. Young people, he says, “are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in.” Pointing to the revitalization of former working class neighborhoods like Logan Square in Chicago, he argues that what is happening is more than garden variety gentrification. Ehrenhalt’s case is somewhat overstated, and the trend that he sees comes with its own set of problems. He claims that there will be a “demographic inversion” in which the rich will move into downtowns and select urban neighborhoods while the poor increasingly locate outside the urban core. I have no idea how substantial this trend may turn out to be. But it ought to be welcome news for those who have decried “white flight” to the suburbs and argued that the abandonment of the city by the middle class has led to the neglect of urban concerns. These folks — whether traditional left liberals or New Urbanists like former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist — have long pined for the day when cities were no longer isolated enclaves of poor minorities surrounded by an “Iron Ring” of suburbs full of middle and upper class whites. MORE>

Sure, pile on the mandates
by Tom Shannon

Normally, my knee-jerk reaction to the idea of forcing Milwaukee employers to provide nine paid sick days per employee each year would be instantaneous and strenuous. Bad idea, I’d say. Why should local community activists and elected officials mandate how a company’s budget is deployed? Normally, I’d say my investors rightfully expect a reasonable return on their investment. Added costs dictated by the government don’t jibe with this objective. Our investors could just keep their money at the M&I bank without any risk at all. In our case, we’ve lost money for them in past years because we are a high-growth company with a heavy emphasis on research and development. But state Department of Commerce officials say growing companies like ours are good for Wisconsin because we have brought numerous natives back home from other states where they had worked as scientists. Our budget process has forced us to consider how much money we investors will add to the pot each year, not what kind of return on investment we will get. We must figure out how to pay our employees a competitive wage and then identify other essential expenses. Only then can we sit down to decide which benefits are most important. We buy these benefits with whatever money is left over. MORE>

Edwards' other sin
by Clarence Page

Among former Sen. John Edwards' other sins against humanity, add this one. He helped the National Enquirer to gain more credibility than any supermarket tabloid deserves. The blogosphere is abuzz with critics of the "MSM" - the mainstream media - for allegedly failing to pursue the story of the former senator's "love child" when the National Enquirer first reported it last year. In fact, major media did try to confirm it, rather than go to press by using the Enquirer as a source. Call us old-fashioned, but most of us in the MSM tend to be hung up on some stodgy, old-fashioned virtues like facts. Unlike the Enquirer's last big baby gotcha - its revelation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's out-of-wedlock child in 2000 - none of the principal parties in the Edwards story would confirm it on the record. That's a problem. If you're going to use unnamed sources, which is questionable enough as a practice, at least make them your own sources, not those of a supermarket tabloid. At first Mr. Edwards flatly denied the story. This year, after the Enquirer published a story and a grainy photo allegedly of Mr. Edwards visiting the baby and its mother, filmmaker Rielle Hunter, in a Los Angeles hotel, the Edwards campaign went mum, refusing to confirm or deny anything. MORE>

The lout is outed - finally; Edwards scandal showcases media’s Democratic bias
by Mark Belling

Try to imagine this. A Republican candidate for president has an affair with a campaign aide while his wife battles cancer. The media frenzy would make this month’s Brett Favre soap opera look tame. Now imagine there were allegations the dirty old Republican fathered a child with his much younger lover. Stop the presses! Call Keith Olberman. Of course the exact opposite occurred with John Edwards. At the very time Edwards was taking the lead in polls leading up to the Iowa caucuses he and his aides were adamantly denying the National Enquirer report that Edwards had an affair with former campaign aide Rielle Hunter. The mainstream media - every component of it (no exceptions!) - refused to report the story. Talk about pack journalism. Nobody wanted to break away from the crowd and even investigate the story. Of course not. Edwards is a Democrat. Hope and compassion etc. Only Republicans would ever do something like this. Or so the media believed. Contrast the Edwards non-coverage with the hit job the New York Times did in March on John McCain. The day after McCain nailed down the Republican nomination the Times ran a page one piece about McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist. MORE>

The Prophet at Harvard
by Dinesh D'Souza

When we think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, several names come to mind: Gorbachev, Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel. But one name is missing: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was Solzhenitsyn’s great corpus of work, beginning with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and continuing through The Gulag Archipelago, that opened the eyes of the West to the magnitude of the crimes of Soviet totalitarianism. Marxist-style regimes now survive only in isolated pockets: Cuba, North Korea, and in a qualified sense China. Today it is impossible to deny that Solzhenitsyn was correct about the “evil empire,” and his role in exposing it and bringing it down. But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn that has been largely ignored, and this is his critique of certain trends in Western civilization. Solzhenitsyn raised this subject, no less controversial and for us closer to home, in his famous 1978 Harvard address. Even though he was second to none in his denunciation of totalitarian socialism, Solzhenitsyn said, "Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively." The whole address is worth reading, but here are some highlights. MORE>

What about the Choice to Say No?
by Dan Gainor

It is a matter of liberal orthodoxy that abortion is all about choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liberals support choice when it’s choice they agree with. The second that changes, they call for government mandates. No choice, just following orders. Doctors and nurses have been targeted in this battle for years. Big companies, too. This is standard for the left – attack businesses that dare support traditional values. After Wal-Mart knuckled under to pressure groups and agreed to stock the Plan B emergency contraceptive, Time magazine called them a liberal “ally.” Now pharmacists and drug store owners are in the thick of the fray. The left wants to make them fill birth control prescriptions against their will. Three states – Illinois, California and New Jersey – have already made that the law of the land. Liberals might get more than they bargained for. The federal government has circulated draft rules to protect “medical providers to offer legal abortion and contraception services to women,” according to Reuters. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt’s blog cited Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, saying, “it’s really not acceptable to the people I represent that this administration is considering allowing doctors and nurses and pharmacists that have received their education to provide services to now be able to not provide those services if they don’t want to.” MORE>

Health insurance disinformation
by Daniel Gallington

The odds are poor that Americans will be allowed to figure out the critical issues associated with health care and health insurance any time before the election in November. This isn't because the issues are particularly complex or that we are too unsophisticated to understand them. It's more because we are taking on a multi-trillion-dollar industry - the insurance industry - and when we ask basic questions about them we are threatening the free ride that they have enjoyed for more than 60 years. In addition, the presidential candidates and their campaigns have so muddied the water on the issues that the best we can hope for is that our Congress will have the courage to hold comprehensive hearings on health care in America, serving primarily to educate us on the more important facts and issues. However, the odds of this happening anytime soon are also slim - because so many politicians are already "in the pockets" of the insurance industry to maintain the status quo. In a word, the insurance industry is "fat" and intends to stay that way. Well, what is the "status quo" - and what are the things that should surprise and upset us to the point of demanding something responsible be done about them? Here a few: MORE>

25 Reasons You Might Be a Liberal
by John Hawkins

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, you just might be a liberal if...
• You're sure the Constitution explicitly guarantees the right to abortion and gay marriage, but not the right to own a handgun.
• You think Dan Quayle is the dumbest Vice-President we ever had because he believed a flash card that misspelled "potato," but think Obama is a genius despite the fact he believes we have more than 57 states.
• You'd be more upset about your favorite candidate being endorsed by the NRA than the Communist Party.
• You think the same criminals who use guns in the commission of a crime will just hand them over to comply with the law if guns are made illegal.
• You know that 86% of all income taxes are paid by the top 25% of income earners and you still feel that the rich "aren't paying their fair share of the taxes."
• You put a higher priority on oil pipelines possibly inconveniencing a few caribou than you do on lowering the price of gas for everyone in the country by drilling ANWR.
• You're worried that Osama Bin Laden might not get a fair trial if we capture him, but want George Bush thrown in prison for being too zealous in protecting us from Al-Qaeda. MORE>

History's Back;
Ambitious autocracies, hesitant democracies.
by Robert Kagan

One wonders whether Russia's invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world's democracies after the close of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union offered for many the tantalizing prospect of a new kind of international order. The fall of the Communist empire and the apparent embrace of democracy by Russia seemed to augur a new era of global convergence. Great power conflict and competition were a thing of the past. Geo-economics had replaced geopolitics. Nations that traded with one another would be bound together by their interdependence and less likely to fight one another. Increasingly commercial societies would be more liberal both at home and abroad. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history. Ideological conflict was also a thing of the past. As Francis Fukuyama famously put it, "At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy." And if there were an autocracy or two lingering around at the end of history, this was no cause for concern. They, too, would eventually be transformed as their economies modernized. MORE>

How to Stop Putin
by Charles Krauthammer

The Russia-Georgia cease-fire brokered by France's president is less than meets the eye. Its terms keep moving as the Russian army keeps moving. Russia has since occupied Gori (appropriately, Stalin's birthplace), effectively cutting Georgia in two. The road to the capital, Tbilisi, is open, but apparently Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has temporarily chosen to seek his objectives through military pressure and Western acquiescence rather than by naked occupation. His objectives are clear. They go beyond detaching South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and absorbing them into Russia. They go beyond destroying the Georgian army, leaving the country at Russia's mercy. The real objective is the Finlandization of Georgia through the removal of President Mikheil Saakashvili and his replacement by a Russian puppet. Which explains Putin stopping the Russian army (for now) short of Tbilisi. What everyone overlooks in the cease-fire terms is that all future steps -- troop withdrawals, territorial arrangements, peacekeeping forces -- will have to be negotiated between Russia and Georgia. MORE>

A majority minority nation
by Linda Chavez

A majority minority nation: that's what the U.S. Census Bureau is projecting by the year 2042, according to new figures released last week. By midcentury, according to the government's projections, Hispanics, Asians and blacks will outnumber non-Hispanic whites by about 32 million. The statistics make for interesting headlines - and, no doubt, cause heartburn in certain circles - but the fact is: they are more or less meaningless. The problem in all such predictions is that they don't take sufficient account of intermarriage and assimilation. From our Founding as a nation, there have been those who worried that "foreigners" would overwhelm us and change our national character. Benjamin Franklin warned in 1751: "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?" It's true, Germans are our largest ethnic group today - numbering 43 million in the last decennial Census - but so what? Despite German language schools - which enrolled as many as 600,000 students in 1900 - and even some efforts by German emigres to form a German ethnic state in Texas or Wisconsin in the 19th century, Americans of German ancestry all speak English today and are entirely integrated into the American mainstream. MORE>

Even By Trial Lawyer Standards,
Edwards A Real Sleazebag
by Ann Coulter

The good news: DNA testing has confirmed that John Edwards is not the father of Rielle Hunter's baby.The bad news: The father is Bill Clinton.
Ha ha -- just kidding! It's almost impossible to get pregnant by having the type of sex Bill Clinton prefers. Also, by now, everyone has heard the news that Edwards' mistress, Rielle Hunter, has refused to grant a paternity test. I wonder if Edwards knew that when he was making his chesty offer to take a paternity test? Edwards gushed to ABC's Bob Woodruff: "I would welcome participating in a paternity test, be happy to participate in one ... happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen." As Edwards knows, our paternity laws were written by Gloria Steinem, so if the mother doesn't want a paternity test, it can't happen. So when Woodruff asked if he was going to actually take the paternity test soon, Edwards quickly noted, "I'm only one side of the test." With Rielle in on the scam, Edwards could boldly demand a paternity test and then self-righteously defend his mistress's decision to refuse a paternity test. How dare you gainsay this woman's right to her privacy! Because if there's one person who's gone the extra mile to keep Hunter from becoming a public figure, it's John Edwards. MORE>

Medical advances offer better quality and value
by John Torinus

New business models for the delivery of medical treatments are popping up across Wisconsin, giving hope that they will yield better quality of care, more responsive service and cost reductions. As I travel the state looking for centers of excellence where we can steer our co-workers for various treatments, it is obvious and encouraging that providers are finding much improved ways to deliver medicine. If you enter the Marshfield Clinic for a treatment, for instance, your doctor will have on his screen an electronic record of your medical history, your prescriptions, prompts for needed preventive tests and alerts to missing elements of care. The place is virtually paperless. Before-and-after photos show where huge vaults of paper files have been eliminated. If you are diabetic, for example, the doctor will be alerted to your exact status against best-practice protocols. If a foot exam has not been performed, it is ordered up electronically on the spot via the doctor’s portable computer.
Down the road, the clinic will be using its expertise in genetic research to deliver personalized medicine, meaning that your genetic profile will be included in the electronic health record. That will offer another diagnostic tool for more precise treatments, such as drug dosages. Other providers in the state are at various stages of converting to electronic health records and computerized systems. MORE>

A Race McCain Could Win
by George Will

Last August, John McCain's campaign was a guttering candle, out of money but flush with half-baked ideas that were unlikely to be improved by further baking. Anyway, to have many ideas is to have too many for a campaign's concluding sprint, and McCain's revival has not been robust enough to bring him even with Barack Obama. Now McCain's rejuvenated hopes rest on his ability to recast this election, focusing it on who should lead America in a world suddenly darkened by Russia's war of European conquest. To begin the recasting, he should weed from the unkempt garden of his political thinking the populism that often seems like mere attitudinizing redeemed by insincerity. His silliness about sinful Wall Street and exploitative corporations cannot compete with Democratic entrees in the nonsense sweepstakes. Furthermore, his populism subverts his strength -- the perception that although he is an acquired taste, he is serious, hence incapable of self-celebratory froth such as "we are the ones we've been waiting for." McCain's populism, if such there must be, should be distilled into one proposal that would be popular and, unlike most populism, not economically injurious. The proposal, for which he has expressed sympathy, is: No officer of any corporation receiving a federal subsidy, broadly defined, can be paid more than the highest-paid federal civil servant ($124,010 for a GS-15). MORE>

Senator George S. McGovern, Manifesting Wisdom as to the Union Card-Check Issue
by Paul Weyrich

Politics, it said, makes for strange bedfellows. I have seen hundreds of examples in the many years I have been involved in politics. Here is another example which I never expected to see. Those who follow this commentary know that one of the chief concerns of Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao as she wraps up nearly eight years of service in the Cabinet of President George W. Bush is the so-called Card Check Program. Liberals in Congress have promised to enact the card-check law in the next Congress. Senator Barack H. Obama has pledged to sign it if he were to become President. In typical Orwellian fashion, the legislation is called the “Employee Free Choice Act.” As Secretary Chao has stated, this legislation would deprive ordinary workers of the right to a secret ballot as to whether to organize a union in a factory or company. Secretary Chao’s opposition to this measure is to be expected since she represents an Administration which has been opposed by union bosses from day one. What I did not expect was who has joined her in opposition to card check. Are you ready? Former Senator and Democratic Presidential nominee George S. McGovern. He has come out as strongly opposed to card check as Secretary Chao. This is a shock because McGovern had a 100% pro-union voting record while serving as a Senator. Whenever measures would surface which were favorable to unions McGovern would defend. I never expected McGovern to oppose card check.MORE>

Echoes of Berlin
by Michael Barone

Last week, the two erstwhile communist superpowers were in the spotlight. Starting on Aug. 8, China staged the Olympics - an event on the schedule for years. Also on Aug. 8, Russia invaded the independent republic of Georgia - which apparently caught our government flatfooted. George W. Bush remained in Beijing watching the Olympians, while Vladimir Putin, making no secret of who is in charge, went to the Russian borderland with Georgia to supervise. There are echoes of history in all this. Echoes that remind us in one way or the other of Berlin. China's Olympic extravaganza - and its suppression of dissent - inevitably remind us of Adolf Hitler's Berlin Olympics in 1936. Russia's torrent of lies - its claims that democratic Georgia has been engaged in ethnic cleansing, its claims that it is acting in the interest of Russian citizens, its claims that it has accepted a cease-fire when its tanks continue to enter Georgian cities - remind us of Hitler's claims that Czechoslovakia was oppressing the Sudeten Germans and his claims that Poland was committing atrocities before he invaded. Belatedly, on Aug. 13, George W. Bush reminded us once again of Berlin, when he announced that the United States would airlift supplies and send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Georgia. The United States has no capacity to join Georgia in arms and does not want a direct military confrontation with Russia. But in effect we are putting feet on the ground in Tbilisi and its airport, which should make it plain to Mr. Putin that an assault on them is an attack on the United States. MORE>

McCain's New Hope
The Candidate Shines at Saddleback Forum
by Michael Gerson

It is now clear why Barack Obama has refused John McCain's offer of joint town hall appearances during the fall campaign. McCain is obviously better at them. Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency -- two hours on Saturday night evenly divided between the relaxed, tieless candidates -- was expected to be a sideshow. McCain and Obama would make their specialized appeals to evangelicals as if they were an interest group such as organized labor or the National Rifle Association. Evangelicals would demonstrate, in turn, that they are not rubes and know-nothings. And Americans would turn en masse to watch the Olympics. What took place instead under Warren's precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign -- a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch. First, the forum previewed the stylistic battle lines of the contest ahead, and it should give Democrats pause. Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral -- the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted. MORE>