Hero/Hack: Pigs Are Bad Edition
My heroes his week are European centrists who are coming to realize that Islam and Europe are not as compatable as once thought. The New York Times:
With each incident, mainstream leaders are speaking more plainly. “Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. “It makes no sense to retreat.”
The backlash is revealing itself in other ways. Last month the British home secretary, John Reid, called on Muslim parents to keep a close watch on their children. “There’s no nice way of saying this,” he told a Muslim group in East London. “These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, grooming them to kill themselves to murder others.”
My hack this week is Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) for his actions relating to pork supporting. Robert Novak:
Honorable mention for hero this week goes to the wonderful Pope Benedict XVI.WASHINGTON -- Staring into the abyss of minority status in Congress, Republicans signaled dedication to pork barrel spending before recessing for midterm election
campaigning. Behind closed doors, the GOP's King of Pork dressed down the party's leading foe of earmarks. In the open, the last bill passed before the election was filled with carefully hidden pork.
In a caucus of Republican senators, 82-year-old, six-term Sen. Ted Stevens charged that freshman Sen. Tom Coburn's anti-pork crusade hurts the party. Stevens then removed from the final version of the Defense Department appropriations bill Coburn's "report card" requiring the Pentagon to grade earmarks. The House passed, 394 to 22, the bill, stripped of this reform and containing some 2,800 earmarks worth $11 billion. That made a mockery of a "transparency" rule passed by the House earlier this year, supposedly intended to discourage earmarks.
According to reports, he is going to revive the Latin Mass. Sweet.
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