Free Republic

They murdered her husband.  They killed his father.Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote of American society rationalizing acceptance of ever rising levels of crime and self-destructive behavior in the 1993 Winter edition of The American Scholar.  The title of his essay was Defining Deviancy Down and became a frequently used part of the lexicon in the ensuing battles and debates in our culture wars.  The same concept of acquiescence writ large on the international stage is the subject of a Wall Street Journal column published yesterday and written by Judea Pearl, father of Danny and UCLA professor.  Judea Pearl, whose journalist son was brutally slain by...

...Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class- fractured families- would have to be faced. But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen. In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter- who repaid it by...

Rival comrades unite to slam ‘CIA’s bourgeois Kerala media’ RAJEEV PI Posted online: Saturday, April 07, 2007 at 0000 hrs 50 yrs after first Communist govt, Cold War sweeps Kerala, comrades say critical papers funded by US spooks Kochi, April 6: Fortunately for Kerala, and world communism, V S Achuthanandan has no beard—nor does Pinarayi Vijayan, his arch party foe and CPM state secretary. They don’t need to worry about the CIA trying to de-beard them, as it famously did with old Fidel in Cuba to make him and his ideology less popular, during the Cold War. But short of...

A federal judge slapped a would-be terrorist, who plotted to blow up the Herald Square subway station, with 30 years behind bars yesterday - heeding calls from prosecutors who said the young radical was "perfectly willing to have people die." Shahawar Matin Siraj, 24, was convicted in May of conspiring to place an explosive device inside a garbage can or under a bench in the crowded West 34th Street subway station, which sits just beneath Macy's flagship department store. He wanted to bomb the station in retaliation for war abuses against Iraqis. "The defendant's role was central . . ....

The last nominee for ambassador to the United Nations about whom The New York Times was frantic was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In fact, it was frantic about him twice. The first time was in November 1970, when Moynihan's name was, for a brief moment, floated as a likely candidate. The Times was quick to declare him the "wrong man for the u.n." The right man was Charles Yost, a foreign servant for nearly four decades so discreet as to be almost invisible. Moynihan never made clear why he did not then take the post. Did he initially decline it because...

In 1965 the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan released the now-famous Moynihan Report which showed that the number one cause of black poverty was the breakdown of the married, two-parent biological family. The Democrats did not recieve this news well. They pilloried Moynihan and called him a racist. Then they went into, in Moynihan's words, denial mode. 40 years later and out of wedlock childbirths have more than doubled and the Democrats are still in denial mode. The scientific debate is over, even among liberal sociologists. But the silence is deafening. Here is some information that the GOP should be repeating...

 The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies Kay S. Hymowitz Summer 2005 Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city. By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be...

Though he had a distinguished career as a journalist and editor at such places as the New York Times, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair, Edward Klein has seen his sterling reputation go into near meltdown in just a matter of days. The reason? He has committed a cardinal sin for liberals: he has harshly criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton. Long time friends are distancing themselves from him and others are going to great lengths to besmirch him. Such was the case last week when the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's daughter Maura penned an article about Klein and his new book "The...

NEW YORK (CBS) A spokesman for Sen. Hillary Clinton is branding a new book about the New York Democrat as being "full of blatant fabrications." Edward Klein, in his book "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President," says Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan - who publicly championed her 2000 race for the Senate - was privately less enthused about the former First Lady. According to an excerpt in July's Vanity Fair magazine, both Moynihan and his wife, Liz, felt disdain for the aspiring senator and didn't trust them when...

Moynihan with Clinton in 1999. Photo: Alan Solomon ....Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his wife despised a "duplicitous" and ruthless Hillary Rodham Clinton, who they believed would do anything to advance herself, according to a bombshell new book. "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Be come President," by Edward Klein, is excerpted in Vanity Fair and slated to roll off the presses later this month. Sen. Moynihan's wife, Liz, griped to a friend that a "duplicitous" Clinton "would say or do anything that would forward her ambitions"........."She can...

The nomination of John Bolton as am bassador to the United Nations fi nally cleared the Foreign Relations Committee last week and is heading for the Senate floor, but Democrats are still working to torpedo it on everything — save the actual merits. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) announced at week's end that she is placing a "hold" on the nomination until the State Department forks over a barrel-full of documents demanded by the Dems in hopes of finding a smoking gun to sink Bolton once and for all. Placing a hold means the nomination is subject to an open-ended delay....

MUCH CRITICISM has been leveled at the president's decision to nominate John Bolton as our next ambassador to the United Nations. While equally outspoken intellects like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick were accepted as appropriate for their time, Bolton's bluntness and penchant for courting controversy in a diplomatic quiet zone like the UN, his critics say, make him ''uniquely ill-suited" to the UN's current demographics. This argument misses the forest for the trees. As even Vice President Cheney noted last Friday, Bolton's historic views about the UN and how it functions, combined with his strong ties to President Bush...

"There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world -- and that's the United States -- when it suits our interests, and when we can get others to go along...." This kind of mindless creation of the United Nations as something different from what it's in the United States' interest to do isn't going to sell here or anywhere else. You know this speaker and his ilk. Or do you? Read on. One of the primary complaints about John Bolton is that he does indeed...

President Bush has named John R. Bolton to be America's new ambassador to the United Nations. He will, in my opinion, be in the tradition of Pat Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Negroponte and Jack Danforth. In a March 9th editorial, The New York Times ridiculed Bolton's appointment by citing various statements he made in recent years. The Times stated that in a 2000 interview on National Public Radio (an acknowledged left-wing outpost of the radio dial), Mr. Bolton told Juan Williams, "If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of...

As Social Security’s critics know, the government program is robed in myths, for example, that it is “insurance” financed with a “trust fund,” paying “guaranteed” benefits “as a matter of earned right.” These myths have given most Americans a mistaken understanding of Social Security. As a result, they perniciously affected policymaking in the past and severely constrain reform options today. Beginning in 1935, when Social Security was enacted, the program’s administrators made a huge effort to shape the public’s understanding of and beliefs about it. In speeches, articles, pamphlets, and other mass-circulation literature, they described Social Security as “insurance” under...

<p>WASHINGTON — President Bush's commission to create a plan to mend Social Security is loaded with members who favor privatizing the federal retirement plan to some degree.</p> <p>Bush wants to allow voluntary private investment accounts. He will officially announce his commission on Wednesday. The group's task is to hammer out the details of a new plan by this fall.</p>

"Hell no, we won't go" is the wrong liberal approach on Social Security reform.The late Pat Moynihan used to joke when I asked him why liberals were so reluctant to consider changing Social Security so that it guaranteed wealth as well as income: "It's because they worry that wealth will turn Democrats into Republicans." Leaving aside that possible correlation, it will be a shame if liberal voices, values and ideas are not brought into the debate initiated by President Bush's Social Security reform proposal. To make certain the reforms are done correctly liberal thinking is urgently needed.There is no doubt...

President Bush must really be on to something with his proposals to reform Social Security. The liberals are circling the wagons and hunkering down for a desperate defense. You'd think these self-described "progressives" would be more receptive to an overhaul and modernization of a 70-year-old program that was designed during the Great Depression. This vehement opposition is over more than the mechanics. It's ideological. The left regards Social Security as the cornerstone of FDR's New Deal socialism. Privatizing it is nothing short of blasphemy. A Ponzi scheme can only survive as long as the number of suckers grows. With the...

While national Democratic leaders have been busy pummeling President Bush, New York's senior senator, Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, spent part of a campaign debate on Sunday aligning himself with the president, saying he voted with Mr. Bush "to extend the child income tax credit,'' and that he "voted with the president for authorization to go into Iraq." With those comments, Mr. Schumer underscored a strategic reality as he seeks re-election: He is not just content to win a second term in the United States Senate, but he is looking to win big. And to do that, he must attract...

Purging the Neocons January 6, 2004 Did you know that the word neoconservative — often shortened to neocon — is an ethnic slur? Neither did I, but some, er, conservative pundits have set me straight. David Brooks of the New York Times says of “the people labeled neocons” that “con is short for ‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish.’” So when other people call these people “neocons,” you see, they’re really calling them Jews, which for some reason is anti-Semitic. This must come as a surprise to Irving Kristol, who long ago cheerfully, indeed proudly, accepted the term. Though...