Couldn’t Help But Notice (091907)

Yesterday (first item at link), I suggested that Don Luskin was right in hoping that the Fed would limit its rate cut to 1/4 of a point. Despite the stock-market surge, I believe that in the long run we would have been better off with that instead of the half-point reduction that occurred. The likelihood that inflation will rise to unacceptable levels has increased.

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A “History” Teacher Asks 14 Year-Olds to Renounce Their Citizenship (HT NewsBusters) — Someone really ought to check up on “teacher” and “Citizen of the World” Mike Brooks of Chico, California, “teacher” in question, votes in the next election. He should be waiting for the next “World” elections to cast his ballot.

The Return of the Conservatives “Reasons to Homeschool” counter is running at full throttle.

Warner Todd Houston at NewsBusters wonders if this story will get wider coverage. The Associated Press “covered” the Jay Bennish story in March of last year by portraying an indoctrinating teacher as a victim, so who reports on the story, if anyone, will matter.

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As yet another Haditha Marine has murder charges against him dropped, Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha cuts and runs into an elevator (HT Michelle Malkin) to avoid answering a question about whether he will ever apologize to those he preemptively smeared (see YouTube vid for the “in cold blood” characterization, and a reference to a previous statement(s) to that effect by Murtha).

Even if one Marine ends up guilty of something, that won’t change the fact that John “Is the trial over?” Murtha (Update — irony caught in the comment below by Large Bill) smeared everyone accused — including those who were ultimately not charged.

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Your chance to buy Belgium has passed.

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Thank you, Michael Medved:

Few opinions I’ve expressed on air have produced a more indignant, outraged reaction than my repeated insistence that the word “genocide” in no way fits as a description of the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American settlers.

But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government, never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality.

….. Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.

….. Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime.

The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents our “original sin” fails to put European contact with these struggling Stone Age societies in any context whatever, and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in young Americans.

Read, and save, the whole thing.

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Thank you, Catholic Church:

The Catholic Church has released a new policy document saying physicians have an obligation to provide comatose patients with food and water. The policy has a bearing on patients like Terri Schiavo, who was killed when courts granted her former husband the right to revoke her food and water.

….. The CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) response, approved by Pope Benedict XVI, says providing food and water is “an ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life,” and, as a result, “obligatory” in most circumstances.

Terri Schiavo’s family is pleased. The pronouncement serves as a stinging rebuke to US prelates who were silent when it counted.