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By Gregory Taggart, March 29, 2011 4:54 pm

So what’s the difference between slavery in the pre-Civil War U.S. and a foreign policy that would prop up a dictator like Mubarak or the Shaw or Marcos because he was friendly to U.S. interests in the region, even though he abused the people of his country? To my mind, in both cases innocent people were being severely abused, even killed. In both cases, people in power ignored the abuse because it benefited their interests. In both cases, the people in power had the resources to stop the abuse.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 28, 2011 11:25 am

I’m a conservative who leans libertarian, and here’s what I think about taxes, entitlements, and deficits. It all comes down to trust, and Congress has lost mine. Consequently, I will not agree to any tax increase unless and until I see real movement on the budget front. By that I mean I want to see real cuts given the realities of the budget. In other words, I realize that defense and entitlements make up such a large proportion of the overall budget that there is no way we’re going to be able to get real deficit reduction without either making big cuts there or raising taxes or both.

Now I’m willing to cut entitlements, even social security–and I’m on the verge of retirement. I could probably find cuts in the Defense budget as well. And I’m agreeable to raising some taxes. However, I’m not willing to do any of this until Congress regains my trust. And it can only do that by getting serious about cutting what can be cut now. No more political gamesmanship. No more calling $80 billion in cuts “draconian.” No more quibbling about this jot and that tittle. Start cutting now and don’t stop until we’ve eliminated every unnecessary program, all wasteful expenditures, and each and every earmark.

Do that, and I’m willing to talk about tax increases and reduced entitlements. Don’t do that, and I’ll do what I can to see that you’re not re-elected.

It’s all about trust. And you don’t have mine.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 18, 2011 12:04 am

Egypt has one.

Bahrain apparently has one.

And the US is thinking about one or might even have one?

As Glenn Reynolds often says, the country is in the very best of hands.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 16, 2011 9:58 pm

About the only thing I agree with Mark Bittman on in this column is that GMO food should be labeled. The rest is, well, an argument built on perhapses and supported by a bunch of maybes. Here’s a whiff:

In one paragraph he writes,

[That a transgenic fish could escape and breed with a wild fish] is impossible, say the creators of the G.E. salmon — a biotech company called AquaBounty — whose interest in approval makes their judgment all but useless.

So AquaBounty’s judgment is almost useless on this subject. Fair enough. Their economic interest calls their impartiality into question. They could be–probably are–biased. Let’s not rely on what they say, Bittman says.

But then he writes,

The subject [of GMO food] is unquestionably complex. Few people outside of scientists working in the field — self included — understand much of anything about gene altering. Still, an older ABC poll found that a majority of Americans believe that G.M.O.’s are unsafe . . .

So, few people understand this stuff, but he’ll cite a survey of those who don’t to support his protest against GMO food. Uninformed people think the stuff is unsafe, and I’m supposed to care? Like AquaBounty, their judgment is probably useless–unless you’re Mark Bittman and need some maybes to support your perhapses.

Update:That Bittman didn’t cite the source for his “older ABC poll” bothered me, so I Googled “abc g.m.o.” and found at least three “older” ABC polls in the first five hits. My educated guess is that Bittman is referring to this one from June 19, 2001 (also found here). That poll says that 52% of the people polled says GMO food is unsafe, 35% unsafe, while 92% want it labeled.

But in quoting this poll, Bittman ignores a trend, one that works against him. A July 13, 2003 ABC poll says, “There have been gains in the belief that genetically modified food is safe to eat – up 11 points since 2001, to 46 percent.” Moreover, whereas in 2001, 55% said they would be less likely to buy GMO food if labeled as such, 52% took that position in 2003. In other words, the trend is against him.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 14, 2011 11:29 am

“The [seven] defendants charged today, including two U.S. citizens, were prepared to provide millions of dollars in dangerous narcotics and lethal weapons to men they believed represented the Taliban,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in the statement. (emphasis supplied)

I think it’s called treason, and I think the penalty can be death. But, so what, if there’s money to be made.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 13, 2011 2:21 pm

As I mention in the previous post, I wrote a number of posts about the constitutional crisis in Honduras in 2009, the U.S.’s response to it. I realized that I hadn’t followed what happened about the crises quieted down–or at least fell off my radar.

Here’s a quick update, beginning with then-President Micheletti’s July 27, 2009 letter to the Wall Street Journal, to sort of get you up to speed as to who he is and what happened in Honduras, at least according to him (and to me for that matter, since I agree with what he wrote).

The nut paragraph in that letter, for my purposes, is:

The way forward is to work with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. He is proposing ways to ensure that Mr. Zelaya complies with Honduras’s laws and its constitution and allows the people of Honduras to elect a new president in the regularly scheduled Nov. 29 elections (or perhaps earlier, if the date is moved up as President Arias has suggested and as Honduran law allows).(emphasis supplied)

Note the date on the letter. The so-called coup took place one month earlier on June 28, 2009. So just one month latter, President Micheletti is talking about regularly scheduled elections where the people can elect a new president.

According to The Economist, that happened as scheduled, when centre-right candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa won the election. Later reports confirmed that he won 55% of the vote. Turnout was “robust,” rivaling turnouts in U.S. elections. As The Economist wrote on December 3, 2009,

On November 29th the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti achieved its main aim of holding a presidential election to choose Mr Zelaya’s successor. All five political parties took part, including the far-left Democratic Unification party, which reneged on a promise to withdraw if Mr Zelaya was not reinstated. Despite warnings of violent protests and a call to boycott the election by Mr Zelaya’s “resistance” movement, voting took place fairly calmly, disturbed only by one clash between police and demonstrators in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second city.

Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, the amiable leader of the centre-right National Party, won a clear mandate with 55% of the vote—primarily because the rival Liberal Party was divided between backers of Mr Micheletti and Mr Zelaya. Turnout seems to have been around the 55% mark reached in the 2005 election, when Mr Zelaya narrowly beat Mr Lobo.

I reviewed that to write this: On December 9, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the First Diplomacy Briefing Series Meeting in Washington D.C. said the following about the election:

Now, the culmination of what was a year-long electoral process occurred on November 29th when the Honduran people expressed their feelings and their commitment to a democratic future. They turned out in large numbers and they threw out, in effect, the party of both President Zelaya and the de facto leader, Mr. Micheletti. Since then, President-elect Lobo has launched a national dialogue. He’s called for the formation of a national unity government and a truth commission as set forth among the requirements in the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord. That is an agreement that the Hondurans themselves reached. We helped to facilitate it, but the Hondurans decided they wanted a local resolution. (emphasis supplied)

I find her choice of words–threw out, in effect–weaselly. Taking Micheletti at his word, he was pushing for elections from almost the very beginning. In fact, the elections that did occur were regularly scheduled. To me the U.S. got in the way from the very beginning. I think the Honduran people in general and the Honduran government in particular acted very much like a mature democracy. They should be proud.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 12, 2011 12:48 pm

Last August, Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University and a blogger on CNN, wrote two different posts about the Mormon reaction to a Muslim group’s efforts to build a mosque at Ground Zero. The first lamented the fact that some prominent Mormons–Mitt Romney and Harry Reid–had both spoken against the mosque. So had Glenn Beck. Prothero was particularly disturbed that Romney had done so (through a spokesperson) because he had been so impressed by Romney’s religion speech during the most recent presidential campaign and because of Romney’s experience with the opposition to the Boston Temple. (Prothero, by the way, seems to have a good grasp on Latter-day Saint history.) He writes,

As I wrote in my 2007 piece on this speech, for Romney, the moral of this history lesson was clear:

Americans today should rise above religious bigotry, not least by evaluating presidential candidates on the basis of their credentials instead of their religious tradition. After all, Romney said, “Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.”

These were the words that came to me when Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and other Republican leaders started to double down on the anti-Islamic rhetoric.

I thought that Romney, as a Mormon, might speak out passionately for the First Amendment. I thought he might remember how the founder of his religion, Joseph Smith Jr., was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob. I thought he might recall how the U.S. government brought down much of its coercive power against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Apparently not. According to a statement released on August 10 by his spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom, “Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site.”

The second discussed Senator Hatch’s position, which was captured by Salt Lake City’s Fox News 13:

Prothero’s reaction to Romney’s and Hatch’s statements prompted me to think about what my stance on the proposed mosque was back then. I realized that I disagreed with Romney. My stance was then and is now similar to Hatch’s: it would be a nice gesture if the mosque’s proponents chose to build elsewhere out of respect for what happened on 9/11; however, I recognize and support their 1st Amendment rights to build where they are planning to build.

I have a long memory, a memory that extends back to the persecution of my Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a memory of recent times when people in Boston, Billings, Denver, and places north and south, east and west, opposed the building of a Mormon temple–always for allegedly non-religious reasons. That opposition was a predictable as the rising sun was an irony that always escaped the protestors.

I suspect that religious bigotry imbues most of the opposition to the mosque as well. I don’t think Romney is bigoted. I do think he is in a rush to the Right, however, in his pursuit of the presidency. I have defended him in the past from the flip criticism that he flip flops a lot. I’ll take a flip from anybody if it demonstrates that they’ve learned something. However, too much pandering is not a good thing. I’ll be watching him closely, as I will Hatch, now that he’s pursuing the Tea Party vote.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 11, 2011 9:35 pm

Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers writes,

The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.

That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.

The controversy over the telephone records is a legacy of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Critics say the Obama administration appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of that strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers.

I’ll go with the meme: Change? I’m sure we’ll hear a lot about this.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 10, 2011 6:16 pm

And three safety mechanisms is too safe.

Hat Tip Instapundit.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 10, 2011 8:58 am

Is the time ripe for a Mormon to be President, or will religion get in Mitt Romney’s or Jon Huntsman Jr.’s way? Sally Quinn asks the question in On Belief, her religious bailiwick at The Washington Post. Eight panelists, including the likes of Barry Lynn who writes,

There really is only one question that needs to be answered: can you faithfully execute the laws of the United States or is there some religious view you hold that you believe transcends that duty?

Which begs the question: Would he, or anyone else, accept the answer, “Yes, I can,” and move on? Or would that question actually be an open door through which the inquisitor would parade his even deeper-held beliefs that “there ain’t no way a Mormon President won’t do the bidding of his (or her) hierarchical superiors in Salt Lake!”

I’ll be back for further comment on this subject.