Blacks Move to SF Suburbs: Liberals Hardest Hit

The liberal issue de la semaine as we French linguists have it is blacks moving from San Francisco and especially from their traditional home in the Fillmore district.  As John Ritter reports in USAToday:

African-Americans are abandoning this famously progressive city at a rate that has alarmed San Francisco officials, who vow to stop the exodus and develop a strategy to win blacks back to the city. In June, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed a task force to study how to reverse decades of policies — and neglect — that black leaders say have fueled the flight.

You mean that blacks are acting like every other immigrant group that ever huddled in an American city?  They are moving to the suburbs?  No!

American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson can’t take it any more. For instance, did none of these liberal reporters know that the reason that blacks came to live in the Fillmore?

Yet none of the papers bothers to note that African-Americans came to the Fillmore in large numbers only because the previous Japanese-American residents were forcibly evacuated to internment camps during World War II.

Oh really?  Blacks, Lifson notes, are represented in San Francisco at about their California average of 6.7 percent. So what’s the big fuss?  Nobody got all bent out of shape as the white percentage in San Francisco declined from 89.5 percent in 1950 to 53 percent in 2000.  And nobody is mourning about how the Irish moved out of the Castro district as gays moved in.

It just shows how one-track and ignorant your average liberal reporter is.

Because the fundamental demographic movement in the United States is that once an ethnic group gets its skills and its income up it moves from the inner city to the suburbs.

And you know why?  It’s one of the little secrets of American life.  Women like living in suburbs.  So really it’s a good sign that blacks are moving out of San Francisco, as Lifson writes, to:

genuine American Dream suburbs like fast-growing Tracy California, which welcomes all races and hosts a proud and growing African-American community that includes a number of people of my acquaintance.

Here’s a dark thought.  Don’t spread it around too much.  Do you think that some of those blacks that Lifson knows in Tracy, CA could be conservatives or, worse, closet conservatives?

Can Peaceful Christianity Beat Militant Islam?

Robert Spencer’s book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t raises an interesting question, according to a review by John Derbyshire.

If, as the subtitle of his book declares, Christianity is a religion of peace, while Islam is irredeemably militant, what on earth does Spencer think is likely to be the outcome of a conflict between the two?

Good old John Derbyshire.  He comes right to the point.  All this talk about whether Islam is or isn’t a religion of peace, or whether Christianity is more peaceful rather misses the point.  The question is: how to prevent militant Islam from taking over the world.

Spencer gets to reply to Derbyshire here.  The Derb responds here, and Spencer gets the last word here.

But maybe it doesn’t matter.  After all, the nation of shopkeepers beat back the challenge of militant secularist France. Commercial empires US and Britain beat back nationalist and then national-socialist-German-workers Germany.  The US beat back the militant communist Soviet Union.

So maybe it isn’t a question of Christianity vs. Islam.  Maybe it is a question of whether “we” really want to push back on militant Islam.

Whoever “we” are.

Is It Over Yet?

The Dow was down another 280 points today, and so Bill Steigerwald asked Fed historian Allan Meltzer if it’s over yet.

I think it’s too soon to say it’s over. It’s the result of errors on the part of both the regulators but especially the banks and financial institutions. The banks and financial institutions were making loans that they had every reason to know could not possibly survive.

There are, as there always are, two questions here.  The first is liquidity.  Can perfectly sound businesses get credit?  The second is solvency.  Are we going to see a lot of businesses going to the wall in the coming year.

The Fed’s job is to make sure that sound business can get credit.  But as for the future, nobody knows.  Will the mortgage mess cause consumers to stop spending and start saving?

Right now, all the experts except the professional contrarians are saying that the economy is sound.

But then they would say that.  From President Bush to Chairman Bernanke to Wall Street they have to say that everything is all right.

Meltzer thinks that the Fed should make it clear that it won’t be bailing anyone out, that it will support the economy but not the bad actors.

But that is exactly what the Fed cannot afford to say.  Who knows which way the political winds will blow in the next few months?

The Fed can’t say anything about bailouts because it hasn’t a clue what will be coming down the pike.  In the final analysis, the Fed will do what it is told.

Appoint a Special Prosecutor?

In the wake of the resignation of Albert Gonzales as Attorney General, Hugh Hewitt thinks not.  He thinks that a confirmation process is a splendid opportunity to take the war on terror to the Democrats.

The confirmation hearing of the right nominee is in fact a great stage for the defense of the Administration’s national security policies, including the recent revisions to FISA.

What is needed is a very sharp and experienced prosecutor who has overseen the investigation, indictment, trial conviction and sentencing of a terrorist or many terrorists in a proceeding that employed evidence that was available only because the government’s full powers of surveillance were deployed.  The nominee needs to be smart on the law and fully aware of what we are up against.

The point is: The administration doesn’t have to get an Attorney General on board by the middle of next week.  It can afford to dance and delay.

And there is the useful fact that the American people believe in the need for surveillance of terror suspects and Democrats apparently don’t.

Fixing the System For Highways

Everyone is naturally outraged by the collapse of an interstate highway bridge over the Mississippi river in Minneapolis.

And because it happened on President Bush’s watch it’s his fault.

Obviously, it is not just the bridge that is broken but the system.  How could the sensible maintenance of bridges have been so neglected, Americans ask?

The answer is the usual one.  Liberals.  There was a time when government didn’t do too much, and one of the major tasks that people expected of it was infrastructure.  There used to be a joke that the job of the Secretary of Commerce was to light the lighthouses and put the fishes to bed every night.

But then came liberals.  And they expanded the menu of programs for which government was responsible.  In particular they vastly expanded social programs, the payment of cash directly to people for not doing anything, or not doing very much.

Then came liberal environmentalists.  They decided that we were “paving over America” and they set to work to block the building of highways.  Much better spend the money on mass transit, they said, and so the states all renamed their Highway Departments as Departments of Transportation.

Not surprisingly, as highway building became controversial, it didn’t happen too much.  For politicians, it was too hard to push against the special-interest opposition in favor of the general interest.

Now it is time to do something, but what?

 Peter Ruane is president and chief executive officer of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, and he writes that:

We need and deserve a system that not only invests in reconstructing, repairing and maintaining aging highways and transit network but also invests in intelligent transportation systems that facilitate efficient and safe movement of goods and people.

You have to agree with him.  And, if you need something to concentrate your attention, there is this:

Since the mid-1990s, China has built 25,000 miles of new, multi-lane highways and has announced plans for 52,000 miles of modern expressways by 2020 -- more than the 46,000-mile U.S. Interstate system.

So what does Ruane suggest?

For the sake of safety and global competitiveness, the U.S. must focus on pushing through in 2009 a real 21st-century transportation bill -- one that will be the envy of the world, not the bane of millions of American drivers and businesses.

That’s where I have a problem.  Any transportation bill passed in Congress today is going to be wasting a huge amount of resources just buying off liberals with enormous environmental studies and mitigation, and building useless bike paths and light rail. 

You can understand why liberals don’t give a damn about the economic benefits of a good transportation infrastructure.  They aren’t integrated into the economy like the rest of us.  They are well-born trust-funders, or they are tenured professors, or they are well-born trust-fund environmentalists or they are government managers, or they are government employees or they are government pensioners of all ages.  What do they care about freight hauling and intercity highways?

Is it really worth while having to buy liberals off?

I’d say that the freight haulers and the road builders would do better to get together and fund the transportation improvements they need without public money.

Here in America we are at least a generation away from utterly discrediting liberals.  So we need to develop strategies to cope until we can set public policy without having to buy them off with outrageous bribes.

But the government can help by selling the concept for new transportation corridors.  Look at the fuss over the so called NAFTA Super Highway from Mexico north through Texas into the heartland of America.  Paleo-Conservatives are bent out of shape on this one because evil foreign Mexican trucks, using special FAST lanes at the border crossings, will be speeding like bullets into the heart of the United States.

The problem is that the Bush Administration is trying to configure the NAFTA Super Highway under a blanket instead of making it into a national show-piece.  You can understand why: unions are opposed because containers will be unloading at Mexican ports.  Liberals are opposed because they hate concrete.  Environmentalists are naturally opposed to the idea of building a ten lane highway anywhere.  Motorists are opposed to toll roads.

Sooner or later we’ve got to stop this tip-toeing around and go public with a new program of transportation improvement. 

But let’s try to minimize the role of the government.  Right now, government just doesn’t work.

The End of Secularism

I had tagged the New York Times Magazine article by Mark Lilla on “The Politics of God,” meaning to get to it later.  Now I find that the irreplaceable “Spengler”, the Asia Times columnist, has detected in the article an important social and political inflection point.  It represents, he writes, a declaration of defeat by the secular liberals.

Not only does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this position from the beginning.

Lilla mourns that after all the progress of the last 200 years we are back in the 16th century.

[W]e find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty.

Earth to Lilla: we are always entangled in conflict over competing revelations.  It’s just that you chaps won’t admit that your secular-liberal religion is a religion, complete with revelation, dogmatic purity, secular duty, and a longing for atonement.  For the last 200-300 years you chaps have been insisting that you are above all that, the superstition, the bigotry, the infamy.

But it was all a lie, and worst of all, it was a lie that you were telling to yourselves.

OK, you say, so the libs have finally admitted defeat.  Now let’s get on with in.

But there’s a problem, according to “Spengler.”

Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims.

The truth about secular liberalism is that it has always been a war against Christianity.  So it makes sense that its last act would be to betray the Christians to the Muslims.

Well, there are some of us that just don’t want to surrender to the Muslims, and we don’t feel that we have deputized our liberal friends to enter into surrender negotiations with anyone.  Regarding the war on terror we take the Reagan position during the Cold War.  We win, they lose.

The big question is how far down the road to ruin the secular liberals will take us before the people of the west cast them off and demand to be led to victory.

My guess is: a lot further down the road that any of us would like. 

Education: What to Do?

The other day, rancher, military expert, and college teacher Victor Davis Hanson went shopping in his hometown, the town where six generations of Hansons had gotten “a good, competitive K-12 education.&rdquo:  Not any more.

I noticed that the 20-something cashier could not count out change. The next day, at the electronic outlet store, another young clerk could not read -- much less explain -- the basic English of the buyer’s warranty.

As another school year is set to get under way, it’s worth pondering where this epidemic of ignorance came from.

What should we do about it?  More testing?  That’s not what the Democrats want.  Writes Debra J. Saunders, quoting Rep. George Miller (D-CA):

"Many Americans do not believe that the success of our students or of our schools can be measured by one test administered on one day, and I agree with them. This is not fair."

The reason we have testing, of course, is that the federal government has been churning out cash to local school districts and most of the money has been wasted.  When you dole out taxpayers’ money to government bureaucrats it is very difficult to get any accountability unless you are ruthless about reporting and results.

But parents don’t like it when little Johnny flunks a grade, and teachers don’t like anybody telling them what to do.

So what do we need?  More money?  More compulsion?  More programs?

How about some radical change?  How about we let parents decide where they want their children to go to school?

It’s interesting that the biggest increase in male literacy in Britain was in the years immediately around 1870.  That was the year that Parliament passed a law providing for board schools to fill the gaps in private education.  But by 1880 when British education became compulsory, literacy was already up to 95 percent according to Clark in A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Here’s the point.  In the United States, literacy was always high, whatever education system we had.  In Britain, literacy rose throughout the 19th century and reached a peak right about the time that education became compulsory, i.e., before it had a chance to educate a new generation of children.

So let’s try something different.  Let’s not pretend that government can educate our children.

Let’s return the responsibility for education to parents.