August 22, 2005

Cindy Sheehan Is Right
by Sheldon Richman

The sort of people who think there is no greater honor than to die in a war are visibly uncomfortable with Cindy Sheehan. They can’t understand her. Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Casey Sheehan, a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. She’s camped outside President Bush’s Crawford, Tex., ranch demanding a meeting with him and calling attention to the terrible predicament into which the president has delivered the American people.

Conservative commentators and talk-radio personalities apparently can’t fathom why Mrs. Sheehan hasn’t accepted her loss with more equanimity, if not satisfaction. After all, they suggest, her son perished while carrying out the inspired will of the president of the United States. Not everyone gets to go to his reward in such a grand fashion. Most people die unremarkable deaths, having quietly and unspectacularly worked to make decent lives for themselves, taking care of their family and being good friends and neighbors. Casey Sheehan and more than 1,800 other Americans were lucky to be spared that ho-hum fate. They died for a Great Cause. Thousands of others will bear the evidence of their patriotic endeavor for the rest of their days, having been crippled or maimed in their service to Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld. (Read the rest here)

What Does the Administration’s Leaked Mea Culpa on Iraq Portend?
By Robert Higgs

In the dreary march of no-news stories about the war in Iraq, little changes from day to day, or even from month to month or from year to year. The killing continues relentlessly, almost monotonously; the Iraqi people struggle to survive without adequate supplies of water, sewerage, and electricity; the political situation festers and bursts forth episodically in kidnappings, assassinations, and violent reprisals; much-ballyhooed elections serve as little more than pointless rituals; the elected representatives quarrel and haggle, altering nothing in the world outside the meeting hall. Through it all, President George W. Bush never fails to perceive progress, and he always promises that U.S. forces will leave Iraq as soon as the Iraqi government becomes capable of providing security.

So, when a genuine news report comes along, even on the front page of the Sunday Washington Post, we may fail to notice that something significant has actually changed. The article I have in mind, by Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer, appeared on August 14 under the headline and subhead “U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq: Administration Is Shedding ‘Unreality’ That Dominated Invasion, Official Says.” Although the article quotes several experts outside the government, its punch comes from statements attributed to anonymous high-level “officials in Washington and Baghdad.” Such “leaks” often consist of information the government wants people to have, even as its official statements continue to follow a different story line. The government may want to see how people react to the leaked revelations or to soften them up for a policy change to come. (Read the rest here)

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Libertarian Commentary on The News
By Nathan A. Barton © 2005

Schools are really representative of the mess our land is in, and the cause of that mess, like the schools' mess, is the government itself. So we can start out today reading about messed-up schools and thinking about how great it would be to get their problems solved, in large part by getting governments' noses out.

Government-Ruined, Theft-Funded Schools

Colleges Attempt to Protect Students from Identity Theft
Reuters via MSNBC
The House Education and the Workforce Committee reauthorized funding for education with a provision prohibiting a national database on every college and university student. This mother of all higher Ed databases would be a hacker's ultimate delight. When Congress returns this fall the battle shifts to the House floor and the Senate. The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will consider reauthorization legislation too. Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY), so far, has not been the outspoken opponent of the database that Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the House Chairman, proved to be. Advocates for privacy and limited government are right to be worried about the creation of a massive new federal database that would include a great deal of information about every student in the United States - their finances, name and date of birth, addresses, etc. Even if the National Center for Education Statistics does not include the Social Security Number in the database, there is still plenty of information in this database for Big Brother to access and hackers to try to pilfer. Washington needs to be sent the message that this is a database that should never be built. With their huge databases, universities may rival financial institutions as attractive targets for the crime, estimated to affect over 9 million Americans a year at the total cost of more than $50 billion, experts said.

Thanks to COCL for this item. Of course, university databases already exist and are subject to attack (see the next story). This would just make the situation worse: all the universities can do is really lobby to fight it: they can't reject this if it passes Congress because (with the notable exception of Hillsdale College and very, very few others) they have already sold their souls to the feds for student loans and grants, and a wide variety of federal assistance that has created a de-facto National higher education system. Even if the schools fight it, their legislatures will probably not permit them to resist to the point of losing money. (Read the rest here)

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