† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case that ruled Washington D.C.'s handgun ban violates the Second Amendment, “was among the first” in line at the police department to register a firearm, reports The Associated Press. He thinks the new rules also violate the constitutional right to bear arms only one handgun may be registered during the first 90 days, the weapon must carry fewer than 12 rounds and it must be kept in the home if used only for self-defense.

† The Uniter: Part II: A couple of dozen “Hillraisers,’’ who raised more than $100,000 for Clinton during the primary season, are so “adamantly” opposed to Barack Obama’s candidacy they asked to meet with Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. and a John McCain campaign advisor, reports The Wall Street Journal:

Amy Siskind, a former Wall Street executive who helped organize the meeting, declined to identify most the attendees, citing their desire for privacy. She said that some of the recently formed pro-Hillary organizations that have been critical of Sen. Obama–such as Together4Us.com, which officially hosted the event, and JustSayNoDeal.com had representatives there.

† Is This Why We Fight? (second item): In a Washington Post op-ed, Center for a New American Security senior fellow Derek Chollet and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow James Goldgeier argue that presidential doctrines are too, well, doctrinaire, in dealing with today’s geopolitical complexities:

During the Cold War, Americans grew accustomed to presidents having big, broad doctrines to organize their thinking. … Jimmy Carter's vow to protect U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf, by force if necessary, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. … Ronald Reagan's pledge to assist anticommunist insurgencies worldwide. All these principles were proclaimed within the context of Washington's overarching Cold War strategy to contain Soviet communism, famously articulated in 1947 by the legendary diplomat George F. Kennan. …

But since the collapse of communism, the effort to impose one grand theory on global politics has proven deeply frustrating - and foolish. …

When George W. Bush took office more than seven years ago, his new administration believed that [Bill] Clinton's failure to define a clear foreign policy framework had helped squander U.S. influence.

The Bush team set out to speak explicitly about doctrine, emphasizing U.S. dominance of the world system, a willingness to go it alone and an insistence that Washington was entitled to take preemptive action to fight emerging threats. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, offered Bush a historic pretext for articulating this set of ideas …

Today, however, the Bush doctrine is in tatters: Reeling from Iraq, abandoned even by many conservatives, the administration is adopting 11th-hour positions that are … more ad hoc, embracing multilateral approaches and tailoring solutions to specific challenges - something suspiciously like the Clinton approach Bush used to sneer at.

In the last analysis, the Bush Doctrine – which aimed to seed the Muslim world with democracy, even if it took a war to do it - resulted in the U.S. expending blood and treasure to create Islamic republics in Afghanistan and Iraq, where women are subject to Sharia law.

As Christian radio talk show host Paul Edwards points out in a Townhall.com column, “The ideal of freedom in all of its various expressions (speech, religion, etc.) has its source in Christian principles, principles not only foreign to the adherents of Islam, but hostile towards them.” He adds:

Democracy germinates from a recognition of the unalienable rights granted by a Creator. America ought to be involved in helping people under non-democratic regimes recognize that their innate longings for freedom are the gifts of their Creator. But this has been accomplished most effectively by the spread of the Christian gospel through worldwide missionary activity (not state-sponsored), resulting in changed hearts giving way to the ideal of freedom as an innate right. Recognizing their G-d-given rights, the people obtain them by rising up to demand them, not by a foreign power imposing them. A foreign power may assist them in securing these unalienable rights once the people of a particular state have recognized them and demanded them, but a foreign power cannot impose them on the people.

The Stiletto doubts that our women in uniform left their homes and families and risked life and limb to secure freedom and "democracy" for only half the population of these countries. 

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, How Poor Is Poor?): Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I-NY) thinks New York's Center for Economic Opportunity has come up with a more accurate formula to measure poverty than the one used by the federal government, reports The Washington Post:

The current federal measures show New York City with a poverty rate of 18.9 percent. But the new measure shows that the rate is 23 percent. And the new measure shows wide differences within that spectrum. There are fewer people in extreme poverty, reflecting the impact of anti-poverty assistance programs. But under the new measure, the number of elderly poor nearly doubles, from 18 percent to 32 percent, mostly because of health-care costs.

The current federal poverty measure, in use since 1969, is based primarily on how much of an individual or household's pretax income is spent on food. The federal poverty measure is used to determine eligibility and amounts of assistance from federal and state programs.

[W]hile food accounted for a third of household spending in the 1960s, food now accounts for only an eighth of spending, with housing and transportation taking a larger slice of income.  …

The new measure also takes into account regional differences in housing costs to reflect the higher amounts in expensive cities such as New York and San Francisco.

The formula Bloomberg wants the nation to adopt as the new standard includes household spending on food, clothing, shelter, transportation, utilities and out-of-pocket medical expenses, as well as food stamps, rent subsidies and other public assistance.