The sufferings of the Christians in Iraq continues:

Mosul, Mar. 13, 2008 (CWNews.com) – Archbishop Bishop Paulos Faraj Raho of Mosul, the Iraqi prelate who was kidnapped by gunmen on February 29, is dead.

The kidnappers of the Chaldean Catholic archbishop, who had been demanding a heavy ransom, told Church officials that the archbishop was dead, AsiaNews reports. The kidnappers reportedly gave instructions on how Church officials could recover the archbishop’s body.

Archbishop Raho was seized outside the Holy Spirit cathedral in Mosul after conducting a Stations of the Cross service on Friday, February 29. His driver and two bodyguards were killed by the gunmen who abducted the archbishop.

In the days since the kidnapping, Church leaders had pleaded in vain for some clear evidence that Archbishop Raho was alive and well. The archbishop, who was 69, suffered from a serious heart condition and needed daily medication. It remains unclear whether Archbishop Raho died of that heart ailment or was killed by his abductors.

Informed of the prelate’s death, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement condemning “an act of inhuman violence that offends the dignity of the human being.”

The critics are as-usual on this – because evil men killed a good man, our effort in Iraq is a failure. The critics, however, are easily and best ignored these days; so invested in defeat are they that they no longer even approach rationality.

But it cannot be denied that the situation of Iraqi Christians is desperate – in spite of many efforts on the part of Iraqi Moslems to do the right thing, the small Iraqi Christian community is all too easy as a scapegoat for any radical and/or criminal group which wants to make a point, or even just make a buck. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that the Christians of Iraq need the protection – as the Kurds have – provided by having an autonomous region of their own. There was a move a few years ago to make the Assyrian area of northern Iraq a self-governing region, and we should look into that (while Christians are scattered around Iraq, most Iraqi Christians live in Assyria).

While this horrible tragedy has brought real sadness to me, I refuse to be stampeded into folly – Iraq must remain a united nation, lest Iran and Syria gain by a carve up of the Iraqi body politic. Outside of such puresly strategic considerations, the fate of our effort in Iraq hinges upon the ability of a majority Moslem nation to engage in a pluralistic democracy which accords respect to ethnic and religious minorities. If we carved up Iraq along confessional and/or ethnic lines, we’d just be substituting a multitude of problems for a single problem. The Iraqis must move forward, together – Sunnis and Shia; Moslem and Christian; Arab and Kurd; only thus can Iraq take its rightful place amongst the nations of the world, and serve as an example for an exhausted and dispirited Arab/Moslem world, weighed down by centuries of oppression.

Interesting and rather alarming article over at First Things by Steven W. Mosher about the collapse of birth rates around the world – the article is written in the form of an argument between Mosher and a lefty who insists that the concerns about the brith rate are actually just racists worried there aren’t enough white babies being born, but as Mosher points out, the demographic winter is spreading rapidly around the globe:

The unprecedented fall in fertility rates that began in postwar Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every corner of the globe.

Take Latin America, for example. The image of the loving Mexican mamacita surrounded by a passel of barefoot children remains scratched on the minds of Americans, even when it has largely vanished in the dusty pueblos of Mexico itself. Government-enforced sterilization campaigns, along with simple modernity, have dramatically shrunk family size south of the border in recent years. When I speak to American audiences, they are invariably surprised to learn that the average young Mexican family now numbers no more children than its American counterpart.

But Central and South American countries, too, are seeing their birthrates fall. Most Latin American countries are now rapidly approaching replacement rate fertility, if they are not already there, according to the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). Women in Brazil, the largest South American country, currently average only 2.3 children. The inhabitants of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile are even less fertile.

Across the Pacific, China has become a byword for forced-pace population control. Since the early eighties, Chinese women have been allowed an average of only 1.7 children, a birthrate so low that by 2020 China’s median age will be older than that of the United States.

India’s de facto two-child policy is neither as well known nor as brutal as China’s. But this policy, in conjunction with simple modernity, has effectively brought the fertility rate down to about 2.8 or so. India is projected to reach replacement rate fertility in a decade or so.

The voluntary childlessness of the Japanese exceeds even the forced-pace population reduction of China’s one-child policy. With a total fertility rate of only 1.25, Japan is on the brink of a major demographic meltdown. Its population of 127 million has stopped growing and—if the birthrate continues at this low level—will soon begin to shrink at an alarming pace. A population bust, like an explosion, proceeds in geometric progression.

The old-age tsunami that is about to hit Japan will not spare other Asian countries. The Four Tigers—Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore—are already getting long in the tooth.

Wherever we turn in the world, we see the same general picture. The only seeming exception is Sub-Saharan Africa, where birthrates are still fairly robust. But Africa has another problem: It languishes in the grip of an HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is sending some nations, such as South Africa, into absolute population decline.

The latest forecasts by the UNPD show the number of people in the world shrinking by mid-century, that is, before today’s young adults reach retirement age. I am speaking here of the UNDP’s “low variant” projections—historically the most accurate—which show that the population of the world will continue to creep up until about the year 2040, peaking at around 7.6 billion people. This is only a fraction more—one-sixth or so–than the 6.5 billion that the planet supports at present. Then the global population implosion, slow at first, but accelerating over time, begins. We fall back to current levels by 2082 and then shrink to under five billion by the turn of the next century.

I first took note of this around the year 2000 – when I came across the “low variant” projection and noted that the global population in 2150 could be 3 billion people, less than 50% of what it is today. From what I understand, the “low variant” revolves around whether or not birth rates will continue to fall at their current rate – and since that time, I’ve seen no indicators of a reversal of the demographic trends. In short, the “low variant” does seem to be the way things are going – though we must always keep in mind that things may change.

But, of course, things won’t change just by accident – it took a consistent effort by governments and pressure groups to bring us to this condition, and it will take a similar effort to swing things the other way. In my view, we live in a pretty wrecked world – a century or more of leftwing influences have entirely destroyed the basis for civilization; and not just our civilization, but all civilization. That we still have a semblance of civilization is akin to the way the Romans had civilization in the late 4th century – only because the final crash hadn’t happened, yet.

We’ve bought a lot of lies over the past century – that we can in the normal course of events engage in uncommitted sexual liasons; that we can in the normal course of events divorce for the most trivial of reasons; that we can in the normal course of events consume massive amounts of pornography; that we can in the normal course of events use abortion and birth control to decouple sex from its procreative aspect; that we can in the normal course of events farm out the raising of children to day care and public schools…the net result of all this lying to ourselves is what you see in front of you: random school shootings; massive illegitimacy, serial divorce when people even bother to marry…and, most devastating, the lack of willingness to produce the next generation. And, by the way, how do I plead? Guilty – I bought the lie, too.

We can rebuild our world and reclaim our civilization from the ruins – but for us to do so, it will take a conscious decision on our part to stop lying to oursleves, and to start acting like real men and real women.

Why need a strong dollar? For me, its a matter of basic fairness – those who hold a US dollar today should have a reasonable expectation that tomorrow it will still be worth a dollar. Outside of that, there are a host of purely economic reasons for a strong dollar, and Jack Kemp lays out why McCain is the man to bring us a strong dollar:

With the dollar’s weakness pervasive and the economy slowing down to a near halt, with more and more evidence of too many Americans, particularly people of color, losing their homes and their nest eggs of wealth, I believe McCain will chart a political and economic course for our nation that will do far more than just offer “hope” or “change.” I believe he will pursue policies that will actually lead to strong economic growth while ending these early stages of dollar weakness and inflation.

Those on the left will ask in response, “Don’t you have to have higher interest rates to strengthen the dollar?” Absolutely not!

As David Malpass, chief global economist at Bear Stearns, points out, “The two aren’t tightly connected. Many countries with low interest rates have had strong currencies, including the German mark in the 1960s and the euro now. The dollar strengthened in the first years of the Reagan administration when he focused on it and put in good economic policies. We should do that again. The United States is a great country, and the dollar is normally a great currency.”

McCain, I firmly believe, will do that again.

As I wrote recently, moving our nation toward a flatter, fairer and simplified tax code that is both pro-growth and pro-family while strengthening the investment climate in our country will immediately strengthen the demand for the dollar here and around the globe. McCain knows we need a tax policy for the 21st century that both recognizes the need for a competitive economy in an increasingly flattening world while encouraging capital formation and job creation here at home. His ideas for cutting corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent, expensing all investment in machinery, equipment and technology, making permanent the 15 percent tax rate on capital gains, dividends and estates while eliminating the alternative minimum tax would give us the answer to the dangerous simultaneity of inflation and recession.

These pro-growth initiatives by candidate McCain will force Sens. Obama and Clinton and their political advisers to say, “Oh no, we can’t cut tax rates, we need higher taxes – but only on the rich.” But soaking-the-rich rhetoric and policies to redistribute wealth will weaken the U.S. investment climate, further weaken the dollar and, in the end, exacerbate stagflation.

McCain’s thesis of noninflationary growth will have the winning edge against Obama and Clinton’s “antithesis.” I truly believe this, among the other issues, like free trade, immigration reform, national security and a strong foreign policy, accompanied by McCain’s pledge of strong appointments to the Supreme Court like Roberts and Alito, will give Republicans the opportunity to both win the White House and gain seats in the U.S. Congress.

The dollar became the world’s reserve currency because of all the world’s economies, that of the United States could be best relied upon to be governed by rational ideas and be ruled by law, rather than governmental whim. People are wary of the dollar today for a variety of reasons, but not least of which is the worry that come January, 2009, the United States will not be as friendly an investment climate as now. With the Bush tax cuts set to expire, the worry is that if you keep your money in the US, you’ll find yourself hit with a rather large tax penalty because liberals in the United States want to tax “the rich” (which actually doesn’t mean taxing real rich people, but works out to taxing productive people and capital).

With Democrats in control of Congress and at least an even money chance that a tax and spend ultra-liberal will be sworn in come January, it might be a good time to hedge your bets on the United States and move your money into Euros…or into oil futures. On the other hand, a McCain victory – especially if accompanied by more GOPers in Congress – would be seen as a signal that taxes will remain low and America will remain open for investment.

Details over at Blogs for John McCain’s Victory.

How long, I wonder, before this trial gets a continuance to January 21st, 2009?

An e-mail message made public on Monday in the fraud trial of Antoin Rezko, a businessman and political contributor, brought attention to Senator Barack Obama’s role in discussions involving a state health planning board that Mr. Rezko is accused of improperly influencing.

The message indicated that Mr. Obama, now a Democratic presidential candidate, and other top Illinois politicians consulted in 2003 on legislation to keep the board, which approved the construction of health facilities, from expiring under sunset provisions in state law.

The vaguely worded message also seemed to raise the possibility that Mr. Obama, who at the time was chairman of the Illinois Senate’s health committee, had been involved in recommending candidates for the board.

Mr. Rezko is accused of using his influence in state government to stack the board with associates, including some who made political contributions to Mr. Obama and other top Illinois politicians, and of seeking a bribe on a hospital project.

But David Wilhelm, a former campaign adviser to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois who asked that the e-mail message be written, said in an interview that he had never talked about the appointment process to Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama has said he had nothing to do with Mr. Rezko’s activities with the board.

Mr. Obama has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and his name is expected to come up only tangentially during the trial. But given his tight race against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, each mention of Mr. Obama’s name is being closely watched.

Now, Obama has spent a lot of time lately trying to make it seem like Rezko was just this guy he had dealings with from time to time…but Rezko was actually a very close friend and political associate of Rezko. The reason Obama is deserately distancing himself from Rezko is because of things like this – you know, the sort of connections to corrupt lobbyists and wheeler-dealers which had Democrats accusing the GOP of having a “culture of corruption” in 2006. When Matt and I were writing Caucus of Corruption we didn’t just put anyone into the book – we put in people we felt were excellent examples of the level of corruption in the Democratic party, and Obama fit very neatly into that catagory. Keep in mind, its not just Rezko and Obama; its the governor of Illinois and a whole bunch of politicians, government employees and associated hangers-on who have been helping Illinois to approach New Jersey levels of political corruption. To think that a politician would emerge out of such an immoral stew without a few skeletons in the closet is to hope against hope.

There is, unfortunately, plenty of corruption to go around in politics and GOPers have not been immune to the lures of money, power and sex – but the GOPers who do these things eventually get caught and punished; the problem, as Matt and I showed in great detail in Caucus, is that Democrats only very rarely get called to account for their corruption. Tom DeLay was indicted for alleged violations of a very obscure Texas law, and he’s out of politics – William Jefferon has been indicted for major corruption and he gets standing ovations from his fellow Democrats, and Speaker Pelosi tries to get him on major House committees. We’ll never cure all corruption in politics, but just so long as Democrats are nearly immune to punishment for corruption, so will the horrific levels of corruption in politics continue.

UPDATE: The Obama file.

Re-emphasising his earlier statements:

New Orleans, Mar 8, 2008 (CNA).- Senator John McCain made efforts on Friday to do more than just distance himself from the anti-Catholic teachings of John Hagee by repudiating any comments made by the well known televangelist.

In an interview with the Associated Press the Republican presidential candidate said, “We’ve had a dignified campaign, and I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics”.

McCain also brought up the fact that he sent his children to Catholic schools as proof of his acceptance of Catholics. “I sent two of my children to Catholic school. I categorically reject and repudiate any statement that was made that was anti-Catholic, both in intent and nature. I categorically reject it, and I repudiate it,” McCain said.

He also tried to strike a conciliatory tone for his campaign by saying, “we can’t have that in this campaign. We’re trying to unite the country. We’re uniting the country, not dividing it.”

For this Catholic, the matter is now closed.

From Gateway Pundit:

Just like his talk on NAFTA, it looks like Obama is not to be trusted with what he says on Iraq, either.

The American Mind has the transcript:

STEPHEN SACKUR: Let me stop you just for a moment. You said that he’ll revisit it when he goes to the White House. So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out within sixteen months, isn’t a commitment isn’t it?

POWER: You can’t make a commitment in whatever month we’re in now, in March of 2008 about what circumstances are gonna be like in Jan. 2009. We can’t even tell what Bush is up to in terms of troop pauses and so forth. He will of course not rely upon some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US senator.

He will rely upon a plan, an operational plan that he pulls together, in consultation with people who are on the ground, to whom he doesn’t have daily access now as a result of not being the president.

So to think, I mean it would be the height of ideology, you know, to sort of say, well I said it therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality entreats me –

SACKUR: Ok, so the 16 months is negotiable?

POWER: It’s the best case scenario…

Power, of course, is now out due to calling Hillary a monster, but I think this is rather descriptive of the vacuity of Obama on foreign and defense policy. This is the man who has repeatedly said he’d “end” the war in Iraq in 2009…and here’s his senior foreign policy advisor saying, in essence, “well, we just don’t know”…and, of course, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing exactly what you’ll do come January 2009 but for crying out loud, if you don’t know then don’t go making fool statements implying that you do know!

I was wandering around a book store on Saturday and espied Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, and it occured to me just how inane that title is…like something put together by a publisher using a focus group to figure out a title which sounds best. And it does sound good, but it doesn’t actually mean anything – being hopeful is audacious? If you are audacious you’ll be hopeful? I figure an earlier version of the title was Yes We Can Have Audacious Hope – but it was rejected as too many words for a liberal to grasp all at once…

This man, Barack Obama: no executive experience; minimal legislative experience; never held a job which required results…a lot of words. That is all.

Ah, the Democrats and their little problems:

…Clinton is still about 100 delegates behind, and the Democrats’ proportional representation rules make it impossible for her to close the gap in the remaining primaries. Her only plausible path to the nomination is to win a majority of super-delegates (party and public officials) and, perhaps, to reverse the party’s decision disqualifying the Michigan and Florida delegations — i.e., overruling the voters in one case and changing the rules after the game has been played in the other.

This might pass muster if the national polls show an unambiguous and substantial move toward Clinton. Otherwise, in more likely and ambiguous circumstances, a Clinton nomination will seem illegitimate to many who have been swooning over Obama and streaming into polling booths because he alone offers hope.

The March 4 exit polls show increasing percentages of Democratic primary voters unwilling to accept the rejection of their candidate. Both candidates have an incentive to attack on grounds that will weaken the other in the general election, as Clinton has already started to do with her “red phone” ad.

All of this is a windfall, surely, for McCain — unless he forgets that his party is in trouble and that he needs to make an affirmative case for himself and his policies. And loudly enough to overcome the din as Clinton and Obama pummel each other.

That last bit is very, very important for we GOPers. We must not even for a moment think that because the Democrats are beating each other up that we’ll cruise to victory. We’re still behind in national polling and in fundraising and while we have, I think, the best man to deflate whichever part of HillBama comes out on top, it will still take an intense effort to do so. Remember that GOPers – if you don’t want President Obama or President Hillary in January, then commit yourself right now to the longest, hardest political fight you’ve ever seen.

Meanwhile, however, the Democrats are in a pickle right now – and deservedly so, as they’ve spent most of the past 40 years playing gender and racial politics against us, and now they’re caught in a web of their own deceit. Really cool, huh? To think that they’ve been saying we’re the racists and sexists, and it will have to be Democrats who either reject a woman or reject a black man! Personally, I’m still thinking that Obama has the inside track to the nomination, but only just – Hillary is a very seasoned campaigner and a very down and dirty politician; Obama will have to call up a level of strength and hardness which have not been evident in his campaign to date.

When your business is primarily in the murder of innocent children, this sort of thing comes naturally:

Los Angeles, Feb 28, 2008 (CNA).- The Advocate, a student magazine at UCLA, has released phone recordings of Planned Parenthood fundraising staffers approving of a donor who claimed he wanted his money to help “lower the number of black people.”

The magazine conducted a seven-state investigation to discover how Planned Parenthood fundraising centers would respond to a caller who expressed explicitly racist motives.

An actor posing as a racist donor called Planned Parenthood development centers asking that his donations be used to abort African-American babies to “lower the number of black people.” Each branch agreed to process the racially earmarked donation. None expressed concern about the racist motives for the donation, and some staffers encouraged the racist reasoning.

In a phone conversation with an Idaho Planned Parenthood office, the actor stated, “the less black kids out there, the better.” Director of Development Autumn Kersey called his position “understandable” and indicated she was excited to process his donation since she had never had a request “like this” before. An Ohio representative, Lisa Hutton, after hearing the donor’s racist explanation said that Planned Parenthood “will accept the money for whatever reason.”

The Editor-in-chief of The Advocate, UCLA sophomore Lila Rose, is leading a student campaign petitioning UCLA to end its ties with Planned Parenthood. Her campaign has won the support of Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rose’s previous work in The Advocate has been featured on The O’Reilly Factor and national radio. Rose said she is hopeful that regardless of their position on abortion, students can unite to combat Planned Parenthood’s racism both past and present.

UCLA senior Jose Manaiza, who was a 2007 nominee for the UCLA Student of the Year award and winner of the 2007 UCLA Chancellor’s Service Award, called upon his fellow African-American students and the entire UCLA student body to “commit to this new era of the Civil Rights Movement and fight any type of racism from Planned Parenthood.”

This is not at all surprising as Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, always thought of elective abortion as a way to limit the number of “inferior” people – especially black people. Not at all shocked to find that PP honors its founder by keeping up the racist end of abortion.

The fundamental problem with abortion is the errosion of humanity which goes along with it – in order to contemplate killing an unborn child, a person has to be substantially dehumanised (either by mental incapacity, addiction or societal pressure), but in order to argue that abortion either is or even may be a good thing, a person has to become all-out wicked…a person who not just lies, but who enjoys lying as a sport. Such moral degradation makes it easy to agree with someone who wants abortion for genocidal reasons – after all, with tens of millions already, why stand on ceremony?

The headline:

33 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Raid in Gaza

The actual story:

Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the tiny seaside territory in late 2005, but militants proceeded to fire rockets from the abandoned territory at Israeli communities.

Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, took control of Gaza by force from the rival Fatah in June.

Israeli government spokesman David Baker said Israel was ”compelled to continue to take these defensive measures” to protect more than 200,000 Israelis living under the threat of Palestinian rocket barrages.

Militants ”hide behind their own civilians, using them as human shields, while actively targeting Israeli population centers,” Baker said. ”They bear the responsibility for the results.”

The actual story is buried on page two of the report. The headline should read, for mere accuracy, Israelis Respond to Hamas Attacks – but that would be fair and accurate, and the MSM doesn’t allow that in reporting about Israel.