Quotes of the day

From today's Federalist Patriot email brief.

"The Children's Defense Fund and civil rights organizations frequently whine about the number of black children living in poverty. In 1999, the Bureau of the Census reported that 33.1 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with 13.5 percent of white children. It turns out that race per se has little to do with the difference. Instead, it's welfare and single parenthood. When black children are compared to white children living in identical circumstances, mainly in a two-parent household, both children will have the same probability of being poor. How much does racial discrimination explain? So far as black poverty is concerned, I'd say little or nothing, which is not to say that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. ...[B]ecause the civil rights struggle is over and won is not the same as saying that there are not major problems for a large segment of the black community. What it does say is that they're not civil rights problems, and to act as if they are leads to a serious misallocation of resources. Rotten education is a severe handicap to upward mobility, but is it a civil rights problem?" --Walter Williams

"We now have an answer to the question of whether U.S. agents should knock down doors and bat the reefer from the fingers of cancer patients. Yes! By all means, yes. The Supremes have ruled that federal anti-weed laws must trump individual states' laws on medicinal marijuana. So much for the idea that the states are the laboratories of democracy. ... I am not a lawyer, which is why the idea of the interstate commerce clause having jurisdiction over intrastate non-commerce is amusing. Everything is a matter of interstate commerce, it would seem. Pity President Bush didn't claim the right to knock over Saddam Hussein based on the interstate commerce clause; every statist and big-government advocate would have gotten writer's cramp praising this novel approach. It's only a matter of time before fast food is regulated under the clause, since hungry truckers often take sacks of fries across state lines. It's the perfect law. We could use it to annex Mars." --James Lileks

"Rather than just another $400 million line item in the federal budget, funding for PBS should be a litmus test for conservatives. After all, if you can't eliminate federal funding for a media outlet that regularly attacks your party and movement, what programs CAN you muster the political will to cut? The situation is as if taxpayers were being forced to fund advertising campaigns for John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi and conservatives who control the presidency and both houses of Congress were unwilling or unable to stop it. The real problem for taxpayers is that PBS is just one of hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of federal programs that take a small slice out of the budget pie every year but add up to big money. If Republicans tinker around the edges by changing the ideological slant of PBS, it will be just another sign that too many Republicans are OK with big government as long as it is 'our' big government. To say the least, that is poor strategy." --Paul Gessing

"The frivolous demands made on our military -- that they protect museums while fighting for their lives, that they tiptoe around mosques from which people are shooting at them -- betray an irresponsibility made worse by ingratitude toward men who have put their lives on the line to protect us. It is impossible to fight a war without heroism. Yet can you name a single American military hero acclaimed by the media for an act of courage in combat? Such courage is systematically ignored by most of the media. If American troops kill a hundred terrorists in battle and lose ten of their own men doing it, the only headline will be: 'Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq Today.' Those in the media who have carped at the military for years, and have repeatedly opposed military spending, are now claiming to be 'honoring' our military by making a big production out of publishing the names of all those killed in Iraq. Will future generations see through this hypocrisy -- and wonder why we did not?" --Thomas Sowell

"As distrust of the press grows, news articles are relentlessly scrutinized for bias, but almost no one is focusing on stories that are simply ignored. For instance, a May 18 report in the Afghan newspaper Kabul Weekly said the riots that killed 17 people were not about disrespect for the Koran in American detainment camps -- they were a show of force by the Taliban and another fundamentalist group, Hezb-e Eslami. 'These demonstrations were organized by the Taliban and their supporters, and only some naive people joined the protesters,' the newspaper said. The BBC picked up the story on May 22, but so far as I can see, it was completely ignored in American news media. If you edited, let us say, a large newspaper in Washington or New York, or a prominent newsmagazine accused of causing these famous riots, wouldn't you want to check this one out?" --John Leo