The Daily Top Five: March 13, 2007

1. Roger Simon asks, How Pure Does Rudy Have to Be? His answer can be summed up as "do Republicans want purity or the Presidency." Personally, I like Guiliani and as Simon noted from George Will, I know where he stands on social issues and it doesn't bother me. The only thing I want Rudy to shift on is immigration. He and many others need to look at the matter as a national security issue and not a labor issue. But other than that, he looks pretty good to me.

2. Gen. Peter Pace has issued a statement regarding his comments about homosexuality. My thoughts on the original subject are here. I like Pace's comments, saying he should not have provided a personal answer but stuck to Pentagon policy. He didn't apologize for his views and he shouldn't under any circumstances.

3. The current Democratic strategy of building a time table into the supplemental appropriations bill is not getting good reviews, even from the Washington Post:

Congress should rigorously monitor the Iraqi government's progress on those benchmarks. By Mr. Bush's own account the purpose of the troop surge in Iraq is to enable political progress. If progress does not occur, the military strategy should be reconsidered. But aggressive oversight is quite different from mandating military steps according to an inflexible timetable conforming to the need to capture votes in Congress or at the 2008 polls. Ms. Pelosi's strategy leads not toward a responsible withdrawal from Iraq but to a constitutional power struggle with Mr. Bush, who has already said he will veto the legislation. Such a struggle would serve the interests of neither the Democrats nor the country.

Of course, another failure to even pursue a course of action will signal yet another policy failure for the Democrats.

4. I forgot about this Op-Ed by Sen. Edward Kennedy from Sunday's Washington Post, which starts:

Rome wasn't built in a day, but if this new Congress had been its architect, it might have been. It has been just 66 days since Congress changed hands, and already the results are remarkable. In my 45 years in Congress, I have never seen the Senate turn so rapidly from stalemate toward real progress. While the daily media focus may be on our internal debates or the next presidential election, the biggest news of 2007 is that the election mattered and that the Democrats have already delivered for the American people.

What utter bombast!!! I don't know what Senate Kennedy is looking at but the U.S. Senate hasn't done anything. The examples Kennedy lists, hearings on the Walter Reed mess ("uncovered" by the Dems according to Kennedy, but I thought it was reporters--but that may be teh same thing), forcing the banking industry to admit that fees might be too high--oh my goodness (not that everyone but the banking industry didn't know that), hearing testimony about the non-scandal of U.S. Attorney firings and so on. Not one of the examples Kennedy talks about was actually done by the Senate. The Senate may have talked about the issue, but they certainly didn't do anything.

5. La Shawn Barber offers a lesson in affirmative action. While her post is dedicated to Univerity of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, who has vowed to disboey the voters of Michigan who passed an anti-race preference referendum in 2006, the message applies to everyone who calls anti-preference people racists.

The original purpose behind affirmative action was to reach out to Americans once excluded from certain admissions and hiring processes because of race and include them in a wider pool of candidates. The idea was to give qualified blacks an opportunity to apply to colleges and for jobs previously closed to them. What affirmative action turned into was a racial spoils system by which underqualified blacks were admitted or hired, despite not being as qualified as everyone else in the pool. Do you see the distinction?

Barber links to a wonderful, older article that destroys the concept of equality in admissions at UM.