Hewitt Blog

Reactions are piling up to the proposed "Ground Zero Mosque."  An important vote will be held on the project today. Here's a photo from Wikipedia on the proposed location of the projected 10-story mosque, which is circled in red:



Dan Senor's proposed open letter in today's Wall Street Journal is brilliant, while Peter Beinart's in the Dail Beast disappoints because it doesn't answer the central question of whether the mosque should be allowed to be built but chooses rather to attack the Anti-Defamation League which opposes construction. 

When I first heard of the project, I dismissed the story as an urban myth, and then as I learned that the proposal was quite serious, I told myself not to cover it as surely New York's fabled zoning swamp would suffocate what surely was a pipe-dream or pr scheme of some enterprizing showman.  (Each year I spend a class on the bureaucratic beauty of the record in the Supreme Court case of Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City.)

But here we are, and does anyone doubt that if approved the mosque will be built?  As a lawyer who has represented churches and religious schools over the past twenty years as various local governments have blocked various projects and uses, and as a law professor who knows the rule and the progeny of Employment Division v. Smith as well as the commands of the the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, I know that there are three key questions here.

Should it be allowed to be built?

If not, why not?

And if the city approves the project, ought the federal government to attempt to stop it?

These are three of the most interesting questions at the heart of American life today, and they ought to be posed not just to New Yorkers and pundits, but to every single candidate for Congress now and in 2012 and of course to President Obama and those who would seek to replace him.

My 2007 book on Mitt Romney spent a great deal of time on the issue of religion in American public life, and my friends at Article VI Blog have worked the same field for many years.  There is a great deal of anti-religious bigotry in America, much of it on the left and directed at Evangelicals, Catholics, and --especially in recent years as the debate over marriage has grown-- at Mormons.  The hatred behind this bigotry is often startling as it is so at odds with the American tradition which is of a robust commitment to religious pluralism and the Free Exercise of religious beliefs whatever they may be.

Opponents of the Ground Zero mosque thus have to be prepared to answer the question of whether they would oppose the construction of a diocesan Catholic church or a church plant from Tim Keller's Redeemer Pres or a new LDS stake on the same site or any site damaged by the attacks of 9/11 and thus in need of rebuilding.

There has got to be one rule, and that one rule may not in the American constitutional tradition discriminate between faiths.

(There is an argument that this stream of the Supreme Court's case law went very badly wrong, and that unique status for Judeo-Christian traditions as opposed to all of the other great traditions on the part of government would not have offended the intent of the Framers, but I am writing here about the Constitution as it has been interpreted to date.  For a review of what those other "great traditions" are, see Patheos.com.)

Here's my short set of answers.

I do not believe the Ground Zero mosque should be built.

I oppose it because the land and buildings damaged by the assault are now part of the sacred space of America's great civic religion. I would oppose the construction of any sectarian project there that wasn't a rebuild of an existing sectarian use for the same reason.

There is no formal designation for the sacred spaces of America's civic religion though they extend from the Mall to the Arizona Memorial.  The land around Ground Zero is very much part of that space, and any project that politicizes it or brings a religious purpose to those sites should be refused.

If the City of New York will not protect the property from politicization or the use by any religious group, then the federal government ought to use its spending power to secure the result.  Federal laws routinely interfere with the use of private property and the decisions of state and local government --see, for example, Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act-- and the federal government has every right to closely patrol the purposes to which the Ground Zero area will be put.  It was a national trauma, felt most intensely and uniquely in New York, but there is an issue here for every American.

I will devote a great deal of today's show to this topic.  Watch to see if anyone in the MSM can bear to pose these difficult questions to President Obama and other federal office holders.

Your thoughts are welcome at hugh@hughhewitt.com.

 

Does President Obama still believe there is a useful dialogue to be had with the Iranian regime?  If so, he ought to read this story about the nature of the top mullah's understanding of Islam.

This is a Taliban-level of extremism, and the regime is closing in on nukes.  Another presidential letter is obviously necessary.  maybe even another speech?

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That's what a lefty blogger at Think Progress thinks.  (HT: Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard.)

Matt Duss wrote in a wind-up to his essay:  "The debate over the Ground Zero Mosque is, in fact, a debate over American values. Those who oppose it don’t have them."

Wow.  Rudy Giuliani is unAmerican?  Members of the military who have fought for Mr. Duss but who oppose building the mosque are unAmerican? Families of victims of the 9/11 attacks are unAmerican?

I look forward to seeing what the other bright lights at the Think Progress operation think of Mr. Duss, who, after all does have a masters in Middle East Studies.  For that matter, I hope the MSM questions everyone on the mosque and whether it ought to be built and why and why not.  Matt Yglesias?  Nancy Pelosi?  President Obama?

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I spent Thursday morning in Stockholm giving a talk to and taking questions from a few dozen, mostly younger Swedish political activists, intellectuals, elected officials and government staffers thanks to the good folks at Timbro, Sweden's free market think tank and especially Timbro's Billy McCormick.

Spend some time at Timbro's site.  Many interesting things are happening in Europe as the EU comes to grip with its demographic crisis and the global economy's demands for increasing productivity over promises of lifetime security. Older Europeans may not want to face the future squarely, but there isn't much stomach for happy talk among folks at the front end of their careers.

If this realism about the need for growth infiltrates America's younger voting demographic, an already deeply damaged presidency will fall apart in 2011 and 2012.  President Obama sold youn voters a bill of goods about what the government could do.  The job market is waking them quickly to why they ought to place their hopes on the private sector and support policies to free it to work its magic.  Many among the younger activists in Sweden got this message years ago.

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Michael Totten wrote about it on Saturday.  (HT:Instapundit.) 

Thanks to Ed Morrissey, Carol Platt Liebau, Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson for filling in for me while I was off. 

Part of vacation hangover is trying to catch up on all the posts I have missed for the past few days.  Of them all the most charming is Powerline's John Hinderaker's link to the amazing photos from the Library of Congress of a time gone by.

Today I'll dive back into the mass of political news that is building towards an election that promises to be a historic U-Turn in the direction of the country.  The only really dark cloud on the GOP horizon right now is in Colorado, where Tom Tancredo's third party candidacy will forfeit the state to another four years of Democratic misrule while effectively making Tom more marginal than Pat Buchanan after his Reform Party dalliance.  Tom should declare that his point has been made and that he is dropping out given the obvious consequence of his candidacy, thus preserving his and Colorado's futures. Colorado's economy cannot afford another four years of Democratic mismanagement, but Tom is delivering that very result with far more effectiveness than even the largest of the Rocky Mountain State's Democratic money interests combined. Hopefully his loyal friends and allies will talk him out of this disastrous indulgence.

In the GOP primary for Senate, a poll touted by the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza had Jane Norton up by a handful of points last week, while the Denver Post's SurveyUSA poll had Ken Buck up by 9 but falling. Norton is the stronger general election candidate and both Norton and Buck are conservatives, so late mail-in ballots will probably break Norton's way. The election is over a week from tomorrow.

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Here is an example of government problem solving.

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The Monday morning column from Clark Judge:

Snooki Economics: More Astute Than Administration Economics
By Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group (www.whwg.com <http://www.whwg.com> ) and chairman, Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org <http://www.pacificresearch.org> )
 
 

“I don’t go tanning anymore, because Obama put a 10 percent tax on tanning.”  Snooki, New York Post, Sunday, August 1st, 2010.

It’s a sad day when Snooki, breakout buffoonette of the MTV hit reality show Jersey Shore, knows more about economics than the White House policy staff.  You tax an activity; you get less of it.  That shouldn’t be too hard a concept to grasp, unless you work in the Obama Administration.
 
Saturday morning headlines greeted the best and brightest of the West Wing and the Executive Office Building next door (where most of the complex’s economic staff is housed) with the decidedly non-MTV reality of an economy that badly needs more jobs and growth:  “Recovery Loses Momentum” (Wall Street Journal); “Growth too slow to drive up hiring” (Washington Post); “Recovery Slows: Outlook on Jobs Grows Dimmer (New York Times).   All were reporting on the Commerce Department’s release the day before of disappointing second quarter GDP data.  

 Read More...

Nancy Pelosi's House of Representatives has become a swamp of hysteria and excess, liberally covered with corruption.  She promised to drain the House swamp and instead turned to breeding mosquitos.  You can rest assured that while the crimes of Charles Rangel are unique, those of Maxine Waters' aren't. The serial antics of Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner, the House's clowns-in-chief-- provide comic relief to the legislative mayhem, but it is the corruption that is now bubbling to the top after four years of Pelosi's rule that will impact the fall's voting.

The massive stimulus bill and the various bailouts provided every member of the House majority a chance to importune Obama Administration senior figures for sweetheart deals --in Waters' case the allegation is that she did it for her own sweetheart, her husband.  If the House shifts to the GOP, Darryl Issa will be very busy indeed with the gavel of the House Committee on Administration's lengthy list of oversight needs which have been kicked to the side as the era of Chicago-politics-on-the-Potomac dawned in 2007.

The Waters' investigations also throws a rare spotlight on my old pals at the Lost Angeles Times.

For the first 15 years of my 20 years in journalism, the Times' astonishingly hard-left bias provided material for scores of television and radio shows and dozens of columns as well.

In recent years, though, the paper's decline has been so precipitous and its influence on public events so limited, that there has been literally no reason to follow its continued decline, which has now reached comical levels.

A little background.  Over the past few weeks a big scandal in California has been the staggering salaries and benefits packages payed senior government officials in the small city of Bell.  (The chief bureaucrat was pulling down close to $800,000 a year and his annual pension will be in the neighborhood of $600K --for life.)  The Times came to the story very late, long after the practice of paying wild salaries began, and the paper seems resolute in its refusal to dispatch its diminishing staff to investigate all California city and county pay and benefits structures, much less the ongoing scandals surrounding the operations of the state's public pension funds.  Because even though there might be readers for an extended, hard-hitting survey of the pervasive corruption of the public sector --and it is all the stuff of requests that must be filled under public records' laws-- it remains the Times: The last people left there are, well, way way left, so they have to worry about standard Times' things, which don't include covering salaries of local liberal elites and public bureaucracies.  Today's front page, for example, has an enormous above-the-fold piece on Skid Row (the first of four, very long parts!), another front-page, above the fold piece on --I do not kid here-- focuses on Hezbollah's "using newfound tools to ferret out spies watching Hezbollah." There's also a piece on Wall Street's worry overwho will head the new consumer protection agency, and a little piece on YouTube's latest 14-year old shopping guru, a nod to grandparents wondering what the grandkids might be up to as, assuredly, there are no 14 year olds reading the paper. Or 20 years olds.  Or increasingly, anyone under the age of 65.  The Times is a habit that is dying as its subscribers do.

Did I mention there's a front page article on the futility of the Afghan war disguised as an assessment of July's casualties.

What's not to love about the Times!  Patterico has long been the paper's most comprehensive critic, but increasingly not even he can bring himself to spend much time on the least read, least influential major paper in America as it staggers along. Ninety-odd days from an election that will determine whether the state goes broke once an for all and whether the state's most powerful figure, Nancy Pelosi, gets tossed, and not a whisper of the Speaker, Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer or Carly Fiorina is to be found on page one.

Page two of today's paper reveals that Steve Lopez is indeed still alive, and he's discovered there is a problem in Bell and a state pension crisis to boot!  Page 7 alerts us that "Japan's women step up to make the big purchases." Page 12 has a nice story on Chelsea's very wonderful wedding with a great couple of pictures.

And, look for it, there on the bottom of page 12 --a story about Maxine Waters!

You have to love the headline, which isn't reproduced on the web site.  In the paper, the headline is "House ethics trials highlight racial issues."

Really, it does.  You cannot make this stuff up. 

The Times was all over, as it should have been, the corruption of Duke Cunningham back when the former fighter pilot was the focus of prosecutors.

But now that Maxine has the investigators bearing down on her, the story is on page 12 and the spin is that it is a racial issue, not standard-order Congressional corruption.

Because the Times simply does not matter, it isn't worth doing a comparison of the early days of the ethics investigations against Tom Delay, Mark Foley or Cunningham.  If we could prove conclusively and to the satisfaction of the faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism that the lefties at the Times systematically avert their eyes, energies and story emphasis and placement from the wrongdoings of Democrats and public employees at every level of government, what would be the point? 

Everyone already knows this.

Everyone.  It isn't even debated.  And because it isn't even open to debate how far gone the paper is, the paper is, well, far gone.  It is a dead paper, without energy or influence and, increasingly, advertisers.

Nobody really cares what the Times does or doesn't cover.  No doubt the paper's "reporters" will try and submarine Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina as the lefties on Spring Street traditionally do for their Democratic pals in Sacramento and D.C. as elections approach.

But those stories won't matter.  TheTimes has all the relevance to California politics that the New York Herald Tribune has for the Big Apple.

An investigation into Maxine Waters, below the fold on p. 12, cast a a "racial issue."  That is truly funny. So too is a story on the spies that threaten Hezbollah on the front page on the same day that Waters' corruption gets rebranded and buried.

That pair of stories is the very best measure of how far the Times has fallen.

No doubt the four parter on the homeless will be nominated for the Pulitzer.  It may even win.  And then everyone in the newsroom at the Times will celebrate and wonder how they can have so few readers and so little impact.

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That's Allahpundit's suggested slogan for the Volt.

Watching the president chest thump about Government Cars telegraphs the Democrats' November campaign. 

Believe it or not they are going to run on the takeover of GM --with the 50 billion tax infusion infusion for stock, followed by the complete screwing of the bond holders and thousands of dealers in order to save their UAW allies-- as an example of what can be done when the government picks winners and losers according to its political favorites.

The takeover of GM, whether or not an IPO arrives nicely timed for the fall voting, remains a bright line for many voters, the sort of massive government jam down that repels rather than enthuses.  The president can keep traipsing up to Detroit to declare victory just as Joe Biden keeps declaring the stimulus a massive success, but neither "initiative" has any more credibility than when they were begun in 2009.

It is a testament to the deep unpopularity of Obamacare that the president has to campaign on the bailout of GM as his great achievement.

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