A quote from Autoblog, 15 February 2007

[Tennessee legislators] have filed bills that would increase the rights of citizens to bear arms and use those arms with deadly force in certain situations. Like during a carjacking. Filing the bill was Rep. Ulysses Jones and Sen. Reginald Tate, two Memphis Democrats. “I’ve heard a lot of support for this. It’s time to give citizens the opportunity to protect themselves. Right now, we’re at the mercy of what I call ‘scum’,” said Jones, a Memphis Fire Department paramedic.

[...] These so-called “No Retreat” laws change the burden of attackees so that fleeing isn’t the only option. Standing your ground and defending yourself and your property is allowed instead.

A quote from The Local, Sweden’s News in English, 15 February 2007

At the same time as immigration to Sweden increased, emigration out of the country also rose. During 2006, 44,908 people emigrated, an increase of 18 percent compared to the previous year.

The last time a higher number of people emigrated from Sweden was in 1892, 45,504 people packed their bags and left the country.

According to Heather MacDonald, the feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The university is about to name as its new president radical feminist Drew Gilpin Faust, following Lawrence Summers’s all-too-brief reign. Summers’s recklessly honest speculations about women in science strengthened the feminist hold on faculty hiring and promotions. The Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard.

Sometimes I sit in my office and listen to the so-called debates in the Parliament chamber through a nifty little device hidden behind the ashtray on my desk. Yesterday was one of those times. The speaker was the President of the Parliament Hans-Gert Poettering putting forward what he would like to achieve in his period of office which runs until 2009 and the European elections. It appears he would quite like it to run a little longer than that, 1000 years maybe…

What got me is when through the simultaneous translation he said “Treaties are to be obeyed.”

A quote from Expatica, 14 February 2007:

[Dutch] MP Geert Wilders was threatened with a suicide attack last week. Two young men reportedly planned to shoot the politician down and detonate a van full of explosives next to the politician. “Many innocent people were to die in the chaos.” [...] The initial, very concrete warning spoke about an attack planned for early February. Wilders would first be shot, and then a man would drive a white delivery van into the victim and detonate the 500 to 600 kilos of explosives in the vehicle.

The perpetrators reportedly got the explosives from a contact in the military. […] The person who called the hotline said that the perpetrators were not fundamentalists, but “just wanted revenge.”

A quote from Julia Gorin at Frontpagemag.com, 14 february 2007

[T]he Serbs have been the canary’s canary. What the world is trying to do to Israel is what it succeeded in doing to Serbia, which no longer has sovereignty, border integrity (the international community decides what is and isn’t Serbia’s), the right to protect its borders and to defend its citizens. And when Serbia dares to utter a peep of protest to these criminal infringements, it gets piled on by politicians and media alike (most consistently by The Wall St. Journal).

[…] [F]or us to still be proceeding in the same direction this far post-9/11 rather than admit what the 9/11 Commission found – that the foundations for the current worldwide jihad were laid in 1990s Bosnia – is our fatal mistake. Yet we seem determined to continue it.

Those who think that Europe is America's past, think again.

Europe matters to America. It matters more than ever before. Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and the liberal special-interest groups that currently dominate Congress want to reshape America in Europe's image: socialist, secularist and multicultural.

Tony Judt is in the public eye mostly for his wrongheaded opinions on Israel, and it’s a pity, because his signal professional achievement is his diligent and valuable exposition of European, and specifically French, intellectual life and culture for an American audience. I am quite sure that he and I are on opposite sides of the domestic political scene; but we are not so far apart on larger issues, including anticommunism, and our admiration for Raymond Aron. (Judt did not introduce me to Aron, but he gets credit for explaining Aron to me.) I write this because I am reading a small book by Judt now: The Burden of Responsibility, as the title suggests, addresses the question of engagement and moral responsibility as grasped by three public intellectuals of mid-20th century France. Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron all grappled with their roles as thinkers and observers in different ways: Blum actually led his nation twice; Camus was ambivalent and sometimes absent; and Aron detached himself, the better to observe. I have not finished the book, so I will not comment more upon it here. One must wonder, though, whether a similar tome will be written about American public intellectuals of this decade in years to come — and one must wonder what its verdict will be.

The Vlaams Belang [Flemish Interest] is Belgium’s largest party. It strives for the independence of Flanders and its election victories might lead to the falling apart of Belgium and, since Belgium’s capital Brussels is the EU capital, threaten the stability of the European Union.

Frank Vanhecke, the party leader and a member of the European Parliament, and Filip Dewinter, the leader of the party in the Flemish regional parliament and the Antwerp municipal council (as well as “the worst Belgian ever”) will be visiting Washington DC from 20 to 24 February.

A quote from Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, in the Czech daily Hospodářské Noviny, 8 February 2007 (translation Lubos Motl)

Global warming is a myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it’s an undignified slapstick that people don’t wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the “but’s” are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.

This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.