Wrong about human rights

By ROGER PILON

When we think of human-rights problems, most of us imagine arbitrary arrests, political repression, religious persecution, torture, show trials, censorship, and the like. In America, we don't often have those kinds of problems. Even the current controversy over an Islamic center near ground zero isn't about the right to build there; it's about the wisdom of doing so.

All of which made it surprising to learn from the Obama State Department that America does indeed have human-rights problems.

The news came last week in the form of our first report on U.S. human-rights conditions to the U.N. Human Rights Council, submitted pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments every four years. According to the State Department, we fall short on "fairness, equality, and dignity" in areas such as education, health, and housing, especially when it comes to women, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, American Indians, and gay people.

Dismantling America: Part IV

By THOMAS SOWELL

How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but very different values and ways of governing?

Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years.

Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the institutions set up by that Constitution are enough to ensure the continuance of a free, self-governing nation. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what members of the Constitution Convention were creating, he replied, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

Nursing a hangover from a 'tea party'

By WESLEY PRUDEN

Knocking the 'tea party' is getting to be a full-time job that not even the president of the United States can manage. Glenn Beck, the resident theologian at Fox, and critics who question his American birth are clearly getting Barack Obama's goat.

The pundits and pols on the left first tried the slander that all the tea sippers were not-so-secret racists, or "nativists," or bigots of one category or another, and were given to showing up at rallies with ugly signs demanding that Mr. Obama shut up and leave town before the sheriff arrives with an impeachment indictment. Certain pundits, editorialists, bloviators and bloggers even accused the tea partiers of attacking blacks in their midst.

When that accusation couldn't be proved — rewards were offered to anyone with the proof — the accusations of racism quieted to tolerable decibels. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the right reverends of the high church of racial scammery, retreated for a time to their drawing boards to plot new schemes.

Bad climate bill belongs in limbo

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Will a lame duck Congress pass cap-and-trade? Judging from recent news, it might try. But, more likely, all the sound and fury will end up signifying its usual nothing. And it leaves the preferred option, where Congress punts the problem to the EPA, very much alive.

On Aug. 10, the House of Representatives blocked a resolution from Tom Price, R-Ga., that would have prohibited the House from convening a lame duck session after November's election unless there was a national emergency.

Climate Czarina Carol Browner recently suggested that such a bill could "potentially" be passed before the 112th Congress opens for business in January. In the new Congress, the House may very well be under Republican control. Hence the need for a lame duck climate bill.

The passing of E-6

By THOMAS SOWELL

Most people have no idea what "E-6" is. To avid baseball fans, E-6 is the way to record an error by a shortstop on your scorecard. But there is another E-6, in photography. This E-6 is the developer in which color slides are processed.

Recently, I received an e-mail from Chromatics, a photo lab used by professional photographers in Nashville, that they will be discontinuing the developing of color slides and color transparencies in general, after Sept. 9. This was sent to me as an old customer of theirs.

The passing of E-6 is the passing of an era, because it means that so few professional photographers are using color slides and transparencies these days, in this era of digital photography, that a major photo lab does not get enough of this kind of film to develop to make it worthwhile to stock the chemical that is used.