Barack Obama’s supporters have trivialized his connections to former Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on April 16. Campaign strategist David Axelrod told CNN Monday that Obama “certainly didn’t know the history” of these two barbarians when they hosted a reception for him when he launched his political career.

Obama might not have heard of Ayers and Dohrn’s brutality from the ’60s through the ’80s had they merely tossed a rock or two in anger. But these two went much, much farther.

In 1970, Ayers encapsulated the Weathermen’s worldview: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.” In his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” Ayers brags that he helped blast NYPD headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Dohrn was an equally stalwart subversive. In July 1969, while John McCain languished in the Hanoi Hilton, Dohrn and five other Weathermen flew to Cuba to conspire with the National Liberation Front, America’s North Vietnamese enemies. Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

Throughout the 1970s, under Ayers and Dohrn’s leadership, the Weathermen blasted the State Department, Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters, and New York’s Queens Courthouse, among at least 16 targets.

Thankfully, one particular bomb detonated early. Three Weathermen fatally blew themselves up in March 1970 while building it in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The Weathermen wanted the nail-filled device to explode at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army base during a non-commissioned officers’ dance. Soldiers, their spouses, and dates would have been maimed and likely killed. As Ayers said, the bomb would have ripped “through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

No wonder Obama has been so evasive about his ties to Ayers and Dohrn. His relationship with these extreme Leftists goes far beyond waving at some folks who live nearby. It defies belief that Obama never learned that Ayers and Dohrn hated the USA and loved TNT.

Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers inaugurated. They jointly attended at least seven of that charity’s top-level oversight meetings between March 1995 and September 1997. They jointly met a dozen times as board members of Chicago’s Woods Fund between December 1999 and December 2002. They appeared together on two academic panels in 1997 and 2002. Obama concisely reviewed one of Ayers’ books in the Chicago Tribune.

Ayers and Dohrn invited Windy City liberals into their living room to meet Obama when he began his 1995 State Senate run. Ayers donated $200 to re-elect Obama in 2001.

*Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s re-election campaign on April 2, 2001, and Obama accepted Ayers’ contribution. According to four federal, state, and private “watchdog” websites, this is the only recorded political contribution for either Ayers or Dohrn. (She has no donations on these public-disclosures webpages.)

These considerable ties might be irrelevant if Ayers and Dohrn regretted their actions. But they are far from remorseful.

“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,” Ayers said in an interview published September 11, 2001 — while Obama knew Ayers. That August, Ayers posed for a Chicago Magazine photo in which he stomped on an American flag crumpled in the dirt. Headline: “No regrets.”

“We’d do it again,” Dohrn told ABC in 1998. “I wish that we had done more. I wish we had been more militant.”

If these facts are news to Obama, he must be the most oblivious man on Chicago’s South Side. But if he knew about Ayers and Dohrn’s background, he is being untruthful about it. At the very least, Obama showed dreadful judgment by closely and repeatedly associating with these violent traitors.

Obama today calls Ayers’ behavior “detestable acts.” But what did Ayers and Dohrn see in Obama? What inspired these unrepentant, hard-Left bomb throwers to hand the chairmanship of Ayers’ foundation and then share their home, friends, and Ayers’ only evident campaign contribution with the charismatic then-35-year-old whose current 95.5 percent Left-wing vote record made him The National Journal’s “Most Liberal Senator In 2007?”
________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Romney’s life problem.

One of campaign 2008’s mysteries is Mitt Romney’s free ride from pro-lifers. His anti-abortion declarations are eloquent, as is everything the silver-tongued former Massachusetts governor utters. But, like most of his pronouncements, his rhetoric is at war with his record.

“Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion,” Romney said while challenging Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1994 reelection. Since then, Romney and his family decided “we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter.” Romney reaffirmed his pro-choice stance in his 2002 gubernatorial bid.

Romney contends he became pro-life in November 2004 after discussing embryonic stem-cells with Harvard researcher Douglas Melton. While U.S. embryos truly are Microscopic-Americans, a skeptic might question Romney’s statement that chatting with a biologist reversed his pro-choice position, rooted as it was in a loved one’s bloody death.

Romney’s metamorphosis would seem more sincere than convenient if his policies matched his perspective. Romney said last December 16 on Meet the Press: “Every piece of legislation which came to my desk in the coming years as a governor, I came down on the side of preserving the sanctity of life.” Nevertheless:

On July 25, 2005, Romney rejected a law that required medical centers to provide rape victims “morning after” emergency-contraception pills. The legislature overrode his veto. That December, the Public Health Department ruled that private hospitals with moral or religious objections could overlook the law. Romney then overturned that decision, as a top legal adviser recommended. “I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view,” Romney said December 8, 2005.

“Flip, flop, flip,” the Boston Herald opined the next day. “Yes, Gov. Mitt Romney has now executed an Olympic-caliber double flip-flop with a gold medal-performance twist-and-a-half on the issue of emergency contraception.”

“The appropriate response for Catholic hospitals is non-compliance,” the Catholic Action League’s C. J. Doyle told the Associated Press. “Otherwise, they would be compromising their religious integrity and Catholic identity.”

Romney signed an October 2005 measure to qualify some 88,000 low-income residents for family-planning services, including abortion counseling and “morning after” pills. “We have no objection to the Legislature’s directive that we seek a waiver to expand the eligible population to women with a slightly higher income,” Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom remarked.

Section 16M of Romney’s health-insurance mandate states, “There shall be a MassHealth payment policy advisory board” with 14 members of doctors’ and hospitals’ groups and “1 member appointed by Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts,” the state’s leading voice for abortion on demand and without apology.

“Romney did not object to Section 16M, even though he certainly could have,” Massachusetts Pro-Life Federation president Jerry Zandstra tells me. In fact, on April 12, 2006, he line-item-vetoed eight RomneyCare provisions, six of which the legislature overrode. While Romney vetoed broader Medicaid dental benefits, he neither rejected Planned Parenthood’s place at the table, nor insisted on including a pro-life representative. Romney and his wife attended a June 1994 Planned Parenthood fundraiser. Mrs. Romney gave the organization $150.

Romney signed this bill, although it did not prohibit subsidies of medically unnecessary abortions. A Massachusetts court ordered taxpayer funding of clinically vital, but not universal, abortions. Yet, RomneyCare unconditionally offers abortions for a $50 co-payment.

“The law exists under Romney’s signature, and the end result is state-funded abortions, guided by the butchering hands of Planned Parenthood,” says Zandstra. “The fact that he wouldn’t fight in Massachusetts does not bode well for what would happen if he occupies the Oval Office. It is exactly this kind of maneuvering that makes conservatives uncomfortable. In this key fight over taxpayer funded abortions, he caved. What would he do in the much bigger battles as president?”

MassDevelopment, an agency Romney’s appointees reportedly controlled, voted November 8, 2006 for a $5 million tax-exempt bond to build a 10,000-square-foot Planned Parenthood clinic in Worcester.

“He did not know about this loan,” Fehrnstrom said in last December 2’s Boston Globe. How strange. Ranch Kimball, Romney’s Economic Development secretary, chaired MassDevelopment. Romney could have opposed this bond until January 1, 2007, but did not.

Romney’s late-term anti-abortionism “was more than just a flip-flop,” said Planned Parenthood’s Angus McQuilken. “This was an extreme makeover.”

Just as Romney’s $983 million in higher levies and fees mock his assertion not to have raised taxes, abortion is yet another area where a grand canyon divides Romney’s words and deeds.

___________________________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

I have written repeatedly on Willard Mitt Romney’s serial flip-flops. Mitt is the born-again supply-sider who today swears he never raised taxes, even though he increased taxes and fees $983 million as Massachusetts governor. He is 2008’s stalwart defender of traditional values and man-woman marriage who, in 2002, distributed a hot-pink flyer among Boston’s gay community that read: “Mitt and Kerry Wish You A Great Pride Weekend! All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.” (Kerry Healey was the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor.) Romney is the Second Amendment enthusiast who brags about being a life-member of the National Rifle Association – “life” beginning in August 2006 – who said in 1994, “I don’t line up with the NRA.”

Pick nearly any topic, and you will find the new and old Romneys as far apart as two pugilists in opposite corners of a boxing ring, ready to knock each other’s lights out.

But nothing prepared me for Romney’s most amazing flip flop of all. Somehow, I missed it, despite months of researching his bipolar record.

During CNN’s January 30 debate from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Romney said, “one of the two great regrets I have in life is I didn’t serve in the military. I’d love to have.” This echoes what he told the Boston Globe last June 24. “I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

Now, as works with almost any subject, search Google or Nexis for “Romney” and “Vietnam” and any date before 2004, when he got serious about pursuing the 2008 GOP nomination.

Voila! There it is, from May 2, 1994. “I was not planning on signing up for the military. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam,” Romney told the Boston Herald.

This flip flop is much more revealing and far more disturbing than the rest.

It is bad enough to reverse course 180 degrees on public-policy matters such as taxes, gay rights, guns, abortion, immigration, the minimum wage, Ronald Reagan’s legacy, or any of the other topics on which the old and new Romneys clobber each other. At least these are political issues on which, at best, new information and thinking can justify changed views or, at worst, electoral mathematics can explain abandoning one position for another.

But for Romney to somersault on something so personal – his own non-involvement in the Vietnam War – makes one wonder if Romney is any different from an exterior set on a Hollywood back lot: Clean and pretty in the front and all flat, plywood planks in the back.

Today’s Romney says, more or less, “Too bad I was not part of a military quagmire that tragically cost the lives of 50,000 GIs.” Yesterday’s Romney said, more or less, “How fortunate I was not to be part of a military quagmire that tragically cost the lives of 50,000 GIs.”

Conveniently enough, today’s position plays well in a GOP primary filled with hawkish voters, and now led by the Vietnam War hero, Senator John McCain (R – Arizona). Romney’s 1994 comments more snugly suited Massachusetts – a liberal, Democrat-dominated state where such dovish remarks would have gone down well.

If Romney cynically shifted from his old position to his new one on Vietnam service, he is even more cold and calculating than previously thought.

And if he sincerely went from saying in 1994 that he had not desired to go to Vietnam to 2007’s longing to have been there, one wonders if there is anything at Romney’s core but breeze and tumbleweeds.

___________________________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

With Mike Huckabee down and Fred Thompson out in Florida, Tuesday’s Sunshine State primary promises a three-way brawl among Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Voters there, and beyond, should regard these three candidates like lamps in a traffic signal.

– Romney is the red light. The former Massachusetts governor’s tax-and-spend record should stop Republican voters in their tracks. Romney presents himself as a corporate super-mechanic who can lift the hood and make a stalled sedan NASCAR-ready. Too bad Romney left his state in the repair bay after four years of parts and labor.

Rather than reinvigorate Massachusetts with broad-based tax relief — as did his Republican gubernatorial predecessors, William Weld and Paul Cellucci — Romney launched a tax-hike binge reminiscent of Daddy Bush’s 1990 “read my lips” raid on America’s wallets.

Romney enacted 126 brand-new or increased fees, having requested 70, totaling $473 million. Thus, Massachusetts residents pay more for marriage licenses, gun registrations, blindness certificates, home-deed registries, power-meter inspections and even milk-dealer permits. Romney also signed 19 tax increases worth $519 million. Romney taxed gasoline, corporate trusts, nonprofit organizations, online software, sales catalogs, securities companies and more.

Romney also saddled Massachusetts with a government-run health-insurance scheme. Those who have ignored its individual-coverage mandate now face $219 in tax penalties, which could soar this year to $912. The Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes calculates that RomneyCare cost taxpayers $619 million in 2007 — 31 percent above projections.

All this bought economic stasis. Manufacturing employment fell 14 percent under Romney, twice the national figure, ranking Massachusetts 48th among the states. As Romney left office, 124,100 fewer employees were working, versus February 2001, before Massachusetts entered recession. As Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom has admitted: “Did we recover all the jobs that were lost? No.”

– This race’s yellow light is McCain. Call him “Bob Dole 2.0″ — a beloved war hero and veteran Beltway insider with an uneven tax record. The Arizona senator voted to extend President Bush’s tax cuts and now wants them permanent. Yet, he rejected them in 2001 and 2003. According to Senate records, McCain cast 52 substantive and procedural votes for higher taxes. He backed Internet-access taxes, the “death tax,” a surtax on incomes above $1 million and $755.67 billion in tobacco taxes. He also spurned lower taxes on incomes and capital gains, and repeatedly voted to delay and shrivel other tax cuts.

On spending, however, McCain is delightfully parsimonious. He fought 2003’s $558 billion Medicare drug entitlement and is one of Congress’ loudest voices against extravagant, idiotic federal boondoggles.

– The green light is Giuliani. New York’s former mayor is a stalwart fiscal conservative who recently proposed America’s largest tax cut — ever.

As mayor, Giuliani pitched 64 tax cuts, and then charmed, scared or otherwise persuaded an overwhelmingly Democratic City Council to enact 23 of them totaling $9.8 billion. The top tax rate dropped 20.6 percent (vs. Romney’s 0 percent reduction). Also, the overall tax burden (tax revenue’s share of personal income) fell 17.1 percent under Giuliani, while it rose 10.8 percent under Romney.

On Giuliani’s watch, real, per-capita spending declined 0.9 percent. He shrank Gotham’s government and produced a $2.9 billion budget surplus, largely through spending reductions and higher revenues generated by accelerated economic growth that his tax cuts triggered.

Likewise, Giuliani unleashed an employment machine. He helped private-sector payrolls soar 15.2 percent (vs. Romney’s 0.5 percent) — great news for 411,600 job seekers. Moving 58 percent of public-assistance recipients from welfare to work also benefited taxpayers. More important, this strengthened the character of the 643,348 people who underwent this transformation.

Giuliani’s proposed optional, one-page tax return collapses today’s six rates (up to 35 percent) into three: 10 percent, 15 percent and 30 percent. This significantly would lower everyone’s taxes. A family of four earning $80,000 would enjoy a 24 percent tax cut of $2,207. Single Americans making $35,000 would save 13 percent on their taxes.

Giuliani also would index and eventually excise the alternative minimum tax and electrify the economy by chopping corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent, and capital gains taxes from 15 percent to 10 percent.

How swiftly will America travel the road ahead? GOP voters will help decide — by lighting that path red, yellow or green.

___________________________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

As political strategists decamped for Michigan and points south, many here wondered how Willard Mitt Romney could lose 2008’s first primary to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., 32 to 37 percent, respectively, despite Romney’s four years as governor of contiguous Massachusetts and some $15.5 million in reported campaign expenditures. Granite State Republicans, previously keen on Romney, likely soured on his legacy as a tax hiker who increased levies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Boston newspapers informed their New Hampshire readers of Romney’s rising-tax tide.

“Tax rates on many corporations almost doubled because of legislation supported by Romney,” Boston Science Corporation chairman Peter Nicholas wrote in the Jan. 6 Boston Herald. Romney boosted taxes on subchapter S corporations owned by business trusts from 5.3 percent to 9.8 percent, a four-fifths increase. Nicholas called this “an important disincentive to investment, growth and job creation.”

“Corporate taxes went up $210 million under Romney,” the Herald editorialized. “And we wonder why companies look north, south, east and west, anywhere but Massachusetts, to expand?”

“Imposing business tax increases is wrong for the people of Massachusetts,” Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce CEO Paul Guzzi complained to State House News Service last year: “We’re down 140,000 jobs since 2001.”

While Romney sped a $275 million capital-gains tax rebate, scored property-tax relief for seniors and secured a two-day, tax-free shopping holiday, he imposed $283 million in business “loophole closures” and $501.5 million in increased fees on marriage licenses, gun registrations, gasoline deliveries, real-estate transfers, and more. Under Romney, the Tax Foundation calculated, Massachusetts fell from America’s 29th most business-friendly state to No. 36.

Romney’s sledding became even tougher when Republicans here learned that his 2003 and 2004 tax legislation covered those who work, conduct business, and/or invest in Massachusetts, but live elsewhere. According to figures the Massachusetts Department of Revenue provided, between 2003 and 2006, such New Hampshirites shipped Massachusetts $95 million above what they paid when Romney arrived. The average check from such a Granite State commuter grew 19.2 percent under Romney.
This bad tax news helped push Romney into McCain’s shadow.

Romney’s worrisome tax record now faces a fresh challenge from his rival, Rudolph W. Giuliani. New York’s former mayor flew to Florida Wednesday to unveil what Club for Growth (CFG) president Pat Toomey calls “a supply-sider’s dream.”

Giuliani proposes that Americans could file an optional, 11-line, one-page Fair and Simple Tax (FAST) form. They would enjoy mortgage-interest, charity, and state/local tax deductions, a $3,500 personal exemption, a $1,000-per-child credit, and a new health-insurance exclusion of $15,000 for families and $7,500 for individuals.

More dramatic, today’s six brackets, reaching 35 percent, would become three: 10, 15 and 30 percent. A family of four earning $80,000 would save $2,207 or 24 percent in taxes. At $120,000, they would save $7,014, or 36 percent.

Americans who cherish today’s 67,204-page tax code could keep it. Others could volunteer for the FAST tax. “Your Money. Your Choice,” as Giuliani’s slogan goes.

Giuliani would index the alternative minimum tax to inflation, and eventually scrap it. He would bury the death tax. Corporate taxes, higher only in Japan, would fall from 35 to 25 percent. Capital-gains and dividend taxes would tumble from 15 to 10 percent. President Bush’s tax reductions would become permanent.

“This tax cut — the largest in history — would represent a monumental leap forward for the American taxpayer and the U.S. economy,” says Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist.

“Giuliani understands that the way to create more economic growth is to lower the burden and inefficiency inherent in the current system, much as he did in New York,” says CFG’s Toomey. “Economic conservatives should be very excited by this bold, new tax-cutting plan.”

“Every Republican that I can see in this race is promising to lower taxes,” Giuliani told journalists here on primary eve. “But here is the difference: I am the only one who actually has done it — big time.” Giuliani reduced Gotham’s tax burden 19 percent, totaling $9.8 billion.

For his part, Romney wants taxes “simpler, and flatter and lower,” but offers few specifics.

With plenty on their minds already, Republicans now can weigh Romney’s sad, statist record on taxes against Giuliani’s audacious, hopeful tax agenda.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Soon after becoming Massachusetts governor, Willard Mitt Romney retroactively imposed new taxes on non-residents, including Granite State citizens who work, conduct business, and/or invest in the Bay State. Romney’s higher taxes reached into New Hampshire and helped vacuum at least $95 million in marginal income back across the border.

According to Massachusetts Department of Revenue figures, the total amount that New Hampshire taxpayers surrendered to Massachusetts grew from $213.6 million in 2002 to $248.9 million in 2006, a 16.5 percent increase. (Data for 2006 are preliminary.)

Had 2002’s tax baseline remained flat, New Hampshire taxpayers would have kept $95 million in cumulative payments to Massachusetts since 2003. Higher revenues often are a supply-side effect of tax cuts. This is not so when taxes increase.

Massachusetts tax revenues from New Hampshire residents increased even as the number of New Hampshire residents who paid Massachusetts taxes fell 2.3 percent — from 89,304 in 2002 to 87,320 in 2006. The checks shrank in number, but swelled in value. The average tax payment from New Hampshire expanded $458 — from $2,392 in 2002 to $2,850 in 2006 — up 19.2 percent.

“That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the number of New Hampshire taxpayers who pay (as opposed to simply file) didn’t change in what appears to be any statistically significant way during this period, yet the average tax payment went up substantially,” says Cato Institute scholar Stephen Slivinski.

These higher payments perfectly coincide with legislation Romney signed on March 5, 2003, retroactive to that Jan. 1. Under Romney’s law, “gross income derived from. . . any trade or business, including any employment,” would be taxable, “regardless of the taxpayer’s residence or domicile in the year it is received.”

These rules now cover “gain from the sale of a business or of an interest in a business, distributive share income, separation, sick or vacation pay, deferred compensation and [state-taxable] nonqualified pension income.” On Aug. 9, 2004 Romney also taxed non-residents’ shares of income from real-estate partnerships.

“Romney created these taxes new,” says Robert Roughsedge, a Hampton attorney who works in Boston. “He taxed more people and companies than before. This is what a dying state must do to keep the tax base. This is not a pro-growth, Reagan-type answer to the problem. . . . Romney chose to tax the people who left, increase the people outside of the state subject to taxation, and probably remove the incentive to leave by increasing the cost.”

“This research confirms what I said when Mitt Romney started attacking Rudy Giuliani on the commuter-tax issue in New York,” says former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci, who supports Giuliani.

“That was an existing tax. Mayor Giuliani had other priorities in terms of tax cutting. He provided broad-based tax relief for New York residents and businesses, something Mitt Romney could not do in Massachusetts. It’s ironic that Mayor Giuliani did not raise taxes on commuters, yet he gets criticized by a guy who did raise taxes on commuters, in particular people in New Hampshire who work in Massachusetts.”

Had Romney’s spokesmen commented, as requested, they might have observed that he sped a $275 million capital gains tax rebate, scored property-tax relief for seniors and secured a two-day, tax-free shopping holiday.

Nonetheless, Merrimack’s Bob Bevill, chairman of the conservative New Hampshire Eagle Forum, is among those who condemn Romney for $283 million in business “loophole closures” and $501.5 million in increased fees on marriage licenses, gun registrations, gasoline deliveries, property-deed certificates, and more.

“New Hampshire taxpayers should be concerned that Mr. Romney will continue his semantically challenged shell-game of raising taxes, through increased users fees and special tariffs, while publicly stating that he has not raised taxes,” Bevill says. “A vote for Romney is a vote for higher taxes — no matter what they are called.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

As if it were an act of Christmas entertainment, America’s so-called “Paper of Record” recently unveiled its latest act of Lance-Armstrong-in-reverse back-peddling.

After much gloating and chest beating, it has taken a closer look at the charge that Mayor Giuliani cooked the books to cover NYPD security costs related to his personal travels. Well, all this turns out to be much ado about next to nothing.

As that paper, whose very name I am loathe to repeat, reported December 20:

“…the records reviewed so far, which account for 93 percent of the mayoral travel expenses for that period, suggest that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to see Ms. Nathan, who is now his wife, had nothing to do with any accounting legerdemain.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is reviewing the remaining 7 percent of relevant records from Mayor Giuliani’s tenure. So far, however, the supposed shifting of funds, financial cover-ups, and other culinary accounting that were alleged never actually happened.

Once again, this paper has lived up to its motto: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — specifically at the bottom of page A-35 on the Friday before Christmas weekend.

The exculpatory details are here, on the record, albeit far from the blaring headlines that originally accompanied this now seemingly baseless flap.

Just look at the numbers.

Ramesh Ponnuru responded Friday to my piece on Rudolph W. Giuliani and the Religious Right by accusing me of performing “spin for the mayor.” My dreidel impersonation, Ramesh wrote, includes “cherry-picking” data to advance my arguments.

It hardly is “cherry-picking” to analyze Giuliani’s abortion record by documenting the decreases during his tenure in New York City’s total abortions, its abortion ratio (abortions per 1,000 live births), local-taxpayer-financed Medicaid abortions, and local-Medicaid-abortion spending. I suppose it also would be “cherry-picking” to invoke GDP growth, the unemployment rate, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and rising tax revenues to prove that President Bush’s tax cuts are working.

Ramesh complained that I failed to tell readers that abortions “remained extremely high…”

Yes, abortions remained extremely high in New York City, a liberal metropolis that some have dubbed America’s abortion capitol. In this environment, it is incredibly unfair to flog Giuliani because abortions dropped “just” 17 percent on his watch, while America managed only a 13 percent simultaneous decline in abortions. Even more impressive, Medicaid abortions tumbled 23 percent. (Because the 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibits nearly all federal abortion spending, no equivalent federal datum exists.) So, apparently scorn is the appropriate reaction to a nearly one-quarter cut in taxpayer-funded abortions.

Damn you, Rudy! Why didn’t you slash Medicaid abortions by 50 percent?

What’s important is that these numbers not only did not rise; they fell significantly, and much more than they did nationally. If Rudy really were the pom-pom-waving abortion monger his critics claim he is (“Gotham, Gotham, Sis-Boom-Bah…Get an abortion, Rah-Rah-Rah!”), abortions should have increased during his term, or at least not slid more quickly than they did from sea to shining sea.

Ramesh also posited that I did not mention that under Giuliani, abortions in New York City “declined less than the statewide average.”

Here are the facts: Between 1993 and 2001, abortions waned 26.9 percent in New York State, excluding the five boroughs; 20.1 percent in New York State overall (including Gotham); and 16.9 percent in New York City.

Giuliani was mayor of New York City, not governor of New York State. Thus, he should be judged according to data relevant to his jurisdiction. Still, these figures are no surprise. Syracuse tends to be more socially conservative than the socially liberal South Bronx. Upstate abortion figures naturally reflect a generally more pro-life culture north of Yonkers, just as Illinois’ incidence of abortion most likely decreases the further one drives south of Chicago.

That said, between 1993 and 2001, taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions in upstate New York slipped 21.7 percent, slid 22.6 percent statewide, and sank 22.9 percent in New York City. So, when it came to government-subsidized abortions, Gotham was more pro-life during Giuliani Time than was the rest of the Empire State.

Speaking of cherry-picking, Ramesh scoured the website of Social Conservatives for Rudy (which I cited), located its list of Rudy-friendly public officials, selected Rep. Judy Biggert (R., Ill.), then highlighted a few of her anti-life votes, presumably to associate Giuliani with several dreadful public policies. This is like picking one cherry from atop a tree, peeling it, and triumphantly waving its pit in the air.

Without such acrobatics, here are a dozen members of Congress who have endorsed Giuliani, not just praised him, along with their National Right to Life Committee ratings for the 109th Congress:

Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Phil English (R., Pa.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R., N.J.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Candice Miller (R., Mich.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. George Radanovich (R., Calif.) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Jim Walsh (R-NY) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) – NRLC rating: 100 percent

Among Giuliani’s nine other congressional endorsers, five enjoy 82 ratings, three range between 70 and 44, while one (Biggert) earns a mere 9. However, Rudy’s congressional team averages an 84 NRLC rating. This is not a bad collective score for those on Capitol Hill who support a man smeared by his adversaries as “Mr. Abortion.” (For details click here.)

These members of Congress grasp what seems to escape Ramesh and other Rudy foes: Giuliani is no social liberal. The impressive abortion reductions during his mayoralty should be counted among the socially conservative advances that Giuliani either engineered or witnessed on his watch. (Adoption hikes, crime cuts, welfare reform, charter schools, and racial-quota elimination were among many others he enacted.) Were Giuliani as energetically pro-choice as his detractors claim, he would have presided over smaller – or even nonexistent – declines in abortion.

Finally, independent of Ramesh Ponnuru’s comments, any third-party bid by pro-lifers if Giuliani were nominated almost certainly would catapult today’s Democratic frontrunner into the Oval Office. That would empower Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton to pursue a proudly pro-abortion agenda, which would increase, not decrease, the number of fetuses killed in America. If that, bafflingly, is what some Religious Right activists would consider a pro-life triumph, the sun rises in the west, Niagara Falls flows upstream, and I have long, blond hair.

____________________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on October 15th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has accused fellow GOP presidential contender Rudolph Giuliani of operating a “sanctuary city” while New York mayor. Presumably, Giuliani waved illegal aliens into Gotham, like a third-base coach urging runners home ahead of a mighty outfielder’s throw. In fact, Giuliani was tougher on illegal immigrants than Romney claims. Conversely, Romney was easier on illegals than his current hard-line posture suggests.

In last month’s CNN/YouTube debate, Romney quoted Giuliani:

“If you come here, and you work hard, and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people that we want in this city.” Romney conveniently omitted this sentence from Giuliani’s June 1994 press-conference remarks:

“And if you’re somebody who comes here, and you want to violate the drug laws, the laws against violence, the laws to protect us in other ways, then I’d like to see you apprehended and put in prison and then sent back to where you came from.”

Among New York’s 400,000 illegals, the feds deported 776 in 1994. With the Clinton administration spurning expulsions, Giuliani did the best he could.

Giuliani maintained city policies that let illegal aliens report crimes without risking ejection. With 1,946 homicides and 600,346 serious crimes the year he was elected, Giuliani wanted illegals to identify criminals. They similarly could receive emergency medicine, rather than remain untreated, possibly sickening others. Illegals also could send their children to public schools, rather than have 70,000 kids roaming the streets, attracting criminals, and possibly committing violations themselves.

Giuliani’s anti-crime campaign otherwise targeted illegal-alien offenders.

“We’d like to see a situation in which we can put ‘em on a plane and charge INS for the ticket,” Katie Lapp, Giuliani’s criminal-justice coordinator, told Newsday in November 1994. “It’s the mayor’s position that INS should increase border patrols and keep these people out of the country in the first place.”

The INS never approved what Newsday dubbed “Air Giuliani.” In April 1994, however, Giuliani restored alerts to the INS whenever police arrested illegal-alien criminal suspects. In January 1993, the INS claimed it lacked resources to pursue such reports and asked Democratic Mayor David Dinkins to stop making them.

In contrast, Romney waited until 18 days before leaving office to secure federal permission for state troopers to arrest illegal aliens. Actually, this program never commenced. As promised, Romney’s Democratic successor, Gov. Deval Patrick, scrapped it before troopers began relevant training.

Romney’s immigration record was ho-hum long before this 11th-hour initiative. Beyond opposing driver’s licenses and in-state college tuition for illegals, Romney’s failures helped keep Massachusetts attractive to them.

It may be a private matter that illegal aliens raked Romney’s lawn as recently as Nov. 29. But Romney’s administration should have scrutinized state employees more carefully. Among nine Massachusetts public-works sites examined in the June 18, 2006, Boston Globe, 38 percent of weekly wage-earners lacked valid Social Security numbers. At one university masonry project, 55 of the contractor’s 87 workers had dodgy Social Security numbers. Some belonged to dead people. One jail-construction worker offered this unusual Social Security number: 666-66-6666.

“The governor is not surprised that our current immigration laws are a mess,” Romney’s gubernatorial spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, shrugged.

Meanwhile, Romney let Brewster, Brookline, Cambridge, Lexington, Orleans, and Somerville openly flout federal immigration laws.

“I’m not going to break the trust we have built up with the immigrant community to enforce the misguided policies of the federal government,” Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone said in the July 6 Somerville News.

Romney could have pressured or sued these six sanctuary cities to become non-sanctuaries. He also could have slashed their allowances. Instead, state tax dollars cascaded into their coffers.

Romney’s proposed assistance to these locales grew from $103,218,421 in fiscal year 2004 to $107,419,246 in fiscal year 2007 — up 4.1 percent.

Did Romney challenge these sanctuary cities?

“Absolutely not,” Cambridge mayoral spokesman John Clifford told the American Spectator’s Philip Klein. Clifford laughed: “He never took on Cambridge, except out of state.”

“Romney’s being a hypocrite on this issue,” Curtatone told ABC News. “I did not receive a mandate, any communication, anything at all from him about this. If it’s so important to him, why didn’t he have the state police enforcing it?”

_______________________________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Mitt’s messy crime record.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney suddenly faces questions about bicoastal tragedies involving three murder victims, a vicious killer, and a permissive judge he appointed who helped magnify this mayhem.

Daniel Tavares Jr., 41, pleaded guilty in 1991 to stabbing his mother fatally with a carving knife in their Somerset, Massachusetts home. While serving a 17 – 20-year sentence for that atrocity, Tavares allegedly punched one prison guard in the head and later spat on another while yelling “I’m going to kill you!” According to a Department of Corrections document cited by the Boston Herald, Tavares also “threatened to kill the governor [Romney], attorney general of MA, Bristol County Sheriff, and other law enforcement officials when released.” Nonetheless, he was freed last June 14 after just 16 years, thanks to “good time.”

Police immediately re-arrested Tavares to prosecute him for his alleged assaults on these corrections officers. But Kathe Tuttman, a Romney-nominated superior-court judge, rejected both a lower-court decision and prosecutors’ requests to hold Tavares on $50,000 bail. On appeal, Tuttman overlooked Tavares’s prison antics, as well as his eight prior drug and robbery busts. She released him on his own recognizance on July 16. Tuttman also spurned prosecutors’ wishes that Tavares wear a monitoring bracelet. “There is no indication,” she ruled, “that he is a risk of flight.” Tuttman ordered Tavares to report to a probation officer thrice weekly, work as a welder at Davon Steel, and move in with his sister in Dighton, Massachusetts.

Instead, Tavares skipped town, went west, and married Jennifer Lynn Freitas, 37, a woman he met on inmate.com with whom he corresponded while incarcerated. They lived in a trailer near Graham, Wash., some 40 miles south of Seattle.

On November 17, Tavares allegedly argued with two neighbors, Beverly Mauck, 28, and Brian Mauck, 30, a young couple who liked scuba diving and married in the Turks and Caicos Islands on May 5, 2006. Police say Tavares wrapped a .22-caliber revolver in a towel, kicked in the Mucks’ door, and then fatally shot each of them three times in the head. Detectives say they matched Tavares to a bloody palm print and shoe prints found in the Maucks’ home. According to police, Tavares confessed to these crimes.

“It’s because of stupidity in Massachusetts that my daughter is dead,” Beverly Mauck’s father, Darrel Slater, told the Herald. “How does a guy who killed his mother, get charged with more crimes, get out of jail? How can he leave the state?”

Romney stepped into this controversy Saturday.

Judge Tuttman’s decision ‘‘showed an inexplicable lack of good judgment in a hearing that decided to put someone on the street who had not only in the past been convicted of manslaughter, but had threatened the lives of other individuals and was a flight risk,” Romney told journalists while campaigning in Derry, N.H. ‘‘And I think on that basis, that despite her record as being a law-and-order prosecutor, her lack of judgment suggests that she needs to resign from that post.”

When Romney appointed Tuttman, however, he seemed more focused on gender issues than on law and order. Tuttman was one of four associate justices nominated in April 2006 – all women.

All four had prosecutorial experience. In fact, Tuttman, a registered Democrat, was an Essex County assistant district attorney who, among others, prosecuted Eugene McCollom. He pleaded guilty in 2005 to decapitating a prostitute and burying her on a beach in Nahant, Mass. Nonetheless, contemporaneous news accounts show that as it unveiled these judicial appointees, the Romney administration seemed singularly enthused about how these nominees helped it celebrate diversity.

Romney made “a concerted effort to find qualified women and minority candidates for the bench,” spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told the State House News Service on April 26, 2006. “For a long time, women and minorities didn’t even bother applying for judgeships because of the perception that the whole process was politically wired.” Fehrnstrom reportedly suggested that although none of these four women was a minority member, people should “stay tuned” for Romney to name judges of color. “The governor is interested in making sure that appointments to the bench, to the extent possible, reflect the diversity of the community at large,” Fehrnstrom said to the Boston Globe.

How might New Hampshire voters regard this development in their next-door neighbor’s presidential bid? Some may see this as further evidence that “Laxachusetts”’s leniency jeopardizes their safety. In a November 14, 2006, editorial, the New Hampshire Union-Leader complained: “When thugs commit crimes in Massachusetts, too often it is New Hampshire that gets punished.” The paper explained that “Massachusetts enters only about 5 percent of its outstanding warrants into the [FBI's National Crime Information Center] database.” Consequently, 95 percent of criminals wanted in Massachusetts appear law-abiding when New Hampshire cops stop them and compare their names against this database. Romney proposed a bill to require state and local cops to report such warrants to the FBI, but failed to get it through his state legislature.

“People tragically have been killed over this,” Stephen Monier, New Hampshire’s U.S. Marshall told the Union-Leader. “It’s a huge issue.”

Former Democratic state senator Jarrett Barrios told the Herald, “Had he [Romney] actually followed our recommendations on appropriate programs for re-entering prisoners, not just this prisoner, but prisoners across the commonwealth, would be less likely to reoffend.” Barrios also accused Romney of ignoring his own blue-ribbon panel on penal reform. Among other things, it advised post-release monitoring of inmates and job training as methods to reduce recidivism.

Romney’s chief Republican rival, former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, took this occasion to examine Romney’s crime record more broadly.

‘‘The governor is going to have to explain his appointment, and the judge is going to have to explain her decision, but it’s not an isolated situation,” Giuliani told the Associated Press Saturday while on a campaign bus tour across New Hampshire. ‘‘Governor Romney did not have a good record in dealing with violent crime.”

“He had an increase in murder and violent crime while he was governor,” Giuliani continued. ‘‘So it’s not so much the isolated situation which he and the judge will have to explain. He’s kind of thrown her under the bus, so it’s hard to know how this is all going to come out. But the reality is, he did not have a record of reducing violent crime.”

While it’s tricky to compare a four-year governorship with an eight-year mayoralty, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics illuminate Romney’s and Giuliani’s records on law and order. While murders grew 7.5 percent in Massachusetts during Romney’s 2002 – 2006 gubernatorial term, they plunged 66.7 percent across Giuliani’s two mayoral terms (1993 – 2001). Burglaries rose 5.8 percent under Romney and slid 68.2 percent under Giuliani. While robberies climbed 12.3 percent on Romney’s watch, Giuliani supervised a 67.2 percent reduction in robberies. As Romney saw a 32.5 percent reversal in motor-vehicle theft, such crimes cratered 73.3 percent under Giuliani. Overall, Romney’s crime index fell 8.2 percent, while Giuliani’s tumbled 56.1 percent.

(For additional details click here.)

This ghastly episode’s most telling comment comes from the pen of the suspect behind this grisly double homicide, now isolated in Washington’s Pierce County Jail. As the Herald reported November 21, Daniel Tavares Jr. wrote his father to say he received a college education and learned seven languages behind bars. As this convicted killer added: “Only in Massachusetts.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on November 26th, 2007.

Third-party talk ignores Giuliani’s record.

“The most important ‘traditional value’ in this election is keeping the Clintons out of the White House,” says Greg Alterton, an evangelical Christian who has “spent my entire professional career considering how my faith impacts, or should impact, the arena in which I work” – government and politics. Alterton writes for SoConsForRudy.com and counts himself among Rudolph W. Giuliani’s social-conservative supporters.

People like Alterton are important, if overlooked, in the Republican presidential sweepstakes. Anti-Giuliani Religious Rightists are far more visible. Also conspicuous are pundits whose cartoon version of social conservatism regards abortion and gay rights as “the social issues,” excluding other traditionalist concerns.

New York’s former mayor “has abandoned social conservatism,” commentator Maggie Gallagher complains. He “is anathema to social conservatives,” veteran columnist Robert Novak recently wrote. Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson has said: “I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008. It is an irrevocable decision.” Dobson and a cadre of Religious Right leaders threaten to deploy a pro-life, third-party candidate should Giuliani be nominated.

This “Rudyphobia” ignores three key factors: Giuliani’s pro-family/anti-abortion ideas, his socially conservative mayoral record, and his popularity among churchgoing Republicans.

While Giuliani accepts a woman’s right to an abortion, he told Iowa voters on August 7: “By working together to promote personal responsibility and a culture of life, Americans can limit abortions and increase adoptions.” Among Giuliani’s proposals to achieve this end:

“My administration will streamline the adoption process by removing the heartbreaking bureaucratic delays that burden the current process.” Giuliani notes that sclerotic court schedules, exhausted social workers, and tangled red tape trap some 115,000 boys and girls in foster care and prevent moms and dads from adopting them.

Giuliani proposes that the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives promote organizations that help women choose adoption over abortion.

He would make permanent the $10,000 adoption tax credit.

Giuliani also would encourage states and cities to report timely and complete statistics to measure progress in abortion reduction.

This is no sudden conversion on the road to Washington. As mayor, Giuliani did nothing to advance abortion. That helps explains why, on his watch, total abortions fell 13 percent across America, but slid 17 percent in New York. More significant, between 1993 and 2001, Gotham’s tax-funded Medicaid abortions plunged 23 percent.

Medicaid reimbursement figures from the New York State Division of the Budget allow a rough calculation of the Giuliani administration’s expenditures on taxpayer-financed abortions. This estimated funding dropped 22.85 percent, from $1,226,414 in 1993 to $946,175 in 2001. (See more here.)

Giuliani’s campaign for personal responsibility helped create a climate that discouraged abortion. Moving 58 percent of welfare recipients from public assistance to self-reliance, starting before President Clinton signed federal welfare reform, may have encouraged women and men to avoid unwanted pregnancies. New York’s transformation from chaos to order – which helped slash overall crime by 57 percent and homicide by 67 percent – probably reinforced such self-control.

Compared to the eight Democratic years before he arrived, adoptions under Giuliani soared 133 percent. Fiscal years 1987 to 1994 saw 11,287 adoptions; this grew to 27,561 between FY 1995 and FY 2002.

In another pro-family policy, Giuliani divested 78 percent of City Hall’s vast portfolio of confiscated, property-tax-delinquent homes. These were privatized and sold to families and individuals.

Giuliani proposed eliminating the city’s $2,000 marriage penalty. (As individuals, a husband and wife each would enjoy a $7,500 standard deduction, but only write off $13,000 if they jointly filed taxes.) He chopped it to just $400, letting joint-filers share a $14,600 deduction.

Giuliani also opposed gay marriage in 1989, long before it shot onto the radar. “My definition of family is what it is,” Giuliani told Newsday 18 years ago. “It does not include gay marriage as part of that definition.”

On Day 24 of his mayoralty, Giuliani jettisoned New York’s minority and women-owned business set-aside program. He later explained: “The whole idea of quotas to me perpetuates discrimination.” During the 12-year “Republican Revolution,” Congress deserted the fight for colorblindness.

Giuliani sliced or scrapped 23 taxes totaling $9.8 billion and shrank Gotham’s tax burden by 17 percent. This left parents more money for children’s healthcare, private-school tuition, etc.

On education, Giuliani launched a $10 million fund to support 17 new charter schools. Zero existed before he arrived. Giuliani also ended tenure for principals, fought for vouchers, and torpedoed City University’s open admissions and social-promotion policies.

“I took a city that was also known as the pornography capitol of this country,” Giuliani told New Hampshire voters last June. “I got through a ground-breaking re-zoning that was challenged in the courts. We won. And now, if you go to New York City, you don’t have to be bombarded with pornography. And the city has grown dramatically – economically, physically, and spiritually.”

Giuliani accomplished this and plenty more – not in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but in New York City. He could have governed comfortably as a pro-abortion, pro-welfare, pro-quota, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, liberal Republican. Instead, Giuliani relentlessly pushed Reaganesque socio-economic reforms through a City Council populated by seven Republicans and 44 Democrats. What’s so liberal about that?

This record, and Giuliani’s headstrong style, may explain why he leads his competitors and impresses churchgoers. An October 3 ABC/Washington Post poll of 398 Republican and GOP-leaning adults found Giuliani outrunning former senator Fred Thompson, 34 percent to 17, versus Senator John McCain’s 12 percent, and Willard Mitt Romney’s 11. (Error margin +/- 5 percent.) As “most electable,” Giuliani took 50 percent, versus McCain’s 15, Thompson’s 13, and Romney’s 6.

An October 3 Gallup survey found Giuliani enjoying a 38 percent net-favorable rating among churchgoing Catholics, compared to McCain’s 29, and Thompson’s 25. Among Protestant churchgoers, Thompson edges Giuliani 26 percent to 23, with McCain at 16, and Romney at 7.

What do Giuliani’s Religious Right detractors really fear he will do about abortion? If he can overcome their suspicions, secure the GOP nomination, and win the White House, do Giuliani’s critics actually believe he would squander that victory and enrage the GOP base by pushing abortion? Do his foes honestly think Giuliani would request federal abortion funding in violation of the Hyde Amendment he says he supports or appoint activist Supreme Court justices, rather than Antonin Scalia- and Clarence Thomas-style constitutionalists, as he says he would?

Having kept or exceeded his mayoral promises on taxes, spending, crime, welfare, and quality of life, why would he break his presidential promises on such a signature GOP issue? What kind of bait and switch do Giuliani’s foes truly worry he will attempt?

The contrast between Giuliani and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, could not be sharper. She would appoint pro-abortion justices and lower-court judges. These jurists also would be softer on crime, racial preferences, unions, and eminent-domain abuse than Giuliani’s would be.

Hillary Clinton also would take President Bush’s embryonic stem-cell program and expand it in every direction. If Giuliani does not padlock it, he at least would be more sympathetic than Clinton to privatizing it. If America must banish embryos to Petri dishes, let Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer do this. It is inconceivable that Hillary Clinton would shift anything from Washington to the private sector, especially America’s “greedy, wicked” pharmaceutical companies.

Religious Right leaders should study Giuliani’s entire socially conservative record, not just the “socially liberal” caricature of it that hostile commentators and lazy journalists keep sketching. Giuliani’s October 20 appearance before the Family Research Council will permit exactly that. Also, while Giuliani may not be their dream contender, social conservatives should not make the perfect the enemy of the outstanding. Ultimately, they should recognize that a pro-life, third-party candidate would subtract votes from Giuliani in November 2008.

That would raise the curtain on a 3-D horror epic for social conservatives: “The Clintons Reconquer Washington” – bigger, badder, and more vindictive than ever.

____________________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on October 12th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Executive inexperience.

The Yellow-billed Oxpecker stands atop the mighty rhinoceros, gobbling ticks and chirping loudly when danger looms. This tiny bird would make a perfect mascot for Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Akin to that creature, the New York Democrat leaves tiny footprints and has spent more than three decades riding aboard her outsized, accomplished husband, William Jefferson Clinton.

And, like the Oxpecker, Hillary Clinton is remarkably unprepared for the presidency. Beyond helping to secure post-September 11 recovery funds for Gotham, her legislative achievements are rather slight. Lighter yet is her executive experience, which is measurable in grams.

While Clinton has been an outspoken liberal activist since the 1960s, she never has run a business, a city, a state, or a Cabinet department. She was a partner at Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm, but did not administer it. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families aside, she headed none of the non-profits whose boards her website says she joined.

While she conducted President Clinton’s health reform task force in 1993, the plan it concocted in secret collapsed in public. This 1,368-page prescription for government medicine quietly vanished, sparing a Democratic congress the embarrassment of euthanizing it.

Since her 2000 election, Clinton never has chaired a Senate committee. However, she does lead the Senate Superfund and Environmental Health Subcommittee. As its website explains, the panel oversees “recycling, Federal facilities and interstate waste.”

Clinton has presided over something. She commanded the Wellesley College Republicans in 1965, and then became student-government president.

Despite repeated requests, Clinton’s campaign did not identify the executive experiences that supposedly merit her presidency.

Conversely, Clinton’s Democratic rivals display relevant resumes.

Bill Richardson was elected New Mexico’s governor in 2002. He handles a $13.7 billion budget, guides 20,816 state workers, and serves 1.9 million constituents. He was a U.S. House member between 1982 and 1996. He also gained valuable global expertise as United Nations ambassador from 1996 to 1998. Under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush, Richardson has negotiated nuclear issues with North Korean generals and helped free American citizens, soldiers, and dissidents from Cuba, Iraq, and Sudan. As Energy secretary from 1998 to 2000, Richardson addressed Arab-oil dependency and nuclear non-proliferation, and maintained America’s atomic arsenal.

First elected in 1972, Delaware’s Joseph Biden chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also directed it between 2001 and 2003.

Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, elected U.S. representative in 1974 and senator in 1980, chairs the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee.

Even far-Left eccentric Rep. Dennis Kucinich was Cleveland, Ohio’s one-term mayor, years before his 1996 House win.

Elected in 2004, former Harvard Law Review president Barack Obama’s credentials are limited. Nonetheless, the Illinois senator is 2008’s “fresh face” – a phrase rarely in the same sentence with Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s Republican competitors offer considerable executive dexterity: Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor of New York, America’s largest city, with 8 million people. Between 1994 and 2002, he managed budgets as high as $40 billion and as many as 222,836 employees, a payroll surpassed only by Uncle Sam’s and California’s. As U.S. attorney, Giuliani supervised 130 prosecutors and some 200 support staffers between 1983 and 1989. In 2002, he launched Giuliani Partners, a security consultancy that reportedly earned tens of millions in revenues.

Mitt Romney founded Bain Capital, a prosperous enterprise, before becoming Massachusetts’ one-term governor in 2002. His final $36 billion budget funded 43,979 personnel who aided 6.4 million citizens.

Mike Huckabee was Arkansas’s governor between 1996 and 2006. His final, $15.6 billion budget financed 29,151 staffers who covered 2.8 million Arkansans.

Arizona Senator John McCain was a decorated Navy pilot and Vietnam-era POW before his 1982 U.S. House victory. He was elected senator in 1986 and has chaired the committees on Commerce and Indian Affairs.

To Clinton’s credit, she represented America as First Lady in 82 countries, perhaps her most pertinent duty. This may qualify her for secretary of State, a position she could execute with energy and discipline.

However, facing a $2.9 trillion federal budget and 5,120,688 civilian and military employees, Hillary Clinton is ill-equipped to become president of the United States, commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, and leader of the free world. Her executive experience is lighter than a fistful of feathers.

____________________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on November 19th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Racing through the record.

With the 2008 presidential race in fifth gear, two Leftist commentators are trying to sideswipe the Right by running over the late, great Ronald Wilson Reagan. They are driving the ugliest vehicle available: accusations of racism.

“Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism,” columnist Paul Krugman wrote last September. Consequently, he continued, Ronald Reagan “started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered.”

Krugman alluded to the 1964 Ku Klux Klan killings of three Congress of Racial Equality freedom riders, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. This case was dramatized in the 1988 film, Mississippi Burning.

Columnist Bob Herbert then exacerbated Krugman’s act of grave desecration.

“As president, he [Reagan] actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Herbert wrote. “He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Herbert added: “Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.”

Of course, rubbish like this routinely blows along Manhattan’s sidewalks.

While defending Reagan against these outrageous charges, columnist David Brooks cites an invaluable online recording created August 30, 2006, long before this controversy erupted anew. David Hixson, a broadcaster who retired from Denver’s KEZW radio, presents an amateur audio tape of Reagan’s August 3, 1980, appearance at the Neshoba Country Fair. It seems to be the only available recording of this speech.

“The Fair is a recognized must appearance for any serious Mississippi political candidate and could be a deciding factor for Mississippi votes in the upcoming presidential campaign,” Hixson explains. “Pete Perry, [Neshoba] County GOP Chairman, used this strategy successfully in making the arrangements with the Reagan team on very short notice.”

Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly won Mississippi in 1976, so that state was quite competitive in 1980. Team Reagan found this particular event attractive after reading a June 1980 National Geographic magazine article titled “Mississippi’s Grand Reunion at the Neshoba County Fair.” Though some staffers worried about this appearance, Reagan believed in honoring his scheduled commitments, not canceling them. Pollster Dick Wirthlin’s advice to the contrary went unheeded.

Rather than addressing a race rally, the tape finds Reagan speaking jovially for 15 minutes to an overflow crowd. He discusses Carter’s failures including inflation, high taxes, runaway spending, and myriad foreign-affairs blunders. Reagan also tells plenty of jokes.

“People have been telling me that Jimmy Carter has been doing his best,” Reagan quips. “And that’s our problem.”

“I know why he’s so interested in poverty,” Reagan says of Senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.). “He never had any when he was a kid.”

Reagan invokes his experiences with welfare reform in California. While he easily could have used that theme to stir racial animus against minority-group members on public assistance, Reagan empathizes with those on relief:

I don’t believe the stereotype, after what we did, of people in need who are there [on welfare] simply because they prefer to be there. We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be out, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is, again, that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.

Next, Reagan prescribes federalism – the basic conservative, constitutional principle of devolving power and resources as close to localities as possible.

I believe there are programs like that, programs like education and others that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [inaudible].

The crowd roars over the end of that sentence. Reagan continues:

I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, [applause] I will devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions that properly belong there.

Examined honestly, the diabolical phrase, “state’s rights,” which Krugman and Herbert decry as a plea for white power, dissolves into an innocuous call for Conservatism 101: A smaller federal government with revenues and public programs left as close to the people as possible. If Krugman and Herbert are unfamiliar with this concept, they can start by reading the 10th Amendment.

A clearly frustrated Reagan later wrote about this controversy: “Because I said I believed states should be allowed to regain the rights and powers granted to them in the Constitution, he [President Carter] implied I was a racist pandering to Southern voters.”

Federalism may be hemlock to big-government Leftists like Krugman and Herbert, but advocating it is not Morse code for bigots. If it were, Reagan’s largely white, rural, Mississippi audience would have welcomed the words “states rights” with cheers rather than silence.

Krugman and Herbert failed to mention that after supposedly wooing white supremacists with encrypted Klan rhetoric, Reagan flew from Mississippi to Manhattan to address the Urban League the next day. He promoted the idea of low-tax, deregulated “enterprise areas” to stimulate economic growth in America’s ghettoes.

“I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans,” Reagan told the Urban League. “That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose.” This overture to black Americans presumably dimmed the flaming crosses of the very same voters who Reagan allegedly tried to woo just one day earlier.

Krugman and Herbert’s anti-Reagan rage so totally blinds them that they neglected to discuss Democrat Jimmy Carter’s racially insensitive remarks in his 1976 campaign. That April, Carter said he opposed government programs “to inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration.” He added: “I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods.”

As the April 19, 1976 Time reported:

Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson last week postponed plans to endorse Jimmy Carter and angrily exclaimed: “Is there no white politician I can trust?” Jesse Jackson, director of Chicago’s Operation PUSH, called Carter’s views “a throwback to Hitlerian racism.”

Krugman and Herbert also forgot to chide 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for speaking at…the Neshoba County Fair! The Massachusetts governor ignored Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner on the 24^th anniversary of their murders, which were committed about 12 miles away.

Krugman and Herbert’s liberal limousine glides right past numerous inconvenient truths about Reagan’s record on race:

As the future president was growing up, “The Reagans were so poor that he played in the street with black children and thought little of it,” Nicholas Wapshott remembered in the November 14 New York Sun.

In his memoir, An American Life, Reagan wrote: “My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals…There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance.”

In 1931, Reagan was on Eureka College’s football team. One night, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon recalls, an Elmhurst, Illinois hotelier refused lodging to two of Reagan’s black teammates. Reagan invited them to stay at his parents’ home, where Mr. and Mrs. Reagan welcomed them. Reagan “and one of the players, William Franklin Burghardt, remained friends and correspondents until Mr. Burghardt died in 1981,” Cannon wrote Sunday.

As an adult, Reagan had a long history of bias-free fair-mindedness. As Cannon added:

As a sports announcer in Iowa in the 1930s, Mr. Reagan opposed the segregation of Major League Baseball. As an actor in Hollywood, he quit a Los Angeles country club because it did not admit Jews. In 1978, when preparing to run for president, Mr. Reagan opposed a California ballot initiative that would have barred homosexuals from teaching in the state’s public schools.

Ronald Reagan Jr. recalls the day at a California barbecue when his father dived into a pool to save a black child from drowning.

As president, Reagan named Samuel Pierce, a black man, as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development. While Pierce was outside Reagan’s inner circle, he was in Reagan’s Cabinet. In 1982, Reagan promoted Roscoe Robinson to become the Army’s first black four-star general. Reagan also helped place Clarence Thomas on his path to the United States Supreme Court by naming him chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Reagan’s critics may dismiss these appointees as “tokens.” Of course, they also would denounce Reagan for racism if he had zero appointees of color. Either way, Reagan loses.

Bob Herbert’s deceptions notwithstanding, on June 29, 1982, President Reagan approved a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

‘‘The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished,” Reagan said that day. “Citizens must have complete confidence in the sanctity of their right to vote, and that’s what this legislation is all about.” He added: ‘‘As long as I am in a position to uphold the Constitution, no barrier will come between our citizens and the voting booth.”

Reagan signed this measure at a White House ceremony attended by some 300 people including Senator Kennedy and bipartisan members of Congress. Civil-rights veterans were there, too, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Benjamin Hooks, then-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Urban League president John Jacob; the Rev. Joseph Lowery, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King.

Krugman whines that “Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday.” Earth to Planet Krugman: On November 2, 1983, President Reagan made Dr. King’s birthday a federal holiday, the first and only such honor for a black American.

As the Associated Press reported back then, “Reagan originally had expressed concern over the cost of honoring King with a national holiday, and said he would have preferred a day of recognition.” Also, when asked at a press conference if he agreed with then-Senator Jesse Helms’s (R., N.C.) claims that sealed FBI files implicated some of King’s associates as Communists, Reagan said: “We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?” Reagan telephoned Mrs. King to apologize for that comment.

Reagan warmly honored King at the White House.

“In America, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination,” Reagan said. “The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther Kings Jr.”

Reagan added that King “awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, ‘Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone.’”

After endorsing the measure before some 200 guests, Reagan handed his signature pen to King’s widow.

As UPI’s then-White House correspondent Helen Thomas wrote: “When it was over, the guests joined in softly singing, ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the battle cry that symbolized King’s struggle for racial equality.”

According to the Washington Post, Jesse Jackson, who attended the event, said of Reagan that day: “We’ve all had high and low moments, and this is one of his high moments.”

“It was a beautiful day, and a beautiful statement was made,” Coretta Scott King told reporters in the Rose Garden. “And the president spoke as president of all the people today.”

President Reagan named Lieutenant General Colin Powell America’s first black national-security adviser in November 1987. He served through Reagan’s second term and was a major player in Reagan’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union’s final leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

“He was not only my boss and commander-in-chief, both in my capacity as a soldier, but also as his national security adviser,” Powell recalled on CBS News after President Reagan passed away in June 2004. “We became very good friends, both during the two years I worked with him and in the year after he retired, as I did with Nancy Reagan.”

Another of Reagan’s unsung achievements is his signature on the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. This federal law green lighted the Indian casinos that dot America, from Connecticut’s enormous, eye-popping Mohegan Sun to the slightly more modest but still impressive Pechanga Casino in Temecula, California. Whatever one thinks of gambling, these enterprises earn billions for Indian tribes that had little beyond their traditions until Ronald Reagan freed them to capitalize on America’s betting jones. A true bigot would have let the red man stay poor and hopeless.

Krugman’s latest sludge bucket holds this lump of deep thought:

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

O.K., so Reagan loved blacks personally, but pushed us around politically to earn for himself and other Republicans the loyalty of bigoted white voters? So, let’s see: Reagan invited news cameras to capture him extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and signing the MLK holiday into law while sitting beside King’s widow in 1983. This clearly was part of Reagan’s effort to boost his standing among white bigots before seeking reelection in 1984.

And how about making Colin Powell America’s first black NSC chief and enriching Choctaws and Seminoles? Obviously, this was meant to galvanize white racists into electing Reagan’s successor, G. H. W. Bush.

“Why is this slur being floated now?” wonders Hoover Institution scholar Martin Anderson, Reagan’s long-time aide, chief White House domestic-policy adviser, and co-editor of several books documenting Reagan’s insightful, hand-written, speeches, and correspondence on public affairs. “I don’t know – maybe the 20th anniversary of Reagan’s departure from office, which is looming ahead, will show that his legacy is far more important than we knew. And that will be intolerable to a lot of people.”

Especially with the White House at stake, Leftist hacks like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert will keep trying to smear Ronald Reagan as a racist. The obvious implication is that those of us who love America’s 40th president also are either racists or self-hating blacks.

These annoyingly immortal, liberal fantasies are just a steaming pile of lies.

____________________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on November 20th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

And they’d rather see Rudy dead than president.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is gaining fans, even on the West Bank.

“I hope Hillary is elected in order to have the occasion to carry out all the promises she is giving regarding Iraq,” said Ala Senakreh, West Bank chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Palestinian terror group. “I hope also she will maintain her husband’s policies regarding Palestine and even develop that policy. President Clinton wanted to give the Palestinians 98 percent of the West Bank territories. I hope Hillary will move a step forward and will give the Palestinians all their rights. She has the chance to save the American nation and the Americans’ life.”

Senakreh and other top Islamo-fascists want Hillary in the Oval Office. These mass murders also have “gone negative.” They want GOP contender Rudy Giuliani dead.

“We see Hillary and other candidates are competing on who will withdraw from Iraq and who is guilty of supporting the Iraqi invasion,” said Abu Jihad, an Al Aqsa leader in Nablus. “This is a moment of glory for the revolutionary movements in the Arab world in general and for the Iraqi resistance movement specifically.”

Al Aqsa’s man in the northern West Bank, Nasser Abu Aziz, considered it “very good” that there are “voices like Hillary and others who are now attacking the Iraq invasion.”

Islamic Jihad’s Abu Ayman felt “emboldened” by Clinton’s demands that America retreat from Iraq. He said: “It is clear that it is the resistance operations of the mujahideen that have brought about these calls for withdrawal.”

“All Americans must vote Democrat,” insisted Jihad Jaara, an exiled Al Aqsa agent who commanded 2002’s siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

Since 1995, these terrorists’ organizations have killed an estimated 162 and wounded 368 others in Israel. Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is WorldNetDaily.com’s Jerusalem bureau chief, interviewed some three dozen leading Muslim fanatics, including those quoted here. His new book, Schmoozing with Terrorists, details these chilling encounters with violent Islamic extremists in Israel’s Palestinian territories.

Klein boldly goes where few journalists have gone before. For one typical interview, he traverses an Israeli border checkpoint, takes a local Palestinian taxi to central Jenin, then waits for a white Ford Escort without license plates to whisk him to an apartment complex at the end of an alley. He then meets Islamic Jihad’s Abu Ahmed. After several minutes, Klein asks: “So, if after today’s meeting, you saw me in a café in Jerusalem that you were sent to attack, you’d still try to blow it up?”

“I will not hesitate to blow you up,” Ahmed responds. “Meanwhile, and before I drive you to Hell in an operation, enjoy your tea and our hospitality.”

Why do these hardened butchers have a soft spot for Hillary Clinton? Perhaps because the New York Democrat is soft on terrorism.

Clinton has vacillated on robustly interrogating terrorists in “ticking time bomb” scenarios. In a September 26 Democratic debate, she said: “It cannot be American policy, period.” This reversed Clinton’s October 2006 statement to the New York Daily News that, in case of “having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans,” a president could “depart from standard international practices.”

Clinton opposes the U.S. Terrorist Surveillance Program, calling it “a secret program that spies on Americans.”

Clinton voted against military tribunals for terror suspects, including al-Qaeda detainees.

Clinton has zigzagged on Iraq. In autumn 2002, she voted to authorize Operation Iraqi Freedom. In February 2005, she said, “I don’t think we should be setting a deadline” to leave Iraq. Last January 18, she told PBS: “I think the timetable still remains problematic.” But a month later, on February 17, she stated: “It’s time to say the redeployment should start in 90 days, or we will revoke authorization for this war.”

Clinton has waffled on Iran. Last February, she told the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee that “no option can be taken off the table” when confronting Tehran. This month, she declared she is “opposed to letting President Bush take any military action” against Iran without Congress’ permission.

The fact that Hillary’s foreign-affairs advisers include Bill Clinton’s national-security chief, Sandy Berger – despite his guilty plea for stealing al-Qaeda-related secrets from the National Archives, stuffing these documents down his socks, then shredding them at home with scissors – raises grave doubts about how seriously she takes national security.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign has yet to respond to my requests to list her counterterrorist accomplishments.

These terrorists’ love for Hillary mirrors their hatred for her leading GOP rival, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“If I had the occasion to meet him I would hurt him,” said Ramadan Adassi, a West Bank Al Aqsa leader. “For the sake of the American people, Giuliani shouldn’t be elected. He is a disgusting guy, and I think Americans must think very hard about their future and their soldiers who will be killed when they come to elect their leaders.”

“Giuliani doesn’t deserve to live or even to be mentioned,” said Al Aqsa’s Ala Senakreh. “He hates Palestinians and we hate him.”

Al Aqsa’s Abu Hamed said Giuliani “can hate Arafat and the Palestinians, but he knows that nobody is hated in the world more than his leadership, his party, his president, and his Zionist friends.”

Why the hard feelings? Perhaps because Giuliani has snipped terrorists’ bomb wires for 31 years.

Giuliani’s “On the Issues” website entry identifies “Winning the War on Terror” as his third Top-10 theme. Clinton’s third of 10, coincidentally, is “Ending the War in Iraq.” Her “Issues” page does not even mention “Terror.”

Mayor Giuliani’s NYPD officers in July 1997 arrested two Palestinians with Jordanian passports and five pipe-bombs. They were convicted of immigration fraud and plotting to blast Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue subway station.

Giuliani rode a No. 18 bus in Israel in March 1996, just weeks after terrorists attacked that route. He said, “I want to show that terrorism can’t succeed and that decent people stand up against terrorists.”

In 1995, Giuliani famously expelled Yasser Arafat from an invitation-only United Nations 50^th anniversary celebration at Lincoln Center. As Giuliani said then: “Arafat has never been held to answer for the murders that he was implicated in.” Last October 16, Giuliani told the Republican Jewish Coalition why he booted the PLO dictator: “I knew from my own investigations of Arafat that he was a murderer and a terrorist.” Giuliani added: “This whole idea of holding him on a morally equivalent plane to the prime minister of Israel…was a terrible, terrible mistake.”

As New York City’s U.S. attorney, Giuliani attempted in 1988 to close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s U.N. observer mission under the 1987 Anti-Terrorism Act.

In 1986, Giuliani targeted an anti-Castro group responsible for two murders and 25 bombings. Giuliani secured guilty pleas from three Omega 7 members who conspired to kill Cuba’s U.N. ambassador in 1980 and blow up its Manhattan consulate in 1979.

While he was third-in-charge at President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Giuliani encouraged Interpol to improve its global probes of money laundering, international fugitives, and explosives trafficking. He also worked with the FBI to protect the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics from terrorism and other threats.

Giuliani represented the Justice Department on President Gerald Ford’s Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. It addressed the “increased danger of major terrorist attacks in the US requiring urgent preventive and preparatory action,” according to a declassified June 10, 1976 State Department memo. Among other things, Giuliani foresaw that the regulations that blocked CIA and FBI intelligence sharing “were hampering the U.S. government in keeping track of terrorists.” This very “wall” later kept the September 11 conspiracy’s dots fatally disconnected.

“I don’t believe Americans should base their votes entirely on what the terrorists think,” Aaron Klein says from Jerusalem, “but it’s certainly telling that our enemies are rooting for the Democrats, particularly Hillary.” He adds: “The theme from all those interviewed in the book, about 35, and those I have talked with for my reporting the past few years, which adds many more, is the same: They favor the Democrats and believe the liberal ideology is their road to victory.”

As the War on Terror continues, Americans should study our foes’ political preferences – and then pull the lever the other way.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Editor’s Note: The original version of this article was published in Human Events and Race42008.com on October 26th, 2007. The full and complete version published here originally appeared in the National Review on October 29th, 2007.-KWN

Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is gaining fans, even on the West Bank.

“I hope Hillary is elected in order to have the occasion to carry out all the promises she is giving regarding Iraq,” said Ala Senakreh, West Bank chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Palestinian terror group. “President Clinton wanted to give the Palestinians 98 percent of the West Bank territories. I hope Hillary will move a step forward and will give the Palestinians all their rights.”

Senakreh and other top Islamo-fascists want Hillary in the Oval Office. These mass murders also have “gone negative.” They want GOP contender Rudy Giuliani dead.

“We see Hillary and other candidates are competing on who will withdraw from Iraq,” said Abu Jihad of Al Aqsa’s Nablus unit. “This is a moment of glory for the revolutionary movements in the Arab world…”

Al Aqsa’s Nasser Abu Aziz, considered it “very good” that there are “voices like Hillary and others who are now attacking the Iraq invasion.”

Islamic Jihad’s Abu Ayman felt “emboldened” by Clinton’s demands that America retreat from Iraq. He said: “It is clear that it is the resistance operations of the mujahideen that have brought about these calls for withdrawal.”

“All Americans must vote Democrat,” insisted Jihad Jaara, an exiled Al Aqsa agent who commanded 2002’s siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

Since 1995, these terrorists’ organizations have killed an estimated 162 and wounded 368 others in Israel. Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is WorldNetDaily.com’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief, interviewed some three dozen leading Muslim fanatics, including those quoted here. His new book, “Schmoozing with Terrorists,” details these chilling encounters with violent Islamic extremists in Israel’s Palestinian territories.

Why do these hardened butchers have a soft spot for Hillary Clinton? Perhaps because the New York Democrat is soft on terrorism.

Clinton rejects robustly interrogating terrorists even in “ticking time bomb” scenarios. In a September 26 Democratic debate, she said: “It cannot be American policy, period.”

Clinton opposes the U.S. Terrorist Surveillance Program, calling it “a secret program that spies on Americans.”

Clinton voted against military tribunals for terror suspects, including al-Qaeda detainees.

Clinton has zigzagged on Iraq. In autumn 2002, she voted for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Last January 18, she told PBS: “I think the timetable still remains problematic” for leaving Iraq. But on February 17, she stated: “It’s time to say the redeployment should start in 90 days…”

Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign has not responded to my request to list her counterterrorist accomplishments.

These terrorists’ love for Hillary mirrors their hatred for her leading GOP rival, Rudy Giuliani.

“If I had the occasion to meet him I would hurt him,” said Ramadan Adassi, a West Bank Al Aqsa leader. “For the sake of the American people, Giuliani shouldn’t be elected.”

“Giuliani doesn’t deserve to live or even to be mentioned,” said Al Aqsa’s Ala Senakreh. “He hates Palestinians and we hate him.”

Al Aqsa’s Abu Hamed said Giuliani “can hate Arafat and the Palestinians, but he knows that nobody is hated in the world more than his leadership, his party, his president, and his Zionist friends.”

Why the hard feelings? Perhaps because Giuliani has snipped terrorists’ bomb wires for 31 years.

Mayor Giuliani’s NYPD officers in July 1997 arrested two Palestinians with Jordanian passports and five pipe-bombs. They were convicted of immigration fraud and plotting to blast Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue subway station.

As New York City’s U.S. Attorney, Giuliani attempted in 1988 to close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s United Nations observer mission under the 1987 Anti-Terrorism Act.

In 1986, Giuliani targeted an anti-Castro group responsible for two murders and 25 bombings. Giuliani secured guilty pleas from three Omega 7 members who conspired to kill Cuba’s U.N. ambassador in 1980 and blow up its Manhattan consulate in 1979.

Giuliani represented the Justice Department on President Gerald Ford’s Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism in 1976.

“I don’t believe Americans should base their votes entirely on what the terrorists think,” Aaron Klein says from Jerusalem, “but it’s certainly telling that our enemies are rooting for the Democrats, particularly Hillary.”As the War on Terror continues, Americans should study our foes’ political preferences — and then pull the lever the other way.

______________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in Human Events on October 26th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s consent.

With his confident style and crowd-pleasing smile, Ames, Iowa straw-poll winner Willard Mitt Romney looks like a formidable contender for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. If he’s lucky, he can leave voters so dazzled that they ignore his record.

Rather than see stars, Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Boston’s Northeastern University placed Romney’s rule beneath their statistical microscope. Let’s hope what they discovered is not contagious.

“Our analysis reveals a weak comparative economic performance of the state over the Romney years, one of the worst in the country,” the researchers wrote in the July 29 Boston Globe. Specifically, they found:

As U.S. real output grew 13 percent between 2002 and 2006, Massachusetts trailed at 9 percent.

Manufacturing employment fell 7 percent nationwide those years, but sank 14 percent under Romney, placing Massachusetts 48th among the states.

Between fall 2003 and last autumn, U.S. job growth averaged 5.4 percent, nearly thrice Massachusetts’ anemic 1.9 percent pace.

Romney predicted August 12 on Fox News Sunday that Massachusetts eventually will harvest his new-business-development seeds. “You’re going to see the product of that generate great results for years to come.”

Romney’s vaunted healthcare plan also disappoints. It forces individuals to purchase medical coverage and fines those who refuse. Businesses with at least 11 employees either must offer health insurance or pay penalties. (Democrats overrode Romney’s veto of this provision). The Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, a government panel, defines every health policy’s “Minimum Creditable Coverage.” So far, the Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes reports, monthly premiums average $380, not $200, as Romney forecast. The program may cost taxpayers an extra $276.4 million this year, more than double its original $125.4 million estimated expense.

Romney blames tinkering Democratic state legislators.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen down the road as the Democrats get their hands on it,” Romney told the National Review Institute. “I was a little concerned at the signing ceremony when Ted Kennedy showed up.”

Romney’s Pontius-Pilate-like hand washing is thoroughly unconvincing. Bay State Democrats would have struggled to hijack health reform based on tax incentives, choice, and ownership — as GOP frontrunner Rudolph W. Giuliani recently proposed — rather than RomneyCare’s easily scaled universal mandates, regulatory boards, and government-imposed standards. (Romney’s campaign did not return calls for comment before press time.)

Romney’s administration fades badly beside Giuliani’s accomplishments.

While Romney couldn’t persuade Democratic legislators to lower taxes, Giuliani convinced a Democratic City Council to reduce or scrap 23 taxes. Consequently, Gotham’s top income-tax rate fell 20.6 percent, while Massachusetts’ remains stuck at 5.3 percent, despite Romney’s unheeded plea to cut it to 5 percent.

Though Romney’s tax burden (revenue’s proportion of personal income) increased 10.8 percent, Giuliani sliced his 17 percent.

Public-assistance rolls slid 5 percent under Romney (albeit, after most reductions already occurred), but they tumbled 58 percent under Giuliani, starting before President Clinton signed federal welfare reform.

Romney watched unemployment wane 5.7 percent while joblessness plummeted 40.8 percent under Giuliani.

Personal income advanced 18.2 percent during Romney’s days, while it sped ahead 49.9 percent during Giuliani time.

It’s tricky to contrast Romney and Giuliani. New York’s former mayor led a city of 8 million (up 9.3 percent during his mayoralty), and supervised 215,891 public employees (down 3.1 percent from his arrival, or 17.2 percent, excluding new cops and teachers). Though not a governor, Giuliani governed a metropolis one quarter larger than Massachusetts. Its 43,979 state employees (down 1.4 percent under Romney) served 6.4 million residents (up 0.1 percent).

It would be easier to draw parallels if, like Giuliani, Romney had won re-election, rather than duck a second-term bid that experts widely predicted he would lose. Romney explained to the Globe that he stood aside because, “There was very little that had to spill into a second term that we had any prospects of ever getting done.”

So, what remains to recommend Romney? No doubt, he showed how to succeed in business by founding Bain Capital, which flourishes. Also, Romney is smooth, charismatic, and handsome. Someday, he could portray George Clooney’s older brother in “Ocean’s 14.” But, given his flimsy gubernatorial legacy, that doesn’t mean much. In essence, Mitt Romney is just another pretty face.

______________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in Human Events on August 17th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s consent.

Rudy’s freedom-loving approach to health care.

This week’s health-care debate previews the fall 2008 election, if today’s presidential frontrunners win their respective party nominations. Senator Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.) and former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R., N.Y.) are promoting reforms that contrast like midnight and high noon.

As Clinton cheers, Congress moves to reauthorize the State Child Health Insurance Program. Launched modestly in 1997, SCHIP was targeted at kids whose families were too prosperous for Medicaid, but too poor for private coverage. Like nearly every federal scheme, SCHIP is metastasizing. Clinton, her Democratic comrades, and some weak-kneed Republican appeasers are widening SCHIP into a self-contradictory contraption, complete with a tax hike and a fiscal blunderbuss.

“It is one of our most important national priorities to cover all Americans, and that should start now with all of our children,” Clinton said July 16. Of course, it depends on what the meaning of the word “children” is. Washington already lets 14 states cover 670,000 “boys” and “girls,” up to age 25, some of whom have been drinking legally for four years and voting for seven. Ninety-two percent of Minnesota’s SCHIP budget insures adults.

Clinton’s proposal, like the House Democrats’ bill, would cover children in families up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL), double today’s target. Thus, a family of four making $82,600 could receive federal-government medicine. Meanwhile – the Heritage Foundation’s Rea Hederman estimates – 70,000 “American families are both poor and high-income – simultaneously.” They qualify for SCHIP and the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Madder still, 77 percent of children between double and triple FPL and 89 percent between 300 and 400 percent of FPL already have private health insurance, notes Cato Institute scholar Michael Cannon. Nonetheless, the Democratic House Wednesday night approved $47 billion for SCHIP through 2012, 88 percent above its current $25 billion, five-year budget.

Senate Democrats would fund this extravaganza via a 156 percent cigarette-tax hike – from 39 cents to $1 per pack. Heritage forecasts that 22 million new smokers would have to light up by 2017 to keep SCHIP afloat. So, SCHIP promises to improve children’s health while exploiting adult tobacco addiction. And if those smokers never materialize, future Congresses simply will invoice smoke-free taxpayers.

“The Left is pretty blatant about this being their vehicle to move to universal coverage,” one health-policy expert told me. “Make kids think you get health insurance from the government, and in less than a generation, you’re there.”

While Democrats and some lily-livered Republicans ceaselessly invoke “the children” to impose government medicine, Giuliani does the reverse. His just-unveiled health plan rejects public entitlements and tax hikes and embraces private property and tax incentives to extend health coverage overall – beyond just kids.

“America’s health-care system is being dragged down by decades of government-imposed mandates and wasteful, unaccountable bureaucracy,” Giuliani told New Hampshire voters Tuesday. “To reform, we must empower all Americans by increasing health-care choices and affordability, while bringing accountability to the system.”

Giuliani specifically would grant uninsured families $15,000 tax exemptions, and singles $7,500, to help them buy private coverage that they, not their bosses, would own, control, and transport throughout their careers – much like car, home, and life insurance. Funds remaining after insurance purchases could be deposited tax-free into Health Savings Accounts for routine medical expenses.

He also would let Americans acquire health plans across state lines, as they now do with non-medical insurance. For instance, unmarried New Yorkers, who currently must buy such unneeded mandatory benefits as fertility services, would be free to secure no-frills plans from insurers in, say, mandate-light Ohio.

Giuliani also would curb malpractice costs by capping lawsuit damages and requiring frivolous plaintiffs to cover victorious doctors’ legal bills.

“If a person gets injured, he should be compensated, but he shouldn’t get the brass ring or win the lottery,” Giuliani explained.

Unlike President Bush, whose happy talk fuels Leftist disdain, Giuliani describes Democrats’ ideas with bracing candor. He calls their health proposals “heavily influenced by Marxism.”

“We’ve got to solve our health-care problems with American principles, not the principles of socialism,” Giuliani says. “I know Democrats will say this is unfair, I know they’ll squeal… But I am a realist. I face reality, which is: If you take more people and have government cover them, it’s called socialized medicine.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on August 2nd, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

NEW YORK – The Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame Wilson controversy threatens to linger for months. Exhibit A is the House Judiciary Committee’s July 11 hearing on President Bush’s commutation of the former vice-presidential aide’s jail sentence. He was convicted of lying about his role in identifying Plame as a CIA officer. Amid the political fisticuffs over Libby’s punishment, one important issue remains overlooked: exposing CIA officers, especially in wartime, is stupid, dangerous behavior.

Many of my fellow Republicans have convinced themselves that Plame was not covert, so it’s no biggie that former State Department official Richard Armitage unmasked her to veteran columnist Robert Novak, who then published her identity.

“Plame was not covert,” former federal prosecutor Victoria Toensing insisted in the February 18 Washington Post. “She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years.”

“It was a desk job,” Rep. Roy Blunt (R – Missouri) said of Plame’s duties. He added, on CBS Face the Nation, “I think many people in Washington understood that her employment was at the CIA and she went to that office every day.”

These arguments crumble in two key ways:

First, as a March 16 House Oversight Committee hearing demonstrated, Plame indeed served undercover.

“I was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Plame swore. “I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified.” Within the last five years, Plame added, “I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.”

Like generals based overseas who remain generals while occupying Pentagon posts, Plame said, “covert operations officers who are serving in the field, when they rotate back for a temporary assignment in Washington, they, too, are still covert.”

Either Plame spoke the truth or she perjured herself before congressmen, journalists, and TV cameras. If so, CIA Director Michael Hayden must have lied, too. He approved this statement to the committee:

During her employment at the CIA, Ms. Wilson was undercover. Her employment status with the CIA was classified information, prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958. At the time of the publication of Robert Novak’s column on July 14, 2003, Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment status was covert. This was classified information.

Second, so what? Even if Plame were not covert, naming her as a CIA officer was utterly reckless.

Imagine a moderate Pakistani Muslim named Kamal who hates al-Qaeda and wants to cleanse his Islamabad neighborhood of a bomb-making terrorist cell. He considers calling his neighbor, Mr. Donovan, who works at the US Embassy and perhaps can help foil these wicked zealots. Then, Kamal clicks on al-Jazeera and witnesses all this hullabaloo about a CIA operative, sees her picture repeatedly, and listens to endless talk-show chatter on CNN International about her blown cover.

Kamal wonders if someday Donovan might get dragged into the spotlight. And what might Kamal’s machete-wielding neighbors think if he were friends with an infidel spy?

Kamal sighs, sips his tea, and shuts his mouth.

If Kamal stays quiet, why should overseas governments sing?

“Leaks like these undermine our ability to conduct liaison relationships with friendly foreign intelligence services because they are afraid these sorts of things will end up in the press, especially when we are at war,” says Peter Brookes, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former intelligence officer. “This could cost American lives.”

Brookes also worries that such fiascos “could turn away bright young people who might want to join the Agency but won’t now because they are afraid of being exposed and finding their lives in jeopardy.”

Libby’s defenders correctly ask why Richard Armitage completely has skated away. The State Department functionary who outed Plame to Novak has endured no evident consequences for his at least careless and arguably unlawful loose lips. Armitage barely has suffered the slings and arrows of bad press.

According to Nexis, between July 1 and July 10, 743 English-language media stories discussed both Libby and Plame. Of these, only 148 cited Armitage. Thus, only 20 percent of this coverage even mentioned the man who initially leaked Plame’s name.

Armitage has not received the high-level scorn he deserves for not coming forward and explaining that he let Plame’s name slip. From Novak’s accounts, he did so off-handedly. For three years, Libby, vice president Cheney, and presidential aide Karl Rove underwent microscopic investigative scrutiny and, in Libby’s case, a lengthy, costly, unsuccessful trial. Reporter Judith Miller spent weeks behind bars rather than reveal her sources in this case. Acrimony flowed like flood water up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. And the only people who found it amusing were – who else? – the defense attorneys who laughed through the whole thing at $500 an hour. These lawyers owe Armitage lunch.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald deserves the silver medal for aggravated injustice, just behind disgraced Duke Lacrosse persecutor Mike Nifong, who scored the gold. Fitzgerald knew all along that Armitage was Novak’s source, yet he told Armitage to hush while he maneuvered others into his cross hairs.

All of this suggests mercy toward Libby, despite the inconvenient truth that a federal jury convicted him of perjury and obstruction of justice.

All told, a key lesson of this entire sordid affair should be that, especially in war, bureaucrats and journalists should clam up about the names of CIA officers.
______________________________________________________________________________________

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

A clever (road-tested) agenda from the GOP frontrunner.

As the Washington spending juggernaut steams furiously ahead, Rudy Giuliani has offered to toss several monkey wrenches into its gears. Wednesday in Des Moines, Iowa, the Republican presidential frontrunner unveiled several attractive ideas to “restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending.”? Among them:

Require that federal agency chiefs propose 5 to 20 percent spending cuts annually, forcing them to streamline their operations and improve services for less money.

Slash federal civilian employment by 21 percent. By 2017, 42 percent of federal workers are expected to retire. As president, Giuliani would replace only half those vacancies. These 150,000 unfilled bureaucratic slots would save taxpayers $21 billion annually, while sparing Americans that many meddlers and nannies.

“GAPStat,” a proposed government-wide accountability program, would evaluate federal activities and correct or eliminate failures.

Place mandatory sunset clauses on all federal programs. Congress would have to rate and reauthorize federal initiatives, or let them expire.

Require Congressional Budget Office price tags on legislation before voting begins on any bill. No such requirement exists today.

Make Washington follow the same generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that it demands of publicly traded companies. This would harmonize conflicting accounting systems among, and even within, agencies.

So what? Why should anyone believe Giuliani ever would implement such clever plans?

Well, he already has. As mayor of New York, Giuliani used similar reforms to reverse the city’s decline and rejuvenate its finances.

Giuliani instructed agency managers to suggest annual spending cuts of at least 5 percent. This enhanced public services and helped keep average annual spending growth 1 percent below inflation. On Giuliani’s watch, per-capita spending sank 2.4 percent, some $149 in today’s dollars.

Despite hiring more cops and teachers, Giuliani reduced city-funded full-time employees from 117,494 to 94,313 a 19.7 percent cutback.

Giuliani’s CompStat system helped NYPD precinct commanders measure crime block-by-block and deploy cops where hoodlums hovered. Such savvy manpower allocation helped slash overall crime 57 percent and homicide 66 percent.

Giuliani did all this and more while reducing or eliminating 23 taxes, chopping the top tax rate 20.6 percent, and saving taxpayers $9.8 billion.

Also encouraging is Giuliani’s recent rejection of Washington’s religious tenet that entitlements are untouchably “non-discretionary.”

“All spending is discretionary,” Giuliani said this month in Bedford, New Hampshire. “Congress has to appropriate it; the president has to sign it and it has to be looked at from the point of view of, can we afford it now?”

Giuliani’s fiscal-discipline program, among his “12 Commitments to the American People,” coincides with his appointment of an economic policy board. The board includes flat-tax guru Steve Forbes; supply-side stalwart David Malpass, Bear Stearns’ chief economist; Hoover Institution economist Michael Boskin; and Annelise and Martin Anderson, co-editors of the Reagan in His Own Hand compilations of the late president’s public-policy writings. Martin Anderson also was President Reagan’s first chief domestic policy advisor.

These are boldly Reaganite economic hardliners. Tax slicers and budget squeezers should lick their lips in anticipation.

Giuliani’s fiscal commitments and achievements require GOP primary voters to decide whether the 2008 Republican nominee should be someone who actually has accomplished something. Giuliani’s rivals in (or recovering from) Congress have sponsored bills, some better than others, and conducted oversight hearings. But what have they managed? The former governors competing against Giuliani have been public chief executives. Good for them. But whose tenure can compare to Giuliani’s successful rescue of a deadly, dysfunctional, and indebted metropolis (America’s largest), which he whisked to safety, efficiency, and surplus? Giuliani did this while Democrats controlled at least 44 of the City Council’s 51 seats, and the New York Times spat venom at him.

It would be refreshing for Giuliani to restrain Washington with his headstrong attitude and his roadmap for fiscal responsibility. Imagine having a president who writes, as Giuliani recently did: “I want to be held accountable for the progress we make as a nation.”

Still, perusing Giuliani’s first-rate prescriptions leaves one melancholy. They resemble those of a conservative Republican aspiring to clean up after liberal Washington Democrats much like Ronald Reagan preparing to sweep up the litter of Carterism.

But Giuliani’s proposals arrive after twelve recently concluded years of GOP congressional control, half of which coincided with a Republican presidency. What should have been a golden age of limited government swiftly deteriorated into a fiscal bacchanal, with no boondoggle left behind. Brand-new entitlements blossomed while a smothering incompetence enveloped everything from foreign intelligence to hurricane relief, and even the timely delivery of get-well cards to hospitalized veterans.

It may take this New York Republican with solid GOP ideas to hose down the mess created by his widely counterproductive party brethren in Washington.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in the National Review Online on June 22nd, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission

Rudy Giuliani isn’t easily intimidated on the environment

As Earth Day dawns Sunday, Americans should consider the relationship between environmentalists and the former mayor of the capital of Earth. From New York’s City Hall, Rudolph W. Giuliani successfully confronted green zealots while advancing science and technology. Here again, Giuliani stands well Right of where his detractors might expect.

The West Nile virus debuted in the Western Hemisphere in Queens, New York’s College Point community in August 1999. Among 62 New York State residents who contracted West Nile encephalitis (brain swelling) that year, seven died.

Rather than study the problem to death, that summer and in 2000, Giuliani launched widespread insecticide spraying against West Nile-carrying mosquitoes. Environmentalists went haywire.

The local No Spray Coalition sued to block fumigation. New York’s Green party callously declared: “These diseases only kill the old and people whose health is already poor.”

Giuliani firmly told Newsday that spraying was “perfectly safe.” He added: “There are some people who are engaged in the business of wanting to frighten people out of their minds.” In 2000, he told CNN: “The reality is that danger to human life is more important than birds, fish, and insects.”

Before releasing water-borne larvicide and aerial- and ground-level pesticide, hundreds of Health Department employees used flyers and home visits to urge Queens residents to remain indoors with windows and air ducts closed during nighttime spraying. A 75-person, 24-hour hotline answered 150,000 calls. Doctors and journalists also were briefed.

“The response required daily, continuous communication among many agencies to coordinate,” then-Assistant Health Commissioner Dr. Marcelle Layton told the New York Academy of Sciences on July 12, 2000. “The city also purchased 400,000 cans of mosquito repellent to distribute free of charge, an action modeled on our plans for mass medical distribution in case of bioterrorism. In retrospect, this was a very good decision because stores in some communities in Connecticut did run out of repellent.”

I remember subsequently walking around the evening my Manhattan neighborhood was sprayed. While meandering through the East Village after I should have returned home, I heard an odd buzz and saw a small white pickup a block away, tailed by a white chemical cloud. I jogged to the next corner to avoid inhaling it. Minutes later, the buzz returned, and an insecticide-spewing truck turned the corner and headed toward me along a largely abandoned Third Avenue. I sprinted home and stayed there until morning.

While this was a bit creepy, the good news is that Giuliani’s swift and thorough spraying programs yanked the wings off the mosquitoes that could have turned a manageable West Nile outbreak into a catastrophe.

“Unfortunately West Nile has spread, largely because other mayors didn’t spray when they were cowed by the greens,” says John Berlau, author of Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health. “But West Nile could have become an immediate nationwide epidemic if not for the quick action of Giuliani and his Health Department.”

Other New York politicians caved into the chemophobic activists. “We believe the risk of infection for…residents remains quite low,” Nassau County’s Health Commissioner announced after West Nile-infected mosquitoes reached Long Island in August 2001. But, as the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Angela Logomasini found, “the risk was not low enough for East Meadow residents Adeline Bisignano and Karl Fink. Both became ill with the virus at the end of that same month and died the following November.”

Given West Nile’s documented human toll, Giuliani did the right thing. In 1999, a Russian flare-up sickened 500 people, killing 40. A 1996 outbreak of West Nile meningitis and encephalitis centered in Bucharest, Romania, infected 90,000 and hospitalized 835. Seventeen died.

Environmentalists whined when New York City and Consolidated Edison cooperated to build ten new electrical generating plants and expand another facility where 14th Street meets FDR Drive.

“We object to the fact that our neighborhood is being slammed with pollution,” East River Environmental Coalition president Susan Steinberg complained to gothamgazette.com. “Con Ed, let me breathe” demanded a placard at an April 2001 protest. One demonstrator’s puppet puffed on an asthma nebulizer.

As Giuliani writes in his book, Leadership, “I, too, would have preferred a public park or beautiful housing to a generator on the East River, but I also had to think about the 12,000 megawatts New Yorkers could consume in an hour on a hot day.” Indeed, a 1999 blackout left 300,000 Washington Heights and Inwood residents in the dark for 30 hours.

“My administration’s clear priority in this area is to see that the lights stay on and that electricity continues to flow in New York City,” Giuliani said in a March 27, 2001, power-policy address. “There is no room for complacency as we prepare for the future.” He added: “The City should continue its support of deregulation because, in the long-run, the free market will do the best job of ensuring that New Yorkers get dependable, affordable, and cleaner electricity.”

“The spectacular economic growth that has occurred over the past half-dozen years means that New Yorkers are consuming more electricity. This is fundamentally a good thing,” Giuliani continued. “If New York City’s record job growth enables a family of recent immigrants living in Washington Heights to afford an air conditioner so that they can be more comfortable during the summer months, that is a good thing as well. Everyone needs adequate power to maintain and further improve their quality of life.”

Intriguingly, Giuliani also said: “While cost-effective energy conservation is important, we need to recognize that conservation alone cannot eliminate the need for new power plants located here in New York City.”

This statement violates the First Commandment of Kyotoism: “Thou shalt chop CO2 emissions to 1990 levels.” Good luck expanding an economy with, essentially, 17-year-old energy-consumption targets.

Giuliani also privatized the management of Central Park. While the city still owns Gotham’s gorgeous 843-acre rectangle of flora, bike paths, lakes, lawns, and stages, the Central Park Conservancy, a non-profit, operates it. For New York, this idea was as radical as an American president asking the National Geographic Society to manage Yellowstone National Park.

Today, Giuliani advocates broader domestic production to achieve energy independence as a national-security goal. As he told supporters March 14 at New York’s Sheraton Hotel: “We have to end our reliance on oil from sources that are enemies of the United States.” Last June 13, he told a Manhattan Institute luncheon, “We have to diversify. That’s our strength. You can be independent by being diversified.” Giuliani embraces Alaskan oil drilling, plus natural gas, clean coal, ethanol, and accelerated construction of atomic power plants.

None of this will help America’s Mayor with the eco-freaks, but they hate him anyway. These facts, however, pour yet another spade full of earth on the myth that Rudolph W. Giuliani is some sort of liberal.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in the National Review Online on April 20th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission

Giuliani needs to talk about the decline in abortions in NYC during his time as mayor.

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took a step back last week in his previously promising effort to woo social conservatives. In seemingly casual and ill-considered remarks to CNN’s Dana Bash, Giuliani rattled the nerves of pro-lifers.

“Do you support taxpayer money or public funding for abortions in some cases?” Bash asked.

Giuliani replied: “If it would deprive someone of a constitutional right, yes, if that’s the status of the law, then I would, yes.”

Giuliani later stated that, as president, he would leave intact the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal abortion funding, except in cases of rape, incest, and pregnancies that jeopardize the lives of mothers.

“As I have indicated before,” Giuliani said, “I will not seek to change current law as described in the Hyde Amendment…”

Still, the damage was done. Conservative commentators, including some Giuliani fans, expressed their bafflement that Giuliani spoke so carelessly about the core concern of a key GOP constituency he has courted, and much of whose support he will need to win the GOP nomination. An NRO editorial even predicted that “an America with Giuliani’s favored policies would be a country with more abortion probably reversing the 15-year trend of decline…”

This conclusion is dubious, and Giuliani should not duck it. His stump speeches, from the handful I have attended to others I have read or watched on TV, largely avoid abortion. Instead, Giuliani stresses his mayoral record on crime reduction, tax cuts, welfare reform, and more. This is a lost opportunity for Giuliani, because what he can say about abortion on his watch should please pro-lifers.

Between 1993 and 2001, while he was at City Hall, abortions across America fell from 1,495,000 to 1,303,000. This 12.8 percent decline, as reported by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, was sizeable. However, the downward trend in abortions under Giuliani was even more encouraging: Legal abortions in Gotham fell 16.9 percent, from 103,997 in 1993 to 86,466 in 2001, according to the New York State Office of Vital Statistics. (Abortions climbed 10.3 percent during the eight years before Giuliani.) As for taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions, they plummeted an even faster 22.9 percent from 45,006 in 1993 to 34,722 in 2001.

My NRO colleagues complained Monday that “New York City’s abortion rate had a long way to fall: Even after its decline, it remained much higher than the national average.” Yes, it’s true. Mayor Giuliani did not erase abortion in New York City. But it fell plenty on his watch. Does he deserve no credit for that?

Giuliani’s critics should pause and remember that these abortion reductions during his tenure did not happen in a conservative bastion like Lynchburg, Virginia, or Tulsa, Oklahoma. These dramatic declines occurred in New York City, arguably America’s abortion headquarters. The New York state of mind on abortion may have been captured most accurately on a bumper sticker I once saw here: “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.”

Had Giuliani turned the then-vacant Tweed Courthouse behind City Hall into a 24/7 free-abortion center, he would have been given a ticker-tape parade. Sex and the City-style feminists would have lined up to give him high-fives. The New York Timeswould have dropped the rolling pins it used to smack his noggin and picked up pom-poms to cheer him on.

“Rudy, Rudy Sis boom bah; Free abortions Rah rah rah!”

That never happened.

As New York State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long told me: “I never remember seeing him promote the issue, to my knowledge.”

Added Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the Archdiocese of New York: “Off the top of my head, I cannot recall any instances when Mayor Giuliani’s and John Cardinal O’Connor’s different positions on abortion came to the fore while O’Connor was New York’s archbishop.”

Giuliani’s mayoral policy of giving occasional pro-choice speeches while doing nothing to promote abortion up-ends the tendency of Washington Republicans to give pro-life speeches while doing nothing to hinder abortion. (The partial-birth abortion ban, which Giuliani supports, is a rare exception.) Giuliani’s approach paralleled a drop in abortions that outpaced the national downward trend.

Unlike Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Rudy could have required abortion lessons for OB-GYN residents in city-owned hospitals. Bloomberg’s pro-abortion policy accompanied a 5.2 percent increase in abortions, from 34,722 in 2001 to 36,523 in 2003. Giuliani easily could have implemented such a policy, or others like it, but he did not. Did Giuliani ever actually do anything that reduced abortions?

Though tough to prove, Giuliani’s very deliberate policy of moving welfare recipients to work might have helped reduce abortions. As Giuliani graduated 57.8 percent of welfare recipients from public assistance to personal reliance, it seems reasonable that women who casually got pregnant while on relief (or otherwise would have) became more wary of impregnation when they had to show up for work. Likewise, moving men from the dole to employment may have inculcated in them a sense of personal accountability that would have encouraged them not to knock women up in the first place.

Giuliani also made a concerted effort to encourage adoption. This may have pushed abortions down.

While only 2,312 children were adopted in New York City in 1994, cumulative adoptions ballooned to 27,949 between then and 2001. This pro-adoption policy was directed by Nicholas Scoppetta a one-time Justice Department colleague of Giuliani’s and current FDNY commissioner himself a former foster child.

Giuliani also addressed parenthood in very traditional terms:

“Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without a father,” Giuliani said in his January 14, 1999 State of the City speech. “So, I guess if you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, a lot better than the City of New York, the United States Congress, the Social Welfare Agency, and Administration for Children’s Services, I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.”

This culture of responsibility, which vanquished Gotham’s dominant socio-cultural free-for-all, likely helped curtail abortions during Giuliani Time.

In short, Mayor Giuliani had eight years in America’s most abortion-happy city to make abortions as common as honking car horns. He did no such thing. Abortions fell on his watch, reversing an increase in abortions over the eight years before he arrived, and preceding an increase in abortions after he left.

Thus, it defies logic to believe that Giuliani would hike abortions as president of a nation in which abortion is increasingly unpopular and as leader of a party whose members largely and correctly equate abortion with murder.

Giuliani has a positive story to tell on abortion, just as he does on Gotham’s tax burden (down 17 percent) and on homicide (down 66.6 percent). Rather than tiptoe around this wooly mammoth at the kaffee klatch, he should confront it directly. Pro-lifers would feel more respected if Giuliani would address their concerns rather than skirt them.

Giuliani also can help extract his bandwagon from this pothole by energetically embracing the Hyde Amendment a law with which politicians Left, middle, and Right have made peace. Rudolph W. Giuliani cannot repeat this loudly and often enough:

“Congress got Uncle Sam out of abortion funding in 1976, and I will keep Uncle Sam out of it.”

_______________________________________________________________________________

This article was originally published in the National Review Online on April 11th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Rudy Giuliani’s expected re-election November 4 is looking more like a coronation. A mid-October poll by NY1 and The New York Observer shows New York’s Republican mayor shellacking his Democratic rival, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, by 24 points. Rudy leads Ruth 56 percent to 32. Some Giuliani aides even speak of a victory exceeding 60 percent.

How has a New York City Republican come within days of doing to a long-time liberal Democrat what Ronald Reagan did to Walter Mondale?

First, Giuliani clearly controls a city that literally had grown ungovernable. Under Giuliani’s predecessor, the warm but inept David Dinkins, the Big Apple had become Beirut on the Hudson. Rival ethnic groups fought openly, often fatally, against a backdrop of urban decay and collapsing infrastructure. As Gotham burned, Mayor Dinkins repeatedly was photographed relaxing on local tennis courts.

Even Giuliani’s critics now concede that he is a detail-oriented, hands-on, full-time mayor. There’s now no doubt who’s boss around here.

Second, credit Giuliani’s world famous War on Crime. With the help of police commissioners William Bratton and Howard Safir, he has fought petty offenses to ensnare big-time bad guys who often jump subway turnstiles and urinate on skyscrapers. The results are familiar, yet eye-popping: since 1993, homicide has plunged 61 percent. Armed robberies have tumbled 48. Rapes are off 13. Assaults have dropped 26. Robberies have fallen 48. With overall crime down 42 percent, New York is now America’s 156th most dangerous city.

Giuliani’s progress in the social sphere, however, has been a more obscure story. Despite conservative caricatures of Giuliani as a pro-abortion, gay rights crusader, he has done plenty that should impress social conservatives.

“What we’re trying to do is establish a sense of reciprocity,” Giuliani told guests of the Manhattan Institute last year. “With rights come responsibilities. With benefits come duties…the second part of that we’ve lost in the last 20 years.”

In order to pare welfare rolls that had swelled to 1,112,495 as Dinkins departed, Giuliani hired 250 people to judge whether recipients truly were eligible for aid. He also required beneficiaries to be finger-imaged electronically. Thousands disappeared rather than get caught double and even triple-dipping from welfare agencies in New Jersey and Connecticut. Other aid recipients already were working, some full-time for the NYPD, fire department and even the Office of the Mayor. “No one had bothered to check before,” Giuliani explained.

Those with children under three needn’t work. But many on welfare now are in the Work Experience Program, America’s largest workfare initiative. At any one time, some 40,000 participants spend up to 35 hours each week cleaning streets and parks and, along with juvenile offenders, removing graffiti. This spring alone, 43,310 WEP workers asked to have their aid checks stopped since they had permanent private-sector employment. Interestingly enough, 51 percent of those who earn below $20,000 annually support Giuliani, the NY1/Observer poll found.

As of last August, there were 256,677 fewer people on welfare than when Giuliani arrived. Naturally, overall economic growth has helped. New York’s economy has accelerated thanks to the bull market and Giuliani’s moderate tax cutting and deregulation.

Giuliani also has fought to allow predominantly black, private van operators to ferry passengers around New York’s outer boroughs. As Nigerian immigrant Lateef Ajala told the Wall Street Journal, these vans employ people and take others to their jobs. “Work is the medicine for poverty,” he observed.

These efforts parallel Giuliani’s support for minority students who are trying to escape New York’s schools. While education remains the city’s greatest area for improvement, reading and math scores have edged ahead under the leadership of no-nonsense schools chancellor Rudy Crew. Still, Giuliani promoted a program in which private donors offered $7 million to help needy students attend private schools. 22,700 applications poured in for 1,300 three-year scholarships.

All this has led Democratic congressmen Floyd Flake and Edolphus Towns to endorse the Mayor, as have at least 38 other prominent black figures, according to The Village Voice.

Though hard to measure, Giuliani also has helped civility return to New York. In small ways, a decrease in crime-related fear and an upward spiral of civic self-confidence have brought out the good in people.

“Are New Yorkers Turning Nice?” The Manhattan Spirit, a community newspaper, asked last August 8. An article described how “the spirit of friendship is springing up across the West Side” as apartment dwellers throw parties to meet their fellow tenants who, for years, have been the closest of strangers.

In well-lit, clean-scrubbed Times Square, tourists now pose for charcoal-sketch artists where prostitutes and gang-bangers once pranced. It’s no longer unusual for bank customers to hold front doors open for each other.

The other evening, I forgot my beret on the seat beside me as I dashed off an express train at Grand Central Station. “Your hat!” a couple yelled as I stood obliviously a few feet away. They tossed it on the platform as the subway’s doors slammed shut. I retrieved it, waved gratefully and saw a half-dozen passengers return my smile.

These good feelings date back at least a year. On October 26, 1996, throngs of New Yorkers packed Times Square to cheer the Yankees’ World Series victory. They laughed, screamed and hugged. Sedans full of fans cruised by with pennants waving from their windows. The panes of now-prosperous shops remained unshattered. Cops smiled at citizens, happy that not even one patrol car was overturned or ignited. Just above this scene stood a sign promoting Jackie Mason’s one-man-show. In what could be the motto of the new New York, the marquis said in flashing lights: “Love thy neighbor.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in The Washington Times on October 28th, 1997. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Willard Mitt Romney donated $250 in 1992 to then-U.S. Rep. Dick Swett’s (D New Hampshire) successful re-election campaign. The one-term congressman served another term before losing to Republican Charles Bass in 1994. Two years later, Swett ran unsuccessfully against Republican Bob Smith for one of the Granite State’s U.S. Senate seats.

In 1992, the former Massachusetts governor and current Republican presidential contender also donated $250 to Rep. John J. La Falce (D New York) and $1,000 to Douglas Delano Anderson, an unsuccessful Democratic primary candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Utah Republican Jake Garn, who retired that year.

The two Democratic House members who Romney funded were solidly liberal. For 1992, Rep. Swett had a 32 rating (out of 100) from the American Conservative Union and an 85 from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. That year, LaFalce scored a 12 ACU rating and a Swett-like 85 from the ADA.

(more…)

Giuliani’s pre-9/11 performance should ease conservatives doubts.

The same Beltway experts who anointed Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.) the GOP frontrunner, even as he under-polled fellow presidential contender Rudolph W. Giuliani, now parrot equally dodgy talking points: When Republicans meet “the real Rudy,” they will abandon New York’s former mayor like cattle fleeing a burning barn. Then, the wobbly Washington wisdom continues, Giuliani’s three marriages, and his less-than-solidly right-wing views on gays, guns, and gametes will torpedo his buoyant presidential hopes.

These seers now detect unhappiness with the GOP aspirants. They cite a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in which 26 percent of Republican primary voters were dissatisfied with Giuliani, McCain, and former Massachusetts governor Willard Mitt Romney, among others. However, 56 percent called these choices satisfactory. This lines up with the 57 percent of conservative Republicans who preferred Giuliani, versus 31 percent for McCain. More broadly, Republicans backed Giuliani 38 percent to McCain’s 24, former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s 10, Romney’s 8, and 2 percent each for Kansas Senator Sam Brownback and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

But what if voters like Giuliani better once they understand his pre-9/11 performance? Educating Republicans on his complete mayoral record – and soon – may be Giuliani’s best bet for extinguishing lingering grumbling about his candidacy.

I recently visited Baltimore, Charlotte, Richmond, Salem, Oregon; Seattle, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, mainly to deliver speeches sponsored by Young America’s Foundation. I conversed with conservative activists, College Republican leaders, university professors, and think-tank scholars, among others.

These Americans vividly remember Giuliani emerging from the ashes of September 11, like a latter-day Churchill rising from the rubble of the London Blitz. However, these involved and informed citizens knew startlingly little about Giuliani’s other mayoral achievements:

Through robust policing, Giuliani drove overall crime down 56.1 percent, while chopping homicides 66.6 percent, from 1,946 in 1993 to 649 in 2001.

Abortions on Giuliani’s watch dropped 16.9 percent, according to figures from the New York State Office of Vital Statistics. It reports 103,997 legal abortions in New York City in 1993 and 86,466 in 2001. Abortions fell more quickly under the pro-choice Giuliani than they did nationwide. The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute tracked 1,495,000 abortions across the U.S. in 1993 versus 1,303,000 in 2001. This 12.8 percent national decrease lagged the swifter fall-off in local abortions during Giuliani’s tenure. Meanwhile, taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions plunged 22.9 percent under Giuliani. Giuliani’s pro-choice rhetoric seemed to accompany an official hands-off policy that otherwise did not promote abortion.

Gotham’s foster-care population fell 38 percent as Giuliani helped loving families adopt 17,804 boys and girls.

By fighting fraud and finding work for legitimate beneficiaries, Giuliani cut welfare rolls 58 percent, starting two years before federal welfare reform. Giuliani renamed welfare offices “Job Centers.”

Giuliani privatized 23,625 previously confiscated, city-owned dwellings, 78 percent of supply, benefiting family and individual homeowners and tenants.

Pursuant to his “One Standard. One City” campaign slogan, Giuliani dumped Gotham’s 20 percent set-aside and 10-percent overbid bonus for minority and female contractors. “The whole idea of quotas to me perpetuates discrimination,” he explained. He initiated this on his 24^th day in office, far exceeding any colorblindness legislation Congress even debated during the 12-year “Republican Revolution.”

Similarly, Giuliani shuttered the David Dinkins-era Offices of African-American/Caribbean Affairs, Asian Affairs, European-American Affairs, Gay Community Affairs, Immigrant Affairs, Jewish Community Affairs, and Latino Affairs.

Giuliani’s $10 million Charter School Improvement Fund helped 3,286 pupils in 17 new charter schools, up from $0, zero students, and zero campuses in 1997. He ended tenure for school principals, so slackers could be sacked. He also stopped social promotion; students needed to complete grade-level work to matriculate.

Giuliani ended “open admissions” at the City University of New York. Mean SAT scores for incoming freshmen rose from 863 in 1993 to 1,049 in 2001, a 21.6 percent improvement. Stricter entrance requirements did not impede minorities, as critics ominously predicted. First-time freshmen enrollment at CUNY’s seven senior colleges grew from 7,104 in fall 1999 to 9,576 in fall 2006, up 34.8 percent. Black-student arrivals simultaneously increased from 1,655 to 1,765 (up 6.65 percent). Hispanic freshmen jumped 37.1 percent, from 1,771 to 2,428. Meanwhile, blacks earned 5.15 percent more bachelor degrees, from 3,843 in 1999-2000 to 4,041 in 2005-2006. For Hispanics, the equivalent figures were 2,456 and 3,032 – a 23.45 percent advancement.

In September 1999, Giuliani loudly wondered why taxpayers helped finance a Brooklyn Museum exhibition that featured a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with a dried chunk of elephant dung. Photos of vaginas and recta, clipped from adult magazines, also festooned artist Chris Ofili’s depiction of Jesus’ mom.

“The city shouldn’t have to pay for sick stuff,” Giuliani said. Often decried by Giuliani critics as an attack on free speech, he merely asked why such a provocative work could not appear in a private museum, without government subsidy.

Meanwhile, ex-pornography mecca Times Square now welcomes families, tourists, and locals for fully clothed musicals like The Lion King and Mary Poppins. Under Giuliani, the city prohibited sex shops within 500 feet of schools, churches, and residential communities.

(Click here for details on Giuliani’s social record.)

Beyond these socially conservative victories, Giuliani governed as a Reaganesque supply-sider:

Giuliani scrapped three taxes and slashed 20 others, lowering Gotham’s tax burden by 17 percent and saving individual and business taxpayers $9.8 billion. A family of four earning $50,000 saw its local taxes plummet 23.7 percent.

While inflation averaged 3.9 percent, Giuliani’s average spending grew 2.9 percent annually. If the departed GOP Congress were that fiscally disciplined, the next federal budget would be $2.275 trillion – $625 billion cheaper, Cato Institute fiscal analyst Stephen Slivinski calculates.

While hiring 12 percent more cops and 12.8 percent more teachers, Giuliani sliced other positions 17.2 percent. Overall, municipal headcount fell 3.1 percent.

These policies helped cut local unemployment from 10.4 percent in 1993 to 5.7 percent in 2001. Tourist arrivals rose 32 percent in that period, while the Big Apple’s population grew 9.3 percent. People who came stuck around, and those already here stopped evacuating, as they were doing before Giuliani Time. Not insignificantly, the personal incomes of New Yorkers ballooned 53 percent during Giuliani’s tenure.

Rudy got this done thanks largely to a management style that he described Wednesday at a $2 million Manhattan fundraiser: “I’m impatient and single-minded about my goals.”

Giuliani’s legacy has earned him the endorsements of such screaming liberals as President Bush’s former solicitor general, Ted Olson, as well as Senator David Vitter (R., La.) and Congressman Pete Sessions (R., Texas) – both proud owners of 100 percent ratings from the National Right to Life Committee.

Before Giuliani’s enemies caricature him as a divorce-driven, abortion-peddling, gun-grabbing transvestite, he should familiarize Republicans with his mayoral accomplishments. From Westwood to Washington’s echo chamber, Rudy Giuliani and his supporters should specify how he rescued America’s largest left-wing city through Reaganite social and economic reforms.

_________________________________________________________________

This editorial originally appeared in the Nation Review Online on March 20th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

In Wednesday’s National Review Online, Evans & Novak reporter David Freddoso hammers former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as a man with a mean streak. Freddoso’s piece recalls some of Giuliani’s more colorful moments in office including his once saying, “If you tell me off, I tell you off — that’s my personality.”

Freddoso repeats the often-stated myth that Giuliani was hated by the end of his term, until the September 11 terrorist attack rehabilitated his supposedly tattered reputation and rocketed him to global fame and acclaim. On the contrary, a key survey showed that New Yorkers regarded Giuliani very highly less than a month before al-Qaeda agents demolished the Twin Towers.

An August 5-12, 2001 poll by the New York Times — perhaps Giuliani’s most bitter critic during his eight-year administration — showed that among 1,353 New Yorkers surveyed, Giuliani was very popular and widely credited for having rescued Gotham from the flames in which he found it in 1994. As Adam Nagourney and Marjorie Connelly reported that August 15:

Only 25 percent said they believed that the city would become a worse place to live in the next 10 to 15 years, the lowest percentage since The Times first asked the question 28 years ago. Eight years ago, before Mr. Giuliani was elected, half of city residents were pessimistic about the long-term course of the city.

And 4 in 10 said Mr. Giuliani’s policies had a lot to do with the improvements. Overall, 55 percent said they approved of the job he was doing, compared with 30 percent who disapproved.

So, the man who the conventional wisdom still says would have vanished into a rain of rotten tomatoes had September 11 not occurred, in fact, enjoyed a 55 percent approval rating one month before al-Qaeda struck.

Naturally, The West 43rd Street Gazette entombed news of Giuliani’s popularity in paragraph 30 of Nagourney and Connelley’s story — the very last paragraph.

Freddoso does concede that, “Maybe a hard, mean man was what New York City needed after decades of feel-good, politically correct thinking had made the place unlivable and nearly ungovernable.”

This is one reason why Giuliani is exactly the presidential candidate around whom conservatives and libertarians immediately should coalesce.

While Giuliani differs with many social conservatives on abortion, gay rights, and gun control, the fact is he is positively Reaganite on taxes, spending, public order, quality of life, welfare reform, school choice, racial preferences, privatization, shrinking bureaucracy, Americanization of immigrants, fatherhood, moving foster kids into adoptive families, pulverizing Islamo-fascism, and maintaining peace through strength. Giuliani also says he would appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices akin to Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sam Alito. Former Solicitor General Ted Olson’s endorsement of Giuliani last week speaks well of the ex-mayor’s judicial temperament.

Beyond being solid on eight or nine of any 10 issues that motivate conservatives and free-marketeers, however, a bit of the “meanness” that Freddoso criticizes is exactly what the next president of the United States should bring to the Oval Office.

Washington Republicans suffer from endemic niceness. Top GOP leaders believe that if they simply smile and work hard not to upset their opponents, everything will be just fine.

For example, President Bush did not press the GOP Senate to hold a vote on retaining John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Such a roll call, presumably, would have rendered Bolton’s archenemy Chris Dodd (D.-Conn.) uncomfortable. So, the speeches were not given, the troops were not rallied, and the yeas and nays were not tallied. Republicans stuck their tails between their legs and scurried away yet again as poor John Bolton quietly resigned with nary a peep from the White House. Invertebrate former Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.) adjourned the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body for the rest of the year last December 7 so senators could go Christmas shopping.

How nice. How sweet. How pathetic.

President Giuliani would have made senators stick around to vote on Bolton, and likely much more of his agenda. (Why not harness congressional majorities when you have them?) Giuliani would have stood by Bolton, spoken on his behalf, and stirred the GOP base to call, write, and demonstrate on the ambassador’s behalf.

“Do Senate Democrats want to help keep America safe from Iranian and North Korean nukes, or not?” Giuliani might have asked bluntly before news cameras. “I want a yes/no vote on John Bolton by Friday so he can get back to work. Any questions?”

Giuliani and Bolton might have won that vote, or they might have lost. But everyone on the Right could have held our heads high and proudly said that we all did what we could do to keep John Bolton on duty. And if that effort made Chris Dodd late for lunch, well too damn bad.

Similarly, President Bush showed extreme niceness when he held a meeting just before the Senate switched from Republican to Democratic control, thanks to Vermont U.S. Senator James Jeffords’ defection from the GOP to independent status. The day before Trent Lott handed the Senate keys to then-minority leader Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.), Bush discussed education with various senators. To his left in the Cabinet Room sat Ted Kennedy (D.- Mass.) and, one seat over, none other than Jeffords himself.

That sent a clear signal around Washington: Go ahead and sabotage this president in public, and he will invite you to the White House for a photo opportunity.

President Giuliani might have told Jeffords not to bother dropping by the White House until the next administration. Even if Giuliani needed Jeffords’ vote on certain matters, he would have been wise and tough enough to handle him by phone, rather than to telegraph spectacular weakness by posing for photos with him after he torpedoed his own party’s control of the United States Senate.

Finally, the Bush Administration has been as stern as a box of puppies when it comes to prosecuting people for mishandling and leaking classified data, much of it vital to preventing America from suffering another deadly terrorist attack.

Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, notoriously stole classified documents related to Clinton-era efforts to neutralize (or not neutralize) Osama bin Laden. Berger stuffed those papers into his socks during the 9-11 Commission’s deliberations, hid them under a construction trailer across the street from the National Archives, retrieved them later on, then shredded them at home with scissors. Berger, a career foreign-policy professional, knew very well that this was no way to treat classified materials.

Berger was fined $50,000, sentenced to 100 hours of community service, and denied his security clearance — for three years.

How could Attorney General Alberto Gonzales allow such a cushy plea deal? Why didn’t he thrown Berger behind bars for a year or two? Well, that would be mean, and who wants that?

Similarly, The New York Times‘ revelation of America’s SWIFT anti-terrorist-financing program gave this country’s sworn enemies a blueprint of how the U.S. tracks their money. To date, no one has been prosecuted for leaking or publishing this life-and-death information. Nor has the Times suffered any consequences for this act of treason. At a minimum, this unpatriotic rag’s correspondents should have been booted from the White House grounds and Air Force One for 30 days. They could have practiced their First Amendment press freedoms from the comfort of the Times‘ Washington bureau, where C-Span and AP wire copy likely are available.

Tough? You bet. Mean? Not if it discourages the Times and other media outlets from making it easier for al-Qaeda to murder Americans and our allies.

The Bush Administration and the GOP congressional minority, in all their niceness, now find themselves foundering amid low approval ratings and an utterly demoralized political base. Beyond his broad smile, President Giuliani would employ his spine and an occasional snarl to make his administration worthy of conservatives’ pride.

_________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in Human Events on February 21st, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Mitt Romney has Hollywood in his future, not Washington.

As former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney declared his presidential candidacy Tuesday at Dearborn, Michigan’s Henry Ford Museum, he could not have been more telegenic. With an angular jaw and a head full of slicked-back, dark hair, Romney is the GOP’s George Clooney. Who needs the White House? Romney should fly to Hollywood and become a movie star. He’s already a highly skilled actor.

Romney is either a true, rock-ribbed conservative who played a Rockefeller Republican to get elected in Massachusetts, or he is a genuine, limousine liberal portraying a conservative to win the 2008 GOP nomination. This fine thespian has lost himself so thoroughly in both these roles that no one really knows where the performer ends and the characters begin.

Studying Romney’s lines only muddles things. His present and past statements on abortion, gays, guns, taxes, and Ronald Reagan each conflict diametrically, like pairs of locomotives racing toward one another from opposite directions.

Just listen to today’s Romney on abortion:

“I am pro-life,” Romney wrote in a July 26, 2005 Boston Globe op-ed. “I believe that abortion is the wrong choice except in cases of incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother. I wish the people of America agreed, and that the laws of our nation could reflect that view.”

He declared last year: “Roe v. Wade does not serve the country well and is another example of judges making the law instead of interpreting the Constitution.”

But yesteryear’s Romney could not have disagreed more.

“Let me make this very clear,” Romney said in October 2002, “I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose.”

During an unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid, he replied to Democratic incumbent Ted Kennedy’s charge that Romney was not pro-choice, but “multiple choice” on abortion:

“Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion,” Romney said in an October 1994 debate with Kennedy. “It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that, or be a multiple choice. Thank you very much.”

He also said in 1994: “I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, we should sustain and support it.”

Today’s Romney may be America’s most outspoken voice against gay marriage. He hardly seems broadly supportive of gay rights, either.

“In order to protect the institution of marriage, we must prevent it from being redefined by judges like those here in Massachusetts,” Romney wrote then-Senator Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) last June, endorsing a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

“From Day One, I have opposed the move for same-sex marriage, and its equivalent, civil unions,” Romney told South Carolina Republicans on February 21, 2005. As for gay couples, he added, “Some of them are actually having children born to them.”

But yesteryear’s Romney aimed to please gay voters, perhaps even more than could his Democratic opponents.

In 2002, Romney and Kerry Healey, his gubernatorial running mate, produced posters that said, “Mitt and Kerry Wish You a Great Pride Weekend! All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.”

In October 1994, Romney said in a debate against Senator Kennedy, “I feel that all people should be allowed to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation.”

As the Boston Globe reported that October 17, Romney told the gay Log Cabin Republicans, “As we seek to establish full equality” for gays, “I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent,” Ted Kennedy.

Romney was even more specific in an August 25, 1994 interview with Bay Windows, a Boston-based gay newspaper.

When Ted Kennedy speaks on gay rights, he’s seen as an extremist. When Mitt Romney speaks on gay rights, he’s seen as a centrist and a moderate. It’s a little like if Eugene McCarthy was [sic] arguing in favor of recognizing China; people would have called him a nut. But when Richard Nixon does it, it becomes reasonable. When Ted says it, it’s extreme; when I say it, it’s mainstream.

Romney also said in that interview: “The authorization of marriage on a same-sex basis falls under state jurisdiction.”

Today’s Romney sounds more like yesteryear’s Romney on civil unions, which both Romneys eventually favored.

“I am only supporting civil unions if gay marriage is the alternative,” Romney told the Boston Globe’s Frank Phillips two days after he decried civil unions while visiting the Palmetto State.

“I have a gun of my own,” today’s Romney said January 10 on the Internet program, The Glenn and Helen Show. “I go hunting myself. I’m a member of the [National Rifle Association] and believe firmly in the right to bear arms. In our state…there are a series of laws restricting gun ownership in various ways. Over the past four years, I’ve worked very closely with the Gun Owners’ Action League here, which is an affiliate of the NRA, and we’ve made some changes which I think they feel have been positive steps.”

Yesteryear’s Romney, however, was quite gun-shy.

“We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts,” Romney said in his 2002 gubernatorial campaign. “I support them. I won’t chip away at them.” In fact, as governor, Romney signed America’s first state-level assault-weapons ban.

“These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense,” Romney said in 2004. “They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.”

Yesteryear’s Romney also backed a federal assault-weapons ban and the national Brady Bill, which created a five-day wait for handgun purchases. “That’s not going to make me the hero of the NRA,” Romney said in 1994. However, he added: “I don’t line up with the NRA.”

Today’s Romney signed Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge last New Year’s Eve. Romney said February 7 that it was “absolutely critical” to “make the tax cuts permanent,” referring to President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax reductions.

But yesteryear’s Romney smiled more on taxes.

In an April 10, 2003 meeting with the Massachusetts congressional delegation in Washington, Romney failed to endorse President Bush’s $726 billion tax-cut proposal then before Congress.

“I was very pleased,” Rep. Barney Frank (D., Massachusetts) told the Boston Globe’s Wayne Washington and Glen Johnson after the pow-wow. “Here you have a freshman governor refusing to endorse a tax cut presented by a Republican president at the height of his wartime popularity.”

Romney also reportedly signaled potential support for a federal gasoline-tax increase. “He wants it dedicated to transportation construction,” Rep. Michael Capuano (D Massachusetts) told the Globe.

While Romney did not raise income taxes, he hiked and created $501.5 million in fees and closed business-tax loopholes to collect another $140 million.

As for the pledge, Romney said in 2002 that he would not “sign a document which would prevent me from being able to look specifically at the revenue needs of the Commonwealth.” A Romney spokesman dismissed taxfighter Grover Norquist’s pledge as “government by gimmickry.”

Today’s Romney speaks glowingly of America’s 40th president.

“Ronald Reagan ismy hero,” Romney said two years ago, as the Boston Globe’s Scot Lehigh recalled January 19. “I believe that our party’s ascendancy began with Ronald Reagan’s brand of visionary and courageous leadership.”

But yesteryear’s Romney was much cooler toward the man who, justifiably, is a veritable saint on the American Right. As Romney said in his 1994 debate with Kennedy: “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”

Mitt Romney should warm up to Reagan. After all, he made it big by moving from acting into politics. Mitt Romney’s best bet for fame and fortune may be to follow Ronald Reagan’s footsteps in reverse.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in the National Review Online on February 16th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission

The following is the complete version of “Supply-Sider in Chief” which appeared on Feb. 9th, 2007 in Human Events. This version was published on Feb. 14th, 2007 in the National Review Online.-KWN

_______________________________________________________________________________________

On economic issues, Giuliani is the right candidate.

Republican primary voters should rally around the GOP field’s most accomplished supply-sider, the all-but-announced Rudolph W. Giuliani. Having sliced taxes and slashed Gotham’s government, New York’s former mayor is the leading fiscal conservative among 2008’s GOP presidential contenders.

Before Giuliani’s January 1, 1994, inauguration, New York’s economy was on a stretcher. Amid soaring unemployment, 235 jobs vanished daily. Financier Felix Rohatyn complained: “Virtually all human activities are taxed to the hilt.” Punitive taxes helped fuel a $2.3 billion deficit that threatened to swallow the city.

Mayor-elect Giuliani sounded Reaganesque when he announced he would “reduce the size and cost of city government” to balance the budget. In his first State of the City address, he said: “We’re going to cut taxes to attract jobs so our people can work.”

Giuliani spent eight years keeping these promises.

“America’s Mayor” cut or killed 23 levies, saving taxpayers $9.8 billion. Giuliani pared Gotham’s top income-tax rate by 20.6 percent. The chief financial officer of Washington, D.C.’s municipal government produces an obscure but invaluable survey called Tax Rates and Tax Burdens in The District of Columbia A Nationwide Comparison. It indicates that between 1993 and 2001, local taxes on a family of four New Yorkers earning $75,000 fell 19.3 percent. For such a household making $50,000, city taxes consumed 23.7 percent less of its income. At $25,000, the drop was 33.9 percent. Giuliani’s tax cuts left moms and dads more money to cover such things as day care, clothing, and private-school tuition for their children.

Giuliani cut the commercial-rent tax, curbed sales taxes, and curtailed the marriage penalty on taxpaying couples. Giuliani proudly shaved Gotham’s hotel tax from 6 percent to 5 in 1994. Consequently, revenues from that tax soared from $115 million in 1993 to $235 million in 2001.

Giuliani defends his supply-side instincts with bracing candor. Asked after September 11 if he would hike taxes, Giuliani called that “a dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic thing to do.”

In 1995, Giuliani was equally clear on spending: “We must choose between pulling ourselves into the late 20th Century or remaining mired in the tired and abandoned policies of the Great Society.”

Giuliani’s expenditure growth averaged 2.9 percent annually, while local inflation between January 1994 and December 2001 averaged 3.6 percent. His FY 1995 budget decreased outlays by 1.6 percent, while his post-9/11 FY 2002 plan lowered appropriations by 2.6 percent.

If President Bush had followed Giuliani’s example and limited Washington’s spending to 2.9 percent average, annual growth, the just-unveiled FY 2008 federal budget would cost $2.275 trillion, not $2.9 trillion, saving taxpayers $625 billion, Cato Institute fiscal analyst Stephen Slivinski estimates. Such fiscal discipline would generate a $386 billion surplus, not an anticipated $239 billion deficit.

Ironically, Giuliani restrained spending with only, at most, six Republicans on the 51-seat City Council. (Speaker Peter Vallone, a moderate Democrat from Queens, often backed Giuliani.) Meanwhile, President Bush, blessed until January with a Republican Congress, has boosted non-defense, non-Homeland Security spending 41 percent outpacing Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Giuliani shrank local bureaucracy. While hiring 12 percent more cops and 12.8 percent more teachers, Giuliani whittled municipal manpower elsewhere by 17.2 percent, from 117,494 workers in 1993 to 97,338 through December 2000. Including police and pedagogues, full-time, city-funded employees fell from 222,836 to 215,891 a 3.1 percent overall decline.

Giuliani repeatedly privatized municipal assets. Among 30,358 abandoned housing units previously seized from tax-delinquent owners, 23,625 (77.8 percent) were sold to families and individual occupants. Giuliani sold WNYC radio for $20 million, WNYC-TV for $207 million, and Gotham’s share of the U.N. Plaza Hotel for $85 million. Divesting the New York Coliseum excised an eyesore from Columbus Circle and added $345 million to city coffers. Giuliani also let the private Central Park Conservancy manage all 843 acres of Manhattan’s fabled urban forest.

Giuliani endorsed real-estate developer Larry Silverstein’s purchase of the previously government-owned World Trade Center. Silverstein signed a 99-year lease on the facility on July 24, 2001, just seven weeks before al Qaeda demolished it.

These eight years of tax reduction and fiscal responsibility helped hammer unemployment from 10.4 percent in 1993 to 5.7 percent in 2001. Simultaneously, personal income advanced 53 percent. Meanwhile, Gotham’s population grew by 679,000 or 9.3 percent, as locals stopped fleeing, and hundreds of thousands came to prosper in a safe, thriving metropolis.

(Click here for detailed figures on Mayor Giuliani’s record.)

It’s hard to compare a two-term mayor, a one-term governor of a state with a smaller population than Gotham’s, and a four-term U.S. senator from Arizona with no executive-branch experience. Nevertheless, Cato’s 2006 Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors gives former Massachusetts chief executive Mitt Romney a “C.” While the top personal tax rate fell 6 percent on his watch, thanks to a referendum voters approved before he arrived, Romney’s first budget raised $140 million by closing corporate-tax loopholes. That budget also featured some $501.5 million in increased fees, including higher marriage licenses (from $4 to $50), pricier gun permits ($25 to $100), costlier elevator-inspection fees, steeper public ice-rink charges, a $100 biannual fee for volunteer firefighters (rescinded under pressure), and a $10 expense for previously free ID cards that let blind people ride Boston public-transit gratis.

“If you consider the massive costs to taxpayers that his universal health care plan will inflict,” writes Cato’s Slivinski, “Romney’s tenure is clearly not a triumph of small-government activism.”

Few in Congress expose outrageous federal boondoggles as fervently as does John McCain. However, he is an ambivalent tax fighter. According to Club for Growth research, McCain opposed President Clinton’s 1993 tax increases and supported his 1997 capital-gains tax cuts. He also voted to extend President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts by two years. For 2005, McCain earned a 78 percent National Taxpayers Union rating an “A.”

Unfortunately, McCain opposed President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Only one other GOP senator so voted: Rhode Island’s Republican renegade loser, Lincoln Chafee. McCain voted against repealing the death tax in 2002. Also, in 1998, McCain embraced former Senator Tom Daschle’s (D., S.D.) motion to waive the Budget Act and approve Big Tobacco’s Master Settlement Agreement, including a $1.10-per-pack cigarette-tax increase.

“I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues,” McCain conceded to the Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore in November 2005. “I still need to be educated.”

Conservatives seeking a proven leader to lasso taxes and rein in runaway spending have a natural choice for president: Rudolph W. Giuliani.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in the National Review Online on February 14th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission

The Wall Street Journal’s Brendan Miniter has a great piece today on Rudy’s appeal to social conservatives. He argues that a president can’t do much about abortion, other than appoint solid judges, which Rudy says he’ll do. But beyond that, Rudy is tough enough to deliver on other major social issues, such as school choice. (Despite what the rock-headed pundits and lazy journalists say, there are MANY issues of interest to social conservatives, not just gays, guns, and gametes. Rudy is a solid Reaganite on nearly every other social issue).

Here is the money-paragraph:

Mr. Giuliani delivered his South Carolina speech to several dozen conservatives. One woman who attended told me she wonders whether electing a president who successfully took on the mob in New York is what it will take to finally break through the entrenched education political culture.

Marvelous.

I don’t know if the NEA can be broken, but Mitt’s too wishy-washy to do it, and McCain would not even try. Huckabee? WHAT?

I see Rudy taking them on, and he just might succeed.

Also, Mona Charen wrote a pretty good piece on Rudy last week. She referred to Rudy’s tax cuts as “modest.” I think they were more-than-modest, but the rest of the article was great.

Republican primary voters should rally around the GOP field’s most accomplished supply-sider, the all-but-announced Rudolph W. Giuliani. Having sliced taxes and slashed Gotham’s government, New York’s former mayor is the leading fiscal conservative among 2008’s GOP presidential contenders.

Before Giuliani’s January 1, 1994 inauguration, New York’s economy was on a stretcher. Amid soaring unemployment, 235 jobs vanished daily. Financier Felix Rohatyn complained: “Virtually all human activities are taxed to the hilt.” Punitive taxes helped fuel a $2.3 billion deficit.

Mayor-elect Giuliani sounded Reaganesque when he announced he would “reduce the size and cost of city government” to balance the budget. In his first State of the City address, he said: “We’re going to cut taxes to attract jobs so our people can work.”

Giuliani spent eight years keeping these promises.

“America’s Mayor” cut or killed 23 levies, saving taxpayers $9.8 billion. Giuliani pared Gotham’s top income-tax rate by 20.6%. Washington, D.C.’s CFO reported that between 1993 and 2001, local taxes on a family of four New Yorkers earning $50,000 fell 23.7%.

Giuliani cut the commercial-rent tax, curbed sales taxes, and curtailed the marriage penalty on taxpaying couples. Giuliani proudly shaved Gotham’s hotel tax from 6% to 5 in 1994. Consequently, that tax’s revenues soared from $135 million in Fiscal Year 1995 to $239 million in FY 2001.

Giuliani defends his supply-side instincts with bracing candor. Asked after September 11 if he would hike taxes, Giuliani called that “a dumb, stupid, idiotic, and moronic thing to do.”

Giuliani’s expenditure growth averaged 2.9% annually, while local inflation between January 1994 and December 2001 averaged 3.6%. His FY 1995 budget decreased outlays by 1.6%, while his post-9/11 FY 2002 plan lowered appropriations by 2.6%.

If President Bush had followed Giuliani’s example and limited Washington’s spending to 2.9% average, annual growth, the just-unveiled FY 2008 federal budget would cost $2.275 trillion, not $2.9 trillion, saving taxpayers $625 billion, the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski estimates. Such Giulianian fiscal discipline would generate a $386 billion surplus, not an anticipated $239 billion deficit.

Giuliani repeatedly privatized municipal assets. Giuliani sold WNYC radio for $20 million, WNYC-TV for $207 million, and Gotham’s share of the U.N. Plaza Hotel for $85 million. Divesting the New York Coliseum excised an eyesore from Columbus Circle and added $345 million to city coffers. Giuliani also let the private Central Park Conservancy manage Manhattan’s fabled urban forest.

These eight years of tax reduction and fiscal responsibility helped hammer unemployment from 10.4 percent in 1993 to 5.7 percent in 2001. Simultaneously, personal income advanced 53 percent.

It’s hard to compare a two-term ex-mayor, a one-term governor, and a four-term U.S. senator. Nevertheless, Cato’s 2006 gubernatorial report card gives former Massachusetts chief executive Mitt Romney a “C.” While the top personal tax rate fell 6 percent on his watch, thanks to a referendum voters approved before he arrived, Romney’s first budget raised $140 million by closing corporate-tax loopholes. It also featured some $501.5 million in increased fees, including higher marriage licenses (from $4 to $50), pricier gun permits ($25 to $100), a $100 biannual fee for volunteer firefighters (rescinded under pressure), and a $10, previously free, ID card that lets the blind ride Boston public-transit gratis.

Few in Congress expose outrageous federal boondoggles as fervently as does John McCain. However, he is an ambivalent tax fighter. According to Club for Growth research, McCain opposed President Clinton’s 1993 tax increases and supported his 1997 capital gains tax cuts. He also voted to extend President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts. For 2005, McCain earned a 78% National Taxpayers Union rating — an “A.”

Unfortunately, McCain opposed President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. McCain voted against repealing the Death Tax in 2002. Also, in 1998, McCain embraced former Sen. Tom Daschle’s (D.-S.D.) motion to approve Big Tobacco’s Master Settlement Agreement, including a $1.10-per-pack cigarette-tax increase.

“I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues,” McCain conceded to Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore. “I still need to be educated.”

Conservatives seeking a proven leader to lasso taxes and rein in runaway spending have a natural choice for President: Rudolph W. Giuliani.

_________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in Human Events on February 9th, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission

Giuliani presided over an extended decline in the number of abortions in New York, largely by doing nothing on the issue.

As pro-lifers mark the 34th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, many wonder whether they could support former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for president despite his pro-choice views. While Giuliani’s statements on abortion make pro-lifers fret, they should find his record surprisingly reassuring.

“I don’t like abortion,” Giuliani said in South Carolina’s The State newspaper last November 21. “I don’t think abortion is a good thing. I think we ought to find some alternative to abortion, and that there ought to be as few as possible.”

Nevertheless, Giuliani’s pro-life critics point to his April 5, 2001, address at the National Abortion Rights Action League’s “Champions of Choice” luncheon in Manhattan.

“As a Republican who supports a woman’s right to choose, it is particularly an honor to be here,” Giuliani said. He added: “The government shouldn’t dictate that choice by making it a crime or making it illegal.”

During his unsuccessful 1989 mayoral campaign, Giuliani said, “I’d give my daughter the money for it [an abortion].” That September 1, Newsday’s transcript of Giuliani’s comments suggested a less strident tone.

“I have a daughter now,” Giuliani told TV’s Phil Donahue. “I would give my personal advice, my religious and moral viewsI would help her with taking care of the baby. But if the ultimate choice of the woman my daughter or any other woman would be that in this particular circumstance, to have an abortion, I’d support that. I’d give my daughter the money for it.”

But did Giuliani’s mayoral deeds match such words?

According to the state Office of Vital Statistics, total abortions performed in New York City between 1993 (just before Giuliani arrived) and 2001 (as he departed) fell from 103,997 to 86,466 a 16.86 percent decrease. This upended a 10.32 percent increase over the course of the eight years before Giuliani, with 1985 witnessing 94,270 abortions.

What about Medicaid-financed abortions? Under Giuliani, such taxpayer-funded feticides dropped 22.85 percent, from 45,006 in 1993 to 34,722 in 2001.

The abortion ratio also slid from 890 terminations per 1,000 live births in 1993 to 767 in 2001, a 13.82 percent tail-off. This far outpaced the 2.84 percent reduction from 1985’s ratio of 916 to 1993’s 890. While abortions remained far more common in Gotham than across America (2001’s U.S. abortion ratio was 246), they diminished during Giuliani’s tenure, as they did nationally.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that U.S. abortions fell from 1,330,414 in 1993 to 853,485 in 2001, a 35.85 percent decrease. However, University of Alabama political scientist Michael New tells me, “the national decline was so sharp because after 1997, three states, including California, quit reporting their abortions to the CDC.” Correcting earlier data by omitting the abortions in Alaska, California, and New Hampshire when calculating the national total prior to 1997, Professor New finds that 1993’s 1,001,769 abortions waned to 853,485 in 2001, a 14.8 percent fall-off.

“So, in percentage terms,” New adds, “the decline in abortions in New York City under Giuliani was greater than the national decline.”

(For a detailed chart analyzing these and other data, please click here.)

Giuliani essentially verbalized his pro-choice beliefs while avoiding policies that would have impeded abortion’s generally downward trajectory.

New York pro-lifers concede that Giuliani never attempted anything like what current Mayor Michael Bloomberg promulgated in July 2002. Eight city-run hospitals added abortion instruction to the training expected of their OB-GYN medical residents. Only conscientious objectors may refuse this requirement.

Giuliani could have issued such rules, but never did.

Interestingly enough, after Giuliani left, Medicaid abortions under Bloomberg increased 5.19 percent from 34,722 in 2001 to 36,523 in 2003.

Asked if he could cite any Giuliani initiative that advanced abortion, New York State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long told me, “I don’t remember, and I don’t think so.” He added: “I never remember seeing him promote the issue, to my knowledge.”

“Off the top of my head, I cannot recall any instances when Mayor Giuliani’s and John Cardinal O’Connor’s different positions on abortion came to the fore while O’Connor was New York’s archbishop,” said Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the archdiocese of New York, a position he held under O’Connor.

“I like him a lot – although he doesn’t share my particular point of view on social issues,” televangelist Pat Robertson said May 1, 2005, on ABC’s This Week. “He did a super job running the city of New York and I think he’d make a good president.”

If Giuliani can sway Pat Robertson, can he attract other pro-lifers? Short of dizzying himself and others with a 180-degree reversal from a pro-choice to a pro-life posture, Giuliani should embrace parental-notification rules, so minors who seek abortions need their folks’ permission, as they now do for ear piercing. He should oppose partial-birth abortion, which even Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and liberal stalwart Patrick Leahy of Vermont have voted to prohibit.

Similarly, Giuliani should propose that Uncle Sam exit embryonic-stem-cell-research laboratories and instead let drug companies not the government finance such embryocidal experiments, if they must. He also could pledge to nominate constitutionalist judges skeptical of penumbras emanating outside Planned Parenthood clinics.

And, of course, Giuliani should remind Republican primary voters that on his watch, total abortions, taxpayer-funded Medicaid abortions, and the abortion ratio all went the right way: down.

______________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in the National Review Online on January 22nd, 2007. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission. Researcher Marco DeSena contributed to this article.