Let’s meet the Indian delegates to next week’s Republican National Convention shall we? Who are they? Can we learn anything about their motivations and beliefs from some recent articles? Continue reading →

First let me break down the Acronyms. NRO stands for National Review Online. It is the online version of the conservative magazine. What am I doing reading the pages of the “enemy’s” literature? Understand thy opponent. APA stands for Asian Pacific Americans, a term often used as an umbrella group which includes Asian Pacific Islanders. What groups fall under APA? According to skeptical author John Derbyshire:

In the first place, it is instructive to look at what “API” (or the newer, more user-friendly “APA”) actually means. Asia stretches from the Suez Canal to the Bering Strait, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Coral Sea. Whatever “API” signifies, it is certainly not a race in either the biological or the social-construction sense. A Samoan has no more in common with an Iranian than he has with an Irishman; a Pakistani is further removed from a Korean on any given criterion — linguistic, cultural, religious, phenotypic, or genetic — than he is from a Norwegian. “API” is in fact a very odd category, even more absurdly artificial than “Hispanic.” The folk gathered thereunder have only this one common characteristic: They, or their recent forebears, hail from somewhere between Istanbul and Tahiti.

Continue reading →

The Times of India has, what I consider, a very poorly written article about Kerry fundraiser Reshma Saujani, who is active in South Asians for Kerry in 2004. She is a friend of mine, and I have a feeling she is not going to be happy with this article.

She’s the iron girl in the Kerry camp. The shrewd strategist, who finds John Kerry, “an incredible leader, easy to talk to,” and Teresa Heinz Kerry “extraordinary, very spirited’. At 28, attorney Reshma M Saujani single-handedly raised $ 1 million at the ‘India Day Parade’ in New York last week for Kerry’s presidential campaign.

This article had several basic facts wrong, including the assertion that she rasied a million dollars at the India Day Parade. Why the article felt the need to point out the following fact, I have no idea:

“…says Reshma, who interned at the White House at the same time as Monica Lewinsky in 1996. ”

In any case, hopefully we will see Reshma run for office within the next several years. Continue reading →

Because I have a friend that works for Human Rights Watch, I have for months been following along as she examines the abuses of the federal material witness statute. What is the material witness statute? Here is a brief explanation from a Christian Science Monitor article about alleged “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla:

…rather than obtaining an arrest warrant by demonstrating to a judge that federal authorities had probable cause to believe Padilla was planning mass murder, they instead relied on an obscure federal law designed to guarantee the presence of a key witness at a criminal proceeding.

By labeling Padilla a “material witness” in an ongoing grand jury investigation of terrorism, US officials were able to whisk him off the streets and into a high-security prison cell with minimal law-enforcement effort.

Since the terror attacks on Sept. 11, the so-called material-witness statute has emerged as a key-and highly controversial-weapon in the legal arsenal being used to wage the Bush administration’s war against terrorism in America’s homeland.

Continue reading →

Steve Scalise has dropped out of the race in Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District. That means that Republican Bobby Jindal’s chances of being elected to Congress are that much greater. From the Washinton Times:

Without Scalise in the race, analysts say, the chances Jindal will be elected outright in the Nov. 2 primary without the need for a runoff are much more likely.

Why did Scalise drop out? Here is a partial explainer.

I, like many in the left, can’t stomach much of Jindal’s politics, but the guy seems to be making all the right moves.