Fr. Hans

Wall Street Opinion Journal Kimberley A. Strassel March 2, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

For Big Labor, this week’s “card check” victory marked the ultimate payoff for past Democratic election support. For House Democrats, it marked the end of the honeymoon.

Democrats won in November in part by playing down their special interest patrons–unions, environmentalists, trial lawyers–and by playing up a new commitment to the moderate middle class. The big question was whether the party had the nerve to govern the way it campaigned, and card check was the first test. The answer? AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney isn’t smiling for nothing.

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Townhall.com Dinesh D’Souza February 26, 2007

HBO’s documentary “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” aired a few days ago, is yet another attempt to use the scandal to portray the Bush administration as soft on torture. Conservatives, meanwhile, continue to minimize the significance of what happened there. Some characterize Abu Ghraib as no big deal, what James Schlesinger termed “Animal House on the night shift.” Others defende Abu Ghraib as a way to get valuable information about potential terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart” because, as an interrogation technique, “it sounds pretty effective to me.”

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The abolitionists’ lament is older than William Wilberforce—whose anti-slavery campaign brought transatlantic slavery to an end 200 years ago this month—but today 27 million people live on in captivity, their lives worth far less than any colonial era slave

World Magazine Priya Abraham February 24, 2007

Premila’s parents sold their daughter for $18 on her 18th birthday. The buyer, from hundreds of miles away, said his Indian village had no good women to marry so he had to buy a wife. He took Premila as a concubine, then sold her into 10 grinding years of prostitution in two cities before rescuers returned the shattered woman to her home.

Premila is a modern slave, one of 27 million in the world today. Two hundred years ago, slaves were relatively scarce, expensive, and publicly owned by men holding title deeds to them. Today, they are plentiful and cheap like Premila—and much harder to spot.

This week Western countries celebrate the life of William Wilberforce, the pioneering abolitionist who labored 20 years to end the British slave trade, a fight he won on Feb. 23, 1807. Today’s abolitionists are no less tenacious but find their work is different: Unlike in Wilberforce’s time, slavery is illegal almost everywhere. Yet modern slavery flourishes because corrupt governments and law enforcers do not enforce the law.

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Jewish World Review Yossi Klein Halevi & Michael B. Oren January 29, 2007

The Jewish State’s worst nightmare

The first reports from military intelligence about an Iranian nuclear program reached the desk of Yitzhak Rabin shortly after he became prime minister in May 1992. Rabin’s conclusion was unequivocal: Only a nuclear Iran, he told aides, could pose an existential threat to which Israel would have no credible response. But, when he tried to warn the Clinton administration, he met with incredulity. The CIA’s assessment — which wouldn’t change until 1998 — was that Iran’s nuclear program was civilian, not military. Israeli security officials felt that the CIA’s judgment was influenced by internal U.S. politics and privately referred to the agency as the “cpia” — “P” for “politicized.”

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