The ultra-wealthy, ultra-liberal community of Santa Barbara, just north of Los Angeles, (known locally as “Snotty Barbara”) has found the impact of its own regulations and restrictions on development sufficiently dramatic that it has decided it needs to build affordable housing for people making up to $160,000 per year. Not only firemen and policemen can’t afford to live in Santa Barbara. The town fathers are starting to worry about the lack of availability of housing for doctors and lawyers.

The City Council is considering whether to use the property to build affordable housing, a condominium complex called Los Portales for families earning up to $160,000 a year.

Now, “it’s hard to get sympathy for people making $160,000 a year if you’re down in Texas or something,” said Bill Watkins, head of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project.

Any household with that kind of money is in the nosebleed section of American earners, and “most of the country would think, ‘You’re going to subsidize that person’s house? You’re kidding me.’ ”

But in this city — where the median home price is around $1.2 million — that person needs help. And the Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara is about to become the rare public housing agency to assist the well-heeled along with the poor, to build shelter for those whose business cards come in designer leather cases and include words like “doctor,” “lawyer,” “director.”

The tallest building here is the eight-story Granada Theatre, built in 1924.

It could never be replicated today, in part because the City Charter strictly limits buildings to 60 feet, about four stories.

And even four stories is a hard sell.

Daily Kos ran a poll on the UK Airline Terrorism Plot, which produced these results:

The thwarted U.K. plot

1. was legit. 792 votes – 49 %
2. was more drama from BushCo to keep us all afraid. 811 votes – 50 %

1603 Total Votes

————————————-

The frightening thing is that they do really let all these impaired people vote.

Thomas B. Edsall, in New Republic, discusses the negative influence of liberal elites.

The Lieberman-Lamont primary is a study, writ small, in what has ailed the Democratic Party over the last few decades. Simply put, Democratic presidential primary electorates continue to be dominated by an upscale, socially (and culturally) liberal elite. Democrats must first win the approval of this elite before they can compete in the general election. It’s a trap that no Democrat other than Bill Clinton has found a way to escape, and Lamont’s victory shows why.

In a quick and dirty analysis of the difference between the Lamont and Lieberman voters based on income, education, and other demographic data from across Connecticut, Ken Strasma of Strategic Telemetry found that Lamont’s strongest support came from areas with high housing values, voters with college or graduate degrees, and parents with children in private schools. Lieberman’s votes, in contrast, came from the cities, renters, blue-collar and service-sector workers, and those receiving Social Security benefits.

There is nothing wrong with upscale liberals or downscale renters; a vote is a vote. The problem for the Democrats is (and has been for more than a quarter century) that liberal elites are disproportionately powerful in primaries–where they turn out in much higher numbers–and in the operations of the party itself. In presidential campaigns, these voters have nominated a succession of losers, including George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. The power of this wing of the party is easy to see in battles against Republican Supreme Court nominees, when Democratic opposition concentrates on such issues as abortion and sexual privacy to the virtual exclusion of questions of business versus labor, tort law, and the power of the state to regulate corporate activity.

For the Democrats, the influence of the upscale left has increased the party’s vulnerability to charges that it is weak on threats to the nation’s security and that its candidates are far from mainstream on social issues. Although the public has lost faith in President Bush and the GOP on a wide range of issues, the GOP continues to hold one trump card: terrorism. A May 10 New York Times/CBS News poll showed voters preferring Republicans to Democrats on terrorism by a margin of 40-35 percent. A more telling finding was in an Associated Press/Ipsos survey released July 14. It found that voters may not be thrilled with the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with terrorism (54 percent unfavorable, 43 favorable), but they are downright hostile to the Democrats’ approach (62 percent negative, 33 positive).

Gerald Baker in the London Times advises as The first step towards defeating the terrorists: stop blaming ourselves.

There’s a familiar ritual each time an operation to thwart a putative terrorist incident dominates the news. After the public’s initial expressions of relief and shuddering contemplation of what might have been, a rising chorus of sceptics takes over, with a string of questions and hypotheses.

Was it really a serious terrorist plot, or only a bunch of misguided, alienated Muslim kids larking about with a chemistry set and a mobile phone? Sometimes, unfortunately, as with this summer’s ludicrously overplayed Miami “plot” to blow up buildings in Chicago, in which the plotters had got as far as purchasing some boots but not much else, overzealous authorities bring this sort of suspicion on themselves. But you can guarantee that every incident now, whatever the evidence, will be treated with such derisive doubt. If the police had got to the 9/11 hijackers or the 7/7 bombers in time, a sizeable chunk of respectable opinion would have dismissed them as idealistic young men with no real capacity or intent to cause harm.

The scepticism is then embellished by the conspiracy-as-diversion theory. How convenient, cluck the doubters, with rolled eyes and theatrical sarcasm, just as the Government’s got some new bonfire of civil liberties planned; or just as President Bush’s poll numbers are collapsing; or just as Israel is stepping up its ground attacks in southern Lebanon.

Then, of course, whether real or imaginary or government-authored, the cynics will say the plot inevitably has its roots in our own culpability. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq, if Tony Blair weren’t George Bush’s agent of oil-fuelled imperialism, if Israel weren’t killing innocents in Lebanon, this wouldn’t have happened.

It is a neatly comprehensive schema of cynicism. If the plot turns out to be a damp squib, or the police have made some ghastly error, the sceptics will triumphantly claim that it was deliberately overdone to scare us. If the plot is real, or God forbid, as with 9/11 or 7/7 it isn’t foiled in time, then they can switch seamlessly to the claim that we’ve only ourselves to blame.

In this internally pure worldview, the consistent theme is denial— denial of the reality of the mortal threat we face, denial of the reasons we face it. The villain for these people is not the jihadist, with his agenda of destroying our very way of life. It is, as it has always been, that malign continuum of institutions of our own authority that begins with the aggressive police officer and goes all the way up via the credulous media and craven officials to No 10 and the White House.

It’s too early to say with any confidence yet, but it looks as though yesterday’s plot to blow up US-bound aircraft from the UK was closer to the 9/11 tragedy than the Miami-Chicago farce. If the police and intelligence authorities have succeeded in foiling such a murderous plan, the correct response is one of immense gratitude to them, pride in our security institutions and continued vigilance against future plots.

But we should also remember that our continuing existence lies not just in inconvenient security measures and uncomfortably intrusive intelligence activities, but in a grand global strategy. Success requires, in addition to the tiresome banalities of long check-in queues and tighter limits on hand luggage, a commitment, whatever the costs, to eradicate the deep global political causes that threaten us.

In François Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim (1962), the lives of two Bohemian male friends, one French, one Austrian (played by Henri Serre and Oskar Werner), in pre-WWI Paris are changed forever by their making the acquaintance of the fascinating and mercurial Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Catherine is a kind of Anima, a force of Nature, a far stronger and more interesting personality than either of the pair, and she easily dominates one after another in turn, until Jim attempts to rebel. Catherine then responds by luring Jim into an automobile, and driving (with him in the car) straight off a bridge.

The democrat party is a lot like Jules and Jim: ineffectual and harmless in itself, but fundamentally allied to, and (in a way) in love with an activist radical left, which it cannot do without, cannot possibly control, and which (like Catherine) is not very nice underneath it all, and (like Catherine) dangerously mad.

Much of the democrat base is made up of people (like Catherine), who carry around a personal bottle of vitriol (“for lying eyes”), who are capable of turning mercilessly upon those closest to themselves (even those whom they have very recently supported for Vice President).

And (like Catherine), too, the democrat base’s madness has every likelihood of always, and inevitably, ending in (electoral) suicide.

One pictures Hillary Clinton walking out of the cemetery after installing the ashes of Joe Lieberman’s democrat party career in the niche, marching off sadly (like Jules). But, in this case, though Catherine may have committed suicide, she cannot herself die, and will get to commit suicide again and again.

Thane Rosenbaum, in the Wall Street Journal, begins coming to his senses.

Many Jews are in my position — the children and grandchildren of labor leaders, socialists, pacifists, humanitarians, antiwar protestors — instinctively leaning left, rejecting war, unwilling to demonize, and insisting that violence only breeds more violence. Most of all we share the profound belief that killing, humiliation and the infliction of unnecessary pain are not Jewish attributes.

However, the world as we know it today — post-Holocaust, post-9/11, post-sanity — is not cooperating. Given the realities of the new Middle East, perhaps it is time for a reality check. For this reason, many Jewish liberals are surrendering to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself — with whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitability of Israel coincides with the inevitability of anti-Semitism.

This is what more politically conservative Jews and hardcore Zionists maintained from the outset. And it was this nightmare that the Jewish left always refused to imagine. So we lay awake at night, afraid to sleep. Surely the Arabs were tired, too. Surely they would want to improve their societies and educate their children rather than strap bombs on to them.

If the Palestinians didn’t want that for themselves, if building a nation was not their priority, then peace in exchange for territories was nothing but a pipe dream. It was all wish-fulfillment, morally and practically necessary, yet ultimately motivated by a weary Israeli society — the harsh reality of Arab animus, the spiritual toll that the occupation had taken on a Jewish state battered by negative world opinion.

The Jewish left is now in shambles. Peace Now advocates have lost their momentum, and, in some sense, their moral clarity. Opinion polls in Israel are showing near unanimous support for stronger incursions into Lebanon. And until kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror curtailed, any further conversations about the future of the West Bank have been set aside.

Not unlike the deep divisions between the values of red- and blue-state America, world Jewry is being forced to reconsider all of its underlying assumptions about peace in the Middle East. The recent disastrous events in Lebanon and Gaza have inadvertently created a newly united Jewish consciousness — bringing right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.

I knew he was a commie, of course. But not until I read Martin Peretz, in the Wall Street Journal, did I realise that he is an hereditary commie of impeccable red-diaper origins: old money, with Exeter, Harvard, and Stalin as family traditions.

Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.

Jed Babbin contemplates the left wing of the democrat party’s impending excommunicaion of Joe Lieberman with glee, noting the concommitant assurance of that party’s permanent minority status.

the Michael Moore-Pinch Sulzberger-Cindy Sheehan Dems are about to purge poor ol’ Joe Lieberman from their party in Tuesday’s primary because he supports the war in Iraq. There’s no other issue among the Dems, as Chris Matthews rehearsed yesterday. Dan Rathercadaver — resurrected by Matthews to make his Sunday show the greatest black comedy since Dr. Strangelove — agreed solemnly. There’s no greater crime for a Dem than to voice any opinion other than the one the Washington Post wrote in an editorial on July 16, wringing its hands and blaming W for all the world’s ills: “But in the press of cascading crises, it is crucial that the administration not lose focus on the two wars it started and has yet to win.” (Italics added, superfluously.)

According to the Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday, Ned Lamont leads Lieberman by 54-41 percent. If Lieberman loses, we should be very grateful. If the anti-Bush media and the Democrats who follow its orders succeed in purging Lieberman, if they succeed in this danse macabre, the Dems will be headed off a cliff and not back to the White House in 2008.

A Lieberman loss will do two things. First, it will prevent the Dems from recovering from their leftward flat spin, and take them into the ground. Hard. Further claims to moderation or credibility on national defense will be laughable to anyone not sharing Bush Derangement Syndrome…

Second, a Lieberman loss will give uncontested control of the Democratic Party to its most left-leaning media bosses. Never forget, dear friends, that there are two political parties in America: the Republicans and the mainstream media. The Dems are so bereft of ideas, so unable to think seriously on any topic, they take their lead on everything from what the New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, ABC and NBC tell them. The AP-Hillary exercise in news manufacturing is only the overture to a symphony that will be playing from now until November, and again in 2008. And the Dems will follow in lockstep. After the New York Times editorial page endorsed Lamont, what else could the Dems do but choose him? They’ll scurry to follow orders, just as Vichy John Kerry flew home from Davos to filibuster Alito when the NYT ordered the Dems to do so…

The effect of a Lieberman purge should reverberate throughout America. A political party that cannot tolerate dissent, that cannot accept as legitimate any position that doesn’t hew to the leftmost fringe, cannot last unless its opponents fail to take advantage of its fundamental weakness. If the kiss on the cheek Lieberman got from the president proves to be the coup fatal, it could be one that produces a veto-proof Republican Senate.

Robert Kagan explains why Joe Lieberman is the last honest democrat, and how he is paying for it.

Twenty-nine Democratic senators voted in the fall of 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. There isn’t enough room on this page to list the Democratic foreign policy experts and former officials, including those from the top ranks of the Clinton administration, who supported the war publicly and privately — some of whom even signed letters calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any need to list the many liberal, and conservative, columnists on this and other editorial pages around the country who supported the war, or the many prominent journalists who provided the reporting that helped convince so many that the war was necessary.

The question of the day is, what makes Joe Lieberman different? What makes him now anathema to a Democratic Party and to liberal columnists who once supported both him and the war? Why is there now a chance he will lose the Democratic primary in Connecticut after so many years of faithfully serving that state and his own party?..

If Lieberman loses, it will not even be because he supported the war. Almost every leading Democratic politician and foreign policymaker, and many a liberal columnist, supported the war. Nor will he lose because he opposes withdrawing troops from Iraq this year. Most top Democratic policymakers agree that early withdrawal would be a mistake. Nor, finally, is it because he has been too chummy with President Bush. Lieberman has offered his share of criticism of the administration’s handling of the Iraq war and of many other administration policies.

No, Lieberman’s sin is of a different order. Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn’t recant. He didn’t say he was wrong. He didn’t turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn’t claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn’t try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn’t claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn’t go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted “public intellectuals.”

These have been the chosen tactics of self-preservation ever since events in Iraq started to go badly and the war became unpopular. Prominent intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, have turned on their friends and allies in an effort to avoid opprobrium for a war they publicly supported. Journalists have turned on their fellow journalists in an effort to make them scapegoats for the whole profession. Politicians have twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away their support for the war or, better still, to blame someone else for persuading them to support it.

Al Gore, the one-time Clinton administration hawk, airbrushed that history from his record. He turned on all those with whom he once agreed about Iraq and about many other foreign policy questions. And for this astonishing reversal he has been applauded by his fellow Democrats and may even get the party’s nomination.

Apparently, amazingly, dispiritingly, it all works. At least in the short run, dishonesty pays. Dissembling pays. Forgetting your past writings and statements pays. Condemning those with whom you once agreed pays. Phony self-flagellation followed by self-righteous self-congratulation pays. The only thing that doesn’t pay is honesty. If Joe Lieberman loses, it will not be because he supported the war or even because he still supports it. It will be because he refused to choose one of the many dishonorable paths open to him to salvage his political career.

He is the last honest man, and he may pay the price for it. At least he will be able to sleep at night. And he can take some solace in knowing that history, at least an honest history, will be kinder to him than was his own party.

But the intellectually and morally dishonest left will also pay a price for driving the last honest, responsible, and patriotic individuals out of the democrat party. They will continue to lose election after election, and their party’s support, and national influence, will continue to dwindle.

Berkeley graduate student Cecilia Lucas was moved by the revolutionary struggle of the Shiite people of Palestine to put pen to paper and produce this poem:

I Don’t Want to Love You, But I Do

You were born out of death to a life in a cage
Where bombs are not the only reason people die
Fed by the violence of hunger and homelessness
Raised by colonialism
Your heart and your will still grew strong

You scare me
Not just because they tell me to be scared
Not just because they repeat, repeat, repeat
The story of 1983
Begging me to understand
Americans are worth more than Lebanese….

And so on.

And the older, and more cynical, Iowahawk was moved to respond.

You were born in the Valley to a life in a suburban cage
Encino, where mean girls and cheerleaders
Drop bombs of hate on the unpopular girls
Shy poetry club chicks like you
With 1480 SATs and early admission to Berkeley
Fed by the violence and lookism of the dance squad
Raised in a four bedroom colonial
They wouldn’t let you wear your Che T-shirt to prom
But your heart and your armpit hair still grew proud and strong

You scare me too
Not just because you have that Code Pink Manson girl freak-vibe
Not just because you repeat, repeat, repeat
All those quotes from your dog-eared volumes of Chomsky
and Zinn
and Edward Said
Begging me to understand
Can’t we just hold each other
Instead of talking, talking, talking
About your Masters thesis?

And so on.

Hat tip to David Ross.

Fjordman argues that the left’s swooning capitulation to Islamic demands for suppression of free speech constitutes the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since WW2.

The less control the authorities have with Muslims, the more control they want to exercise over non-Muslims. As problems in Europe get worse, which they will, the EU will move in an increasingly repressive direction until it either becomes a true, totalitarian entity or falls apart. This strange mix of powerful censorship of public debate, yet little control over public law and order, has by some been labelled anarcho-tyranny.

While Islamic groups in Britain openly brag about how they are going to subdue the country by violent means or call for beheading those insulting Islam, Bryan Cork, 49, of Carlisle, Cumbria, in the Lake District, was sentenced to six months in jail for standing outside a mosque shouting, “Proud to be British,” and “Go back to where you came from.” One British court ruled that even use of the word “immigrant” as an insult could amount to proof of racial hostility.

In Belgium, a Turkish-born Catholic priest, Père Samuel, has been prosecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgian Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), because of a remark he made in a 2002 television interview…

Writer Oriana Fallaci has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy for “vilification” of Islam, because of a book she wrote called The Force of Reason.

Here’s a television advertisement from Greenpeace UK, which alarmingly illustrates the intolerance and appetite for power of Environmentalist extremists.

Gas Guzzler video