WHAT'S NEW - December 2005

PEACE IS NOT THE ANSWER (IN IRAQ)
It's hard to think of a more graphic illustration of the horror the U.S.-led coalition is fighting in Iraq than the mass murder on Sept. 26, in which terrorists disguised as policemen (a New York Times headline called these butchers "fighters") burst into a primary school in Iskandaria, south of Baghdad, seized five teachers (all Shiites) and shot them dead. Children stood weeping through this atrocity.

Why do crimes like this make so little impression on those Americans and Europeans who want the coalition to abandon Iraq? The demonstrators think of themselves as moral, but it is hard to think of any policy more amoral than abandoning Iraq to such an enemy.

IT ALL ADDS UP TO SOMETHING
President Bush put it best: "You know, something we — I've been thinking a lot … and it's clear to me that Americans value human life…. And that stands in stark contrast, by the way, to the terrorists we have to deal with. You see, we look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break. They're the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We're in a war against these people. It's a war on terror.

The total cost of the Iraq war is nearing $200 billion. But keep it in perspective. We're about to spend $200 billion on post-hurricane reconstruction here in the U.S., and we can do that without even raising taxes.

CLINTON PRECEDENT
It's understandable that liberal Democrats would care about the Supreme Court. For more than half a century, the court has been pivotal in reducing the authority of the states, increasing the power of the federal government, eroding protections of property rights, tilting the legal balance from favoring religious worship to favoring atheism, and finding rights in the Constitution that no creative thinker in the nation's first 175 years ever imagined.

Much of the liberal political agenda that could not muster support at the polls has been achieved through the courts. Would voters sanction government taking private property from one person to give to another? Would they approve banning the Pledge of Allegiance as an unconstitutional intrusion of God into our public life?

It's time to return to the understanding that presidents get to pick the judges they want, as long as they're qualified for the job, and that senators are voting not on whether a nominee conforms to their preferences but on whether he or she shows the competence and temperament necessary to the judicial role. It's time to recognize the Clinton Precedent as the benchmark for what presidents do.

MONEY DECIDES WHERE WE BELONG
Maybe he went to UCLA, and you went to USC; maybe she lives on the Westside and you live in the Valley; maybe he's an evangelical Christian and you're Jewish; maybe she speaks Chinese and you speak Spanish; maybe he likes classical music and you like Nine Inch Nails. In this life there are many obstacles to friendship, but the one that people really would rather not talk about, the one that is not fit for polite conversation, is: money.

WHITENESS
Unlike the Irish and other Euroamerican workingmen, whose grandparents sought and achieved the perquisites of "whiteness" by excluding them and scorning their ancestral culture, Chinese Americans of whatever socioeconomic class are transformed into "honorary whites" when denied a place in affirmative action programs, but otherwise and all too often regarded as permanent "immigrants."

A national memory haunts the conceptions of the Asian-American, persisting beyond the repeal of actual laws prohibiting Asians from citizenship and sustained by the wars in Asia, in which the Asian is always seen as . . . the "foreigner-within," even when born in the United States and the descendant of generations born here before.

FEATURED ARTISTS

AA Films Among L.A. Times' Favorites

EDITORIALS

Clinton Precedent
It All Adds Up to Something
Money Decides Where We Belong
Peace Is Not the Answer (In Iraq)
Whiteness

MUSIC

COMMUNITY

Asian Students Question Success Stereotype
Chinese American History
Chinese and the "Vote Factor"
Enemy of the Irish Worker - The Chinese
Homeless Chinese Uncounted and Invisible
Japanese American Abandon Strawberry Farming

DIVERSITY

AZN TV
AZN TV's "Concert of Excellence" Program
Connie Chung at MSNBC
Delicate Job of Transforming a Geisha
Hmong Plot on Grey's Anatomy
Sarah Silverman & AA Joke

BUSINESS

Asian Buying Power
Asian Consumer
Asian Consumer Ignored

SPORTS

Kim Ng

CHINA

R.I.P.

Peter Drucker - Father of Modern Management


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