“Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf [of the proposed Cordoba House mosque] there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

These were sharp words, and as he said himself in a later apology, they may have been excessive. But for most of us doesn’t the “routine and random bloodshed” that occurs daily, if not hourly in failed Muslim states such as Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, represent our principal contact with modern day Islam? Our media reporting on these horrible events is not making it up.

Furthermore, if by “these people” in “I wonder whether I need honor these people,” he didn’t mean Muslims generally, that which I don’t believe he could have meant, given his own closeness to and friendship with many Muslims, but rather he was referring to those terrorists numbering in the tens of thousands who have already and would still literally blow themselves up to destroy some even small part of us and our civilization, even if it meant destroying themselves and many of their own people as a result, well then his words are perfectly understandable.

For who would extend First Amendment privileges to “these people,” meaning by that suicide bombers and their handlers? I wouldn’t.

Marty Peretz ought to have explained himself this way, and not have apologized for his words. For such sharp words are called for by the actions of the tens of thousands of terrorists who, while waging their fanatical war against us, and in particular against our system of liberal democracy that protects our rights and freedoms from would-be destroyers of those rights and freedoms, swear their eternal allegiance to Mohammed.

“A public good is something that the free market tends not to provide on its own, to the detriment of society. Pollution laws and police departments are classic examples.”

Elsewhere, in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal I read:

“In Vallejo, CA compensation packages for police captains top $300,000 a year and average $171,000 a year for firefighters. Regular public employees in the city can retire at age 55 with 81% of their final year’s pay guaranteed. Police and fire officials can retire at age 50 with a pension that pays them 90% of their final year’s salary every year for life and the lives of their spouses.”

In 2008, nearly broke and faced with falling tax revenues, rising pension costs, and unmovable public-employee unions, Vallejo declared bankruptcy.

Are we making, have we made too much of our “public goods?” Are we no longer in charge, and instead are we being driven into financial collapse by overly compensated police and fire departments, not to mention the forever rising number of education and health sector employees?

Perhaps we ought to revise David Leonhardt’s statement and say, that a public good is now something that our elected representatives overly subsidize to the great detriment of society, police and fire department pensions being prime examples.

“In its (falsely) reassuringly subtitled booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans,” the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes acceptable levels of such “defects” for a range of foods products, from allspice to peanut butter.

“Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).”
(E.J.Levy, Op-ED conributor, NYTimes, 2/13/2009)