Are you old enough to remember this McGovern proposal? I am, and so are the guys at the Powerline blog:

George McGovern, who was crushed by Richard Nixon in a landslide in 1972, has gone down in history as one of our most feckless Presidential candidates. McGovern ran on a far-left platform that included a proposal that at the time was deemed risible–the “demogrant.” The demogrant program was simple: the federal government would write a check for $1,000 to every American. In 1972, that idea was so widely ridiculed as over-the-top pandering, as well as economically pointless–even Hubert Humphrey savaged it–that McGovern quietly abandoned the idea.

But the demogrant has returned! Today, Hillary Clinton unveiled her own demogrant proposal: every newborn American baby will get a birthday present from the federal government in the form of a $5,000 check. Buying votes, I guess, is something that never goes out of style.Power Line: The Second Coming of George McGovern

I was struck by a line later in the item, where it’s noted that Hillary

“apparently first sketched it out in her 2006 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council unveiling the DLC’s American Dream Initiative. In that speech she proposed “providing a baby bond to each of the 4 million children born in America every year, a $500 savings bond at birth and again at age 10.”

My first thought was “Each of the 4 million children born in America every year?” Couldn’t they limit it to American kids? And then I remembered, each of the 4 million children born in America every year is an American citizen, whether the American people like it or not.

And that’s going to be a continuing problem for programs to help the poor in America–they won’t generate a lot of enthusiasm if they’re seen as programs for transferring money from one ethnic group to another. Hillary unveiled this proposal at a forum hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus. It would go over well with La Raza, too. White voters–not so much.

See Steve Sailer’s More Diversity = Less Welfare? for more.

I know I’m late to the story about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, and the personal insults Columbia President Lee Bollinger made in his introductory speech, but my question is about Persian culture (or cultures–it’s a big, very old, very complicated place). I don’t know much about Persia, but a lot of it is desert, and don’t West Asian desert cultures put a very strong emphasis on hospitality?

Winston Churchill wrote about the Pathans who live to the east of Iran:

“Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud… For the purposes of social life … a most elaborate code of honour has been established and is on the whole faithfully observed. A man who knew it and observed it faultlessly might pass unarmed from one end of the frontier to another. The slightest technical slip would, however, be fatal. The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…”

Did Bollinger come across as an ill-bred barbarian to people from that part of the world for accepting the role of host but then failing so badly in his duty to be a polite one?

Bollinger got his Ivy League sinecure because he defended “diversity” (i.e., quotas) so vociferously at the U. of Michigan, but an enthusiasm for multiculturalism often goes along with ignorance about other cultures.

You can have lots of free speech if you’re President of Iran, and you can have lots of free speech if you’re a protester physically attacking members of the Minutemen on stage at a speech. If you are a Minuteman, forget it. John Leo has a column on it here:

No Free Speech, Please - This is Columbia
September 28, 2007
Mindingthecampus.com

Posted by John Leo

Ann Coulter seems to be the first writer to guffaw over Lee Bollinger’s statement that Columbia University has a “long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate…” There is no such tradition, and very little debate at Columbia, particularly if one of the proposed debaters or speakers happens to be conservative.

Last October, Columbia radicals stormed a campus stage, knocking over furniture, creating pandemonium and preventing speeches by Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and a colleague. Nobody seemed very upset about this, least of all Lee Bollinger, who issued a tiny bleat about free speech before referring the issue to a committee where it languished for three months. Awakening briefly on Christmas weekend, the committee administered an undescribed slap on the wrist to an unknown number of unidentified members of the censoring rabble and there the matter ended.