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Guess Whose Funding Obama Cut?

The Obama administration has been demanding that Congress spend trillions of
dollars on the so-called stimulus, so-called health-care reform, and so-called
global warming. But the Boston Globe reports on one expenditure it's willing
to cut:

For the past five years, researchers in a modest office
overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented
cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists
in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US
State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents
and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores
of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they
say are Iran's most infamous human-rights abusers.

But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was
ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this
summer's disputed presidential election, the group received
word that--for the first time since it was formed--its
federal funding request had been denied.

"If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this
was it,'' said Rene Redman, the group's executive director,
who had asked for $2.7 million in funding for the next two
years. "I was sur prised, because the world was watching human
rights violations right there on television.''

Foggy Bottom's rationale for the cut is foggy. "The State Department said it
is keenly focused on human rights in Iran," the Globe reports:

The job of doling out money to groups seeking to influence
Iran has been shifted from the State Department's Near Eastern
Affairs Bureau to a lower-profile division, its US Agency for
International Development. USAID spokesman Harry Edwards did
not provide an explanation of why funding was denied for the
Human Rights Documentation Center, widely seen as the most
comprehensive clearing house of documents related to human
rights abuses in Iran. He said the government's funding priorities
have not changed.

One can be forgiven for suspecting that the administration simply does not
want to hear information that would complicate its stated policy of
"engagement" with Iran's brutal regime. There may be a case for talking with
Iran. But "see no evil" is not a tenable position when negotiating with evil.


--
It's now time for healing, and for fixing the damage the Democrats did
to America.

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