Stones Cry Out

October 05, 2007

Changes On The Way

This weekend, the Stones Cry Out blog will change web hosts. For almost 3 years, it has been hosted on a machine owned by Foundation Stone(tm) Rick Brady. Starting this weekend, it'll be hosted on a commercial web host that I use for my web sites. During the transition, it's a matter of luck which site you'll see while the pointer to the new host percolates throughout the Internet. Hopefully by Monday, you'll all be seeing the new site, but it takes 24-72 hours typically.

With this move, Rick officially bows out of the blogging biz. We here at Stones Cry Out are thankful for his time and efforts getting the blog going and keeping it going. While he's not been posting much of late, it was his system that kept the site going. He will be greatly missed (but I'm giving him a user on the new system just in case he changes his mind >grin<). And many thanks to his father-in-law, who was the techie behind the scenes. He helped make this move a smooth one.

We're going to be adding a few features to the blog which I'll enumerate on the first post at the new site. Also, access to all our old posts will (hopefully) be retained, if I do all this right.

See you on the other side of the move!

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October 04, 2007

The Ends Justify the High-Tech Lynching

James Taranto, in his "Best of the Web Today" today, notes that the accusations of "anger" against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas seem to be unfounded. But building on that is the idea that, since the travesty that was his confirmation hearing didn't manage to keep him off the bench, he shouldn't be upset about those accusations. "Hey, you made the highest court in the land. So what about the politics of personal destruction?"

Taranto has a great rundown of all the shenanigans that took place back then, including the observation that

"...Thomas's political foes managed to violate the integrity of the FBI, the Senate and the D.C. Circuit--that is, of all three branches of government. This behavior was unethical, unconscionable and possibly criminal, and no one has ever been held to account for it."

Thomas was treated unfairly, as well as illegally, but that didn't matter to the Democrats that opposed him.

Thomas's opponents believed that the end justified the means, as a former foe tells the justice's wife on page 232:

Years later a young woman who had worked for one of the many groups opposed to my nomination approached Virginia. "We didn't think of your husband as human, and I'm sorry," she said, tears streaming down her face. "We thought that anything was justified because our access to abortions and sex was at risk." The woman went on to explain that she had subsequently had a religious conversion and now felt that it was her duty to apologize to us.

Now, those who remain unrepentant are reduced to arguing, pathetically, that Justice Thomas--and the rest of us--should countenance the means because they failed to realize the end.

Taranto's analysis is why "BotWT" is a daily e-mail I never miss.

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October 03, 2007

The Limbaugh "Phony Soldiers" Kerfuffle

The crew at the Blogometer have a good round-up of the controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" phrase. What I find interesting, and sad, is how the Left has left the concept of "context" way behind them. When Media Matters criticizes Limbaugh, they lead one to believe that something said less than 2 minutes later, never mind the day before, is irrelevant to context.

Limbaugh himself suggests (and not without a little self-serving promotion) that you need to listen to his show for 6 weeks before you can get a good feel for it, especially his schtick. Media Matters and its liberal lemmings want to believe, at least for the moment, that Limbaugh began broadcasting yesterday, which is the only way they can say that he is abusive to the troops.

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October 02, 2007

Two-Party System, Like It or Not

Rudy Giuliani is not my first pick for Republican presidential nominee. He's got some troubling stands on some issues that are important to me. But whatever those disconnects, he'd be far better than anything the Democrats have to offer.

Except that's not what a number of conservative Christians are saying.

Some of the nation's most politically influential conservative Christians, alarmed by the prospect of a Republican presidential nominee who supports abortion rights, are considering backing a third-party candidate.

More than 40 Christian conservatives attended a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City to discuss the possibility, and planned more gatherings on how they should move forward, according to Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail expert and longtime conservative activist.

Rudy Giuliani, who supports abortion rights and gay rights, leads in national polls of the Republican presidential candidates. Campaigning in New Jersey on Monday, Giuliani brushed aside talk of an upstart effort by religious conservatives.

"I'm working on one party right now _ the Republican Party," Giuliani said. "I believe we are reaching out very, very well to Republicans. The emphasis is on fiscal conservatism, which brings Republicans together."

Other participants in the meeting included James Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family evangelical ministry in Colorado Springs, Colo., and, according to Viguerie, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, a conservative policy group in Washington.

The problem with this approach is that if they act on this threat, they ensure the election of someone even further from their beliefs than Rudy. And they have to know this, which means they'd rather have someone in Planned Parenthood's back pocket, never mind all the other nanny-state, anti-growth policies that would get introduced and implemented, than someone with whom they could at least agree on most of the time. If you have a Republican in the White House, you at least have someone who'll give conservative Christians a fair hearing rather than just lip service.

Betsy Newmark has a better suggestion.

There is a candidate in the race right now who fits all the needs of these cultural conservatives - Mike Huckabee. They could be mobilizing behind him. If Huckabee started moving in the polls and surpassing expectations in the early states, these conservatives might be able to convince Giuliani (if he were to win the nomination) to put Huckabee on the ticket to alleviate some of this cultural conservative angst.

How much influence a VP would have is a matter of debate, as Betsy notes, but rather than bailing out, engage.

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September 28, 2007

A Cop-out of Biblical Proportions

John Edwards really need to rediscover his place in this world.

A fairy tale about two princes falling in love sparked a backlash - and a lawsuit - against a teacher and a school last year when it was read to a second-grade class in Massachusetts.

But the three frontrunners in the Democratic presidential race suggested Wednesday night at their debate in New Hampshire that they'd support reading the controversial book to children as part of a school curriculum.

Moderator Tim Russert asked John Edwards, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton whether they'd be comfortable having the story - called "King & King" - read to their children in school.

Edwards gave the first and most definitive answer - a resounding and instant "yes, absolutely" - although he added that it "might be a little tough" for second-graders.

...

The 2004 vice presidential candidate and former North Carolina senator said he doesn't want to influence his kids' opinions about the issue.

"I don't want to make that decision on behalf of my children," he said. "I want my children to be able to make that decision on behalf of themselves, and I want them to be exposed to all the information, even in - did you say second grade? Second grade might be a little tough, but even in second grade to be exposed to all those possibilities, because I don't want to impose my view. Nobody made me God."

Though nobody made John Edwards God, God made him a parent. To throw his hands up and say that since he's not The Almighty that he has no place in forming his childrens' views is a major cop-out. I'm sure he'd find some reason to inject himself in their upbringing if, let's say, the book were instead about a Kingdom where homosexuality wasn't practiced because everyone thought it was immoral.

And while we're on the subject of second graders making their own moral decisions, how about a book on adultery? I mean, it happens quite a lot, and some folks don't see the moral issue with it, so let's just show the kiddos an alternative. "The Open-Marriage Kingdom", in the children's section at a bookstore near you.

Careful, John. If the Lord wants that book out, He'll reach down with His own hand and smite it Himself. No one made you God.

Posted by Doug at 01:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ben Stein on Intelligent Design

In February, 2008, Ben Stein (yes, that Ben Stein) is coming out with a movie that exposes the scientific community's rather non-scientific silencing of those not towing the line.

Evolution – and the explosive debate over its virtual monopoly on America's public school classrooms – is the focus of the film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

In the movie, Stein, who is also a lawyer, economist, former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator, is stunned by what he discovers – an elitist scientific establishment that has traded in its skepticism for dogma. Even worse, say publicists for the feature film, "along the way, Stein uncovers a long line of biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment that allows absolutely no dissent from Charles Darwin's theory of random mutation and natural selection."

"Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way," says Stein. "Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it's anti-science. It's anti-the whole concept of learning."

Nice to see someone taking on this issue in what looks to be a funny and informative, Ben Stein sort of way.

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Serial Divorcers and the Divorce Rate

Liz Taylor is keeping the divorce rate high.

Eight-times married Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor could be heading for yet another trip down the aisle as she declared her love for a wealthy businessman she met last year in Hawaii.

As much as I believe the divorce rate in the country is too high, its people like Taylor that make it artificially high. She's been divorced 8 times, so 8 other married couples need to stay together for life just to keep a combined 50% rate alive.

And if past history is any indicator, two more couples need to be signed up real soon now.

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Change Begins With Us

I'm not one to post campaign material for one candidate or another here, especially since I've really not made up my mind. But this post by Mitt Romney at Redstate really hits the nail on the head with me. Key paragraph:

The blame for Washington's failures lies not just with the Democrats but with Republicans as well. We have to put our own house in order. We can no longer be a party of big spenders with ethical standards more fitting of a Jay Leno punch line. We can no longer pretend our borders are secure. When Republicans act like Democrats, America loses. It's time for change in Washington and change begins with us.

Read the whole thing.

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The Bulletproof Backpack

From Gizmodo comes word of this new item that, frankly, speaks volumes about our public school system.

Made from 13 layers of K-29 Kevlar, this thin, lightweight plate fits in most backpacks and can stop every bullet from a 9mm all the way to Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum.

Yeah, that's the kind of "socialization" my homeschooled kids are missing out on.

Posted by Doug at 08:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 27, 2007

Telling Comedy From Reality

It appears that too many on the Left are willing and eager to accept Jon Stewart at face value, forgetting that his show is, y'know, not an actual news show.

“Idiots are now convinced that Dubya doesn’t know Nelson Mandela is still alive,” writes Abu Wabu. “What has in fact died, and what a miserable, stinking death it was, is real intellectual rigor on the idiot left.” As made evident by followers of Daily Show host Jon Stewart, “a voice for democratic ideals and the noble place of citizenship”, at least according to Tom Brokaw. Pity, then, that Stewart’s idealistic nobility is wasted on an audience of morons:

Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Oh my God. How funny was it? And for a very wrong reason indeed. I’ve already shared it with others. George W Bush thought Nelson Mandela is dead? Dude! How wrong could he possibly be!

Hat tip to Tim Blair, who has a host of other examples. And, of course, if these Nuance Nabobs would take a look at the context, they'd see that Stewart's hack job just fed them plastic red meat, that they gobbled up. This wouldn't be so scary if "The Daily Show" weren't so many people's primary news source.

It's a comedy show, folks. Treat it with way more skepticism than your average nightly news program.

Posted by Doug at 05:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 26, 2007

A Win for Religious Displays

A Ten Commandments display in Kentucky will remain, beating back an assault by the ACLU.

A federal court in Lexington, Ky., has ruled that the Ten Commandments can remain on display in the Mercer County courthouse, rejecting an attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union to have them removed.

“This is a major victory for the people of Mercer County and for all Americans who don’t buy into the ACLU’s extreme misrepresentation of our Constitution,” said Francis J. Manion, senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, which argued the case for the county.

“The First Amendment was never intended to remove all mention of God or religion from the public square,” said Manion. “The Supreme Court and many other courts have long recognized the foundational role of the Ten Commandments in the development of our legal system.”

Hat tip to Stop the ACLU, where Nathan Bradfield, after making his case for why the ACLU has been wrong in this and other efforts, states:

Those who would argue that our Founders intended to begin a secular nation with secular documents are living a pipe dream. A. H. Everett, said in the Legislature of Massachusetts, “In almost all of the distinguished states, the principal care of the community has been to provide for the support of religion.” Whether out of ignorance or lack of exposure, a minority of Americans neglect every Founder not named Paine, Jefferson, or Madison. And the latter two must be quoted out of context in order fit their secular, separation mold.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the tide is turning against the ACLU in cases like this, because it matters so much whether the judge takes the Constitution at its word or not. But it is good to see.

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September 25, 2007

Free Speech for Thee, But Not for Me...Sort of

The appearance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University was trumpeted by portions of the Left as a big win for "free speech". I'm reminded of the saying used quite often; an open mind, like an open window, still needs a screen to keep the bugs out. Just because our republic isn't going to collapse if we let an evil man speak doesn't mean we should offer up a forum for him.

But apparently, the Left has its own version of the screen. If the speech exposes the dirty laundry of the Left, it should be screened out.

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

GQ writer George Saunders traveled with Clinton to Africa in July, and Clinton is slated to appear on the cover of GQ’s December issue, in which it traditionally names a “Man of the Year,” according magazine industry sources.

And the offending article by Atlantic Monthly staff writer Josh Green got the spike.

Wasn't it supposed to be George W. Bush that participated in this kind of stifling of dissent?

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September 24, 2007

TV Screen Clutter

The clutter on your TV screen is getting worse.

Kyra Sedgwick, star of “The Closer” on TNT, walks under a police tape and scans the screen with her flashlight. And every time she does, she makes Gretchen Corbin, a technical writer in Berkeley, Calif., irate.

The promotional ads for “The Closer” run in the bottom right of the screen during other TNT programs — a graphic called a snipe. But for Ms. Corbin, who sometimes watches movies that have subtitles, the tiny images block the dialogue.

“Some ad just took over the entire bottom of the screen so I missed what the characters said to each other,” said Ms. Corbin, describing a recent experience. “And it’s TV, so you can’t rewind.”

Snipes are just the latest effort by network executives to cram promotions onto television screens in the age of channel surfing, ad skipping and screen-based multitasking. At first, viewers may feel a slight jolt of pleasure at the sight of a new visual effect, they say, but over time the intrusions contribute to the sense that the screen is far more cluttered — not just with ads, but with news crawls and other streams of information.

Not just "snipes" but full blown, full-color, moving ads that take away from the current show, sometimes obscuring it. This really is way too much.

This ranks right down there with a feature on news channels that appeared after 9/11: The Scroller(tm). On a day when terrorism hit the US, keeping up with more news than just what was being covered at the moment was very useful. But when The Scroller is noting who's won a local mustache and beard contest, it's usefulness has long, long been outlived. Give me some of my screen back, guys

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September 20, 2007

Unintentional Humor

Bruce Eckel wrote an article about how bad he thinks RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is as a tool for finding out what's new on the net. In "RSS: The Wrong Solution to a Broken Internet", he writes:

What are you, the consumer, trying to accomplish? You want to be notified when something happens. We have a well-known pattern for that problem. It's called publish-subscribe. The publisher keeps a pointer to the subscriber, and when something happens tells the subscriber about it. Maximally efficient.

Why doesn't it work? Because the internet is anonymous. People can behave badly because nobody knows who they really are, and enough people do behave badly that you can't risk giving out a pointer to yourself. So we don't. Instead, we need RSS where our readers are constantly, stupidly asking, "did it change yet?" "Did it change yet?" "Now has it changed?" "Now?"

And indeed that can be a problem, especially for RSS readers that poll far too frequently. Bruce makes the case for a less anonymous Internet, and I can agree with him on a number of points.

What gave me a chuckle was this bit at the end of the article, which, I imagine, is added to any article on the site.

RSS Feed

If you'd like to be notified whenever Bruce Eckel adds a new entry to his weblog, subscribe to his RSS feed.

With "RSS Feed" in big type. I know, gotta use the tools that currently exist, even if you think they're broken, but it got my day off to a good start.

Posted by Doug at 09:32 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 19, 2007

Our Standing In The World

Democrats have bemoaned the (alleged) loss of standing with the world that the US has suffered supposedly due to the war in Iraq. I guess before that, everyone just loved us, and since then we've lost the support of our allies. Well, the good news is, those Democrats can stop their worrying; France likes us again.

Sometimes it's not the message, but the messenger who delivers it. After spending much of this decade going head to head with the US over its invasion of Iraq due to nuclear weapons suspicions, France seems to be joining American bellicosity when it comes to those same suspicions about Iran. On French radio on Sunday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said that it is time to "prepare ourselves for the worst" and indicated that he was talking about a possible war with Iran.

The remarks are simply the most recent indication that France under new President Nicolas Sarkozy is turning its back on the almost reflexive anti-US stance of his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Democrats who have cited our "standing" as a reason to oppose Bush will now start supporting him, right? Well, no, of course it couldn't be that easy.

On Monday, the UN's head nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei blasted Kouchner, saying that diplomacy is still the best route and warned against "hyping" the issue.

"There are rules on how to use force," ElBaradei said "and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."

Of course, the UN is still jittery. Yes, there are rules on how to use force, which, incidentally, we followed, and still we "lost standing". Sorry, I don't exert too much worry on what others might think of us even if we follow the rules. I want diplomacy to work, make no mistake. But I also want enemies to know that there will be a price if they continue to threaten us and our allies. That's all that Kouchner was saying; nothing's off the table.

Kouchner also indicated that the European Union might begin looking into imposing its own sanctions against Iran, should the UN continue to be unable to strengthen those currently in place.

Because we all know how well UN sanctions worked on Iraq. Exhibit A is:

China and Russia -- both of which wield vetoes on the UN Security Council -- have been reluctant to take a harder line against Iran, which is widely suspected of trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Anyway, it looks like the world is starting to see things our way again, albeit slowly. Democrats should be sleeping better tonight.

Either that or the whole "standing" issue was just a smoke screen, as long as the "world" though the way they did. I'm kinda leaning that way.

Posted by Doug at 02:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Evolutionary Theory Challenged By Fossils

CBS News reports on new discoveries that are rewriting what evolutionists have thought about who begat whom.

Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved.

The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution — that one of those species evolved from the other.

And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man.

Scott Ott at ScrappleFace nails it as usual.

Far from casting doubt on Darwin’s theory, experts say that the lack of evidence and contradictory discoveries have helped to build “a consensus of certainty in the field.”

“Finding little physical evidence to substantiate the theory only means there must still be a great deal of supportive evidence out there to be found,” said an unnamed editor of the journal Nature, which plans to publish a paper on the African skulls this week. “The more we realize how little we know, the more certain we are that we’re right. As I once read in a scholarly paper somewhere, ‘faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’.”

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September 18, 2007

Democratic Candidates Continue to Show Partisanship

The Fox News Channel is somehow too biased, supposedly, for a fair presidential debate, but the Huffington Post and Slate aren't?

Democratic 2008 presidential hopefuls parried unusual questions about flatulent cows and "spoiled brat" voters, as well as Iraq and health care, in the first exclusively online campaign "debate."

The "mashup" forum hosted by Yahoo! in partnership with the blog Huffington Post and online magazine Slate, allowed voters to compare responses to similiar questions on burning issues, posed by talk-show host Charlie Rose.

Democrats are simply not interested in fairness and balance. Republicans are going to participate in their own debate hosted by left-wing political web sites. But for Democrats to complain about Fox's bias while embracing a host that is even more biased to the left than about any MSM outlet you can name is the height of hypocracy. Their concern about "bias" is all talk, and completely disingenuous. It is their problem that this highlights, not Fox's.

Posted by Doug at 08:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2007

When the Polls Don't Match the Narrative

I'm not a big fan of opinion polls, especially when average Americans are polled on a subject that they really don't know or can't know much about. One of the recent polls that the media has enjoyed reporting the results of is whether folks think the "surge" in Iraq is working.

Frankly, the average American, myself included, has no way to know definitively whether the surge is "working" or not. It mostly depends on your definition of "working" and what you're hearing from the news media. A poll of people without all the facts -- and if you're not in the military or the government, you probably don't have nearly enough facts -- is pretty much useless.

Still, the media like to use them to generate news, and back in July, CBS News polled Americans and found that 19% thought the surge was "making things better". However, when that poll started to go against the liberal media narrative of how bad things are going there, their coverage reflected their displeasure at the outcome.

On the day of the long-anticipated report from General David Petraeus on the "surge," the CBS Evening News ignored how its latest poll discovered the third straight month of an increase in the percent of Americans who believe the surge has "made things better" in Iraq. As the percentage has gone up, CBS's interest in the result has gone down. In July, anchor Katie Couric led with how only 19 percent thought the surge was "making things better" and a month later, in August, when that number jumped to 29 percent, CBS and Couric gave it just 12 seconds 20 minutes into the newscast..

While Monday's CBS Evening News skipped how the share crediting the surge for "making things better" rose to 35 percent in the survey conducted through Saturday, the newscast found time to highlight three other findings that stressed public opposition to the war and distrust of President Bush.

When the poll backs the narrative, it leads. When it doesn't, find some other way to ask the question to get the "right" response.

Oh, that liberal media.

Posted by Doug at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 11, 2007

Six Years After

There's not much more that I can say about 9/11 than I've already said before (some in 2006, but mostly in 2004). I think the national memory is still fading, especially when many still can't come to face the fact that Islamo-fascists are really out to kill us. Some politicians want to remove preventative measures that nipped many attack, most recently in Germany, in the bud. They just don't realize the danger. 9/11 was a one-off, so far, because of better intelligence gathering. We need to keep it.

If we are attacked again because we forgot the stakes and the lessons, to a large extent we would have ourselves to blame. Remember.

Posted by Doug at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 06, 2007

He Who Pays is In Control

When you want to buy something, especially a high-ticket item -- let's say a car -- you want to do your research first. You have certain things that are important to you, as well as those things you think would be nifty to have, and balance that with how much your needs and wants are going to cost you. Then, you make your choice, good or bad, and you buy a car. You may buy just what you need, or you may buy more than that, but whatever the price, you are responsible for it. Your neighbor can neither tell you what to buy nor should your neighbor pay for any part of it, even the excess gas if you buy a guzzler. You pay the money, so you control the choice, and the consequences.

But with something more personal, like health insurance, liberals seem to think that experts in their ivory tower should manage the health care spending of us all. The lure is that just pay them a fee and they'll run the whole healthcare system for you. Don't worry about cost. The upside, they tell you, is that you may get more healthcare than you pay for. The downside, they don't tell you, is that any money you don't use you also don't keep. This "forced charity" (oxymoron) is held up as the way to make sure we all get what we need. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. (Great line, wonder who said it.)

But that is just the foot in the door. As with the car, when you pay, you decide how much or little gas mileage you're willing to pay for, how much luxury you want, and what you can do without. You neighbor doesn't have a say because he's not paying for it. In a nationalized health care system, however, whoever is paying now has that power over you, and not just which doctor you go to. Folks in the UK are finding that out.

Failing to follow a healthy lifestyle could lead to free NHS treatment being denied under the Tory plans.

Patients would be handed "NHS Health Miles Cards" allowing them to earn reward points for losing weight, giving up smoking, receiving immunisations or attending regular health screenings.

Like a supermarket loyalty card, the points could be redeemed as discounts on gym membership and fresh fruit and vegetables, or even give priority for other public services - such as jumping the queue for council housing.

But heavy smokers, the obese and binge drinkers who were a drain on the NHS could be denied some routine treatments such as hip replacements until they cleaned up their act.

Those who abused the system - by calling an ambulance when a trip to the GP would be sufficient, or telephoning out of hours with needless queries - could also be penalised.

The report calls for a greater emphasis on the "citizen's responsibility" to be healthy and says no one should expect taxpayers to fund their unhealthy lifestyles.

Ironically, I heartily agree with the statement that "no one should expect taxpayers to fund their unhealthy lifestyles". However, because the government is forcing taxpayers to fund their neighbors' poor choices, now the government has to step in and make your lifestyle choices. It's not that I don't think people should be as preventative as they can health-wise, it's just that I don't think the Health Police should be, in effect, roaming the streets making sure you're running your daily 2 miles or doing your 25 situps, and shutting down food stores that don't serve items that are up to government standards. The result is the same, with or without a London bobby walking the beat.

When the government pays, the government calls the shots. All the shots.

Posted by Doug at 01:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 04, 2007

Another Accountability Moment

Brought to you by Republicans.

Sen. Larry Craig said Saturday he will resign, succumbing to rapidly intensifying pressure from within his own Republican Party.

Not censured, not wrist-slapped, not frowned upon; resigned. As noted before on this blog, more than once, both sides have their issues with fallible human beings in positions of power. But it's Republicans that, far more often, do the right thing.

I heard Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday repeat what he'd heard from some sources that the number of Republicans leaving due to scandal shows how bad off the party is. I say that it shows how better off the party is. I repeat, both sides have their troubles, but the Republicans are ridding themselves of the bad apples, and they are better off for it.

Update: Looks like Sen. Craig is trying to undo his guilty plea and resignation. We'll see how that turns out. But if indeed he is still guilty on the other side of this legal maneuver, I believe the Republican party will continue to do the right thing.

Posted by Doug at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 31, 2007

Religious Offense: A Comparison

What happens when art that offends people of a particular religion is displayed? Let's do a comparative look. First, the Christians, in an article headlined, "Christians Mull Offensive Art Works".

The inclusion of two provocative entries in Australia's most prestigious religious art competition has again highlighted the issue of distasteful art and Christians' reaction to it.

Critics ranging from Prime Minister John Howard to church leaders have questioned the appropriateness of the two exhibits -- one depicting the Virgin Mary wearing an Islamic burqa, and another, a holographic image of al-Qaeda terror chief Osama bin Laden morphing into an image of Jesus Christ.

The works, submitted for a 55-year-old annual award called the Blake prize, are on display at a taxpayer-funded gallery in Sydney. Howard has called them "gratuitously offensive to the religious beliefs of many Australians."

"Regrettably, attempts to insult Jesus and Mary have become common in recent years, even predictable," said the country's most senior Catholic leader, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney.

"Too often it seems that the only quality which makes something 'art' is the adolescent desire to shock," he said. "If this is the best the Blake prize can do, it has probably outlived its usefulness."

The chairman of the Blake prize, the Rev. Rod Pattenden, said in a statement it seemed that "a real nerve" had been hit.

"I have received several angry phone calls from people claiming religious allegiance who have expressed themselves with clear hatred and violence towards other religious groups," said Pattenden, a minister in the Uniting Church, a liberal Protestant denomination.

Mulling, questioning, and even some angry phone calls over this sort of art.

Let's look at the history of another religion.

The drawings show the head of a turbaned man attached to the body of a dog, in front of various settings including a football goal.

The publication, in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, came after several galleries had refused to display the drawings, apparently for fear of violent retaliation from offended Muslims.

Early last year, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the Muslim world after the publication in Denmark of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed which were also deemed blasphemous.

"Alongside the picture, we published a comment piece saying that it was serious that there is self-censorship among exhibition [galleries]," said the Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief, Ulf Johansson.

Last weekend, a small gathering of protestors gathered outside the newspaper's offices to demonstrate against the cartoon's publication.

That was followed this Monday by Iran summoning Sweden's chief diplomat in Teheran to express its own outrage. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has blamed "Zionists" for the images but said he would not hold the Swedish people responsible.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said that Sweden's charge d'affaires had promised his government "shared the views of the Muslim community and termed the publication as unfortunate".

In Stockholm, the Swedish foreign ministry said it now considered the matter closed.

But last year's violent protests over the Danish cartoons has showed that initially little noticed drawings can eventually prompt widespread anger.

Yes, well, more than just "widespread anger"; over 100 people died. This particular situation has become an international incident, and it's working, since some places are afraid to display them.

Both situations -- the Christian one and the Muslim one -- are equal in that they offend some people of a particular religion and, in my view, also equal in that they should not be banned. I don't think public money should be financing them (and I have no evidence that they are), but banning insults is, to me, a slippery-slope freedom-of-speech issue.

But there is self-censorship happening in the case of art insulting Islam, not because of any sense of tact or taste (unfortunately), but because of the fear of what its adherents might do. For many, it's not OK to insult Islam because they might kill us if we do. Far too many folks who stand up for freedom of speech or for the arts are more than willing to throw out those principles before the angry mob show up. The "religion of peace" does not have a very good record at handling insults peaceably, with mulling and phone calls.

Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I'm fully aware that a majority of Muslims don't take up arms over cartoons. But the point is, so many do, and so many Christians or Jews don't, that to the observer of these events, Islam does seem more violent than others.

Is Islam in need of a reformation?

Posted by Doug at 01:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Remains of The Second Jewish Temple Found?

Might be.

Remains of the Jewish second temple may have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem, Israeli television reported Thursday.

Israeli television broadcast footage of a mechanical digger at the site which Israeli archaeologists visited on Thursday.

Gaby Barkai, an archaeologist from Bar Ilan University, urged the Israeli government to stop the pipework after the discovery of what he said is "a massive seven metre-long wall."

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August 30, 2007

It Should Have Come as No Surprise

As first noted here, talked about here, and with evidence here, the election results from 2006 were incredibly misread by Democrats. On the whole, conservatism won, with those Democrats coming in to power being far more right-leaning than those who were applauding the election results cared to see or admit.

But the chickens came home to roost, and the netroots are shocked -- SHOCKED -- at the outcome.

A leading liberal blogger has declared political war against centrist Democrats – the latest move in an intensifying show of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Congress by the once-friendly blogosphere.

Matt Stoller, who blogs at the well-trafficked OpenLeft.com, has compiled a list of 38 House “Blue Dog” Democrats who have voted with Republicans on key legislation, and called on the activist community to put pressure on them – and perhaps challenge them in primaries – if they fail to shape up.

“Some of these members may need to face a primary challenge, and it's useful for potential primary challengers to know that there is criticism of these members,” wrote Stoller, who refers to the 38 Democrats as “Bush Dogs.”

MoveOn.org is getting in on the act as well, targeting those who have become better informed and thus are no longer towing the liberal line.

Rep. Brian Baird’s (D-Wash.) recent conversion on the Iraq war is beginning to affect more than the national dialogue. On Wednesday, liberal group MoveOn.org announced an ad campaign against the congressman in his own district.

Baird recently returned from a trip to Iraq and reversed his position on a withdrawal timetable, citing military progress in the four-year-old war.

The far left's influence over the Democratic party is pushing that party further and further away from the mainstream. I wish Stoller and MoveOn all the success in the world in getting more fringe candidates. It'll push the government to the right when they lose.

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August 29, 2007

Private vs Public Disaster Relief: Which Works Faster?

Same conservative drumbeat, different song, but the beat goes on.

Two years after the devastating floods that followed Hurricane Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans, and much of the Gulf Coast, has largely taken two paths: communities that have rebuilt themselves using private funds, insurance money and sheer will — and publicly funded efforts that have moved much more slowly.

Federal, state and local governments have struggled to speed up the release of funds and restore infrastructure. None of the 115 "critical priority projects" identified by city officials has been completed: For example, New Orleans' police superintendent still works out of a trailer, as do most of the city's firefighters. And analysts at the city's crime lab don't have a laboratory to match DNA samples.

Private funds also generally indicate that more personal effort is going into the project than those who, waiting on big government money, are also waiting on big government action. The more big government is relied upon, the slower things go, and the more people tend to avoid aiding in the cause because, hey, the government will help them. In that sense, government aid can be society's own worst enemy, in the long term.

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Conscience and the Pro-Choice Christian

Russ over at Pro-Life Pro-Logic had a post last month that covered the same topics as those in my response to Anne Rice. While mostly dealing with Christianity vs. the pro-choice viewpoint, he makes a very interesting and thought-provoking connection to the subject of charity to the poor.

The Left has, in my view, a totally one-sided view of poverty. They have abandoned one part of humanity – the unborn (the unseen), for the economically poor (the seen). Mary Meehan, in an article in “The Progressive” in 1980 stated it clearly: “the abortion issue, more than most, illustrates the occasional tendency of the Left to become so enthusiastic over what is called a "reform" that it forgets to think the issue through. It is ironic that so many on the Left have done on abortion what the conservatives and Cold War liberals did on Vietnam: They marched off in the wrong direction, to fight the wrong war, against the wrong people.”

That Christians would follow them off this cliff, given what should be a different view of God's creation, makes no sense to me.

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August 27, 2007

A Forced Moral Equivalence

Clayton Cramer watched CNN's "God's Warriors". While he was encouraged to see some programs, like "Teen Mania", covered, Christiane Amanpour appeared to him to be trying to draw moral equivalences where there weren't any.

As much as CNN may feel the need to draw bogus moral equivalences, they failed. What is wrong with Islam isn't a few kooks on the edges, but a large and dangerous faction of Islam.

Teen Mania runs a school in Texas where they train their people. They have all sorts of very strict rules: no smoking; no alcohol; no R-rated movies; and skirts have to be a certain length.

Amanpour had the nerve to suggest that this was like the Taliban. Yes, except the Taliban executed homosexuals, "loose women," prohibited girls from receiving an education; banned clapping at sporting events; made apostasy from Islam a capital crime; blew up the symbols of other religions. Yes, that's quite similar to a dress code. How did I miss the comparison?

Trying to keep kids on the straight and narrow used to be lauded. Now it's compared to extremist terrorism by our "mainstream" media.

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Covering the Genocide...Or Not

If we pull out of Iraq soon, and if there is a massacre there on the scale of the millions in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, will the news media tell us about it? If you look at the history of the media, probably not, since they didn't say much about those very Killing Fields. The Media Research Center highlights a 1982 study done by George Washington University professor William Adams, in which he documented how much coverage, between 1975 and 1978, the media gave this holocaust. The short answer:

Television coverage averaged "less than thirty seconds per month per network."

The study also compares the coverage to that of the Jonestown suicides, and debunks the excuse TV gave at the time that there were no pictures and without that there isn't a story. It also slams the print media for their lethargy.

Oh, that liberal media.

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August 24, 2007

Christians & Political Parties: A Response to Anne Rice, Part 2

This is the 2nd and final part of my analysis of an open letter from Anne Rice. Part 1 can be found here.

Abortion

Anne Rice spends most of her letter covering this issue, and she starts with an assertion that, to me, shows a lack of consideration of the history of the issue.

I want to add here that I am Pro-Life. I believe in the sanctity of the life of the unborn. Deeply respecting those who disagree with me, I feel that if we are to find a solution to the horror of abortion, it will be through the Democratic Party.

Ms. Rice does touch on these historical issues lightly later on, and I'll hit them more in-depth then, but even looking at how the abortion issue generally falls between the parties today, I don't see this as making sense. What I hear from Democrats are things like John Kerry with this sentiment:

I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views. But I disagree with them, as do many. I can't legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith. I believe that choice is a woman's choice. It's between a woman, God and her doctor. That's why I support that. I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade.

If one's commitment to Christianity should be "absolute", as Ms. Rice has said, there is a big problem with this statement, that is generally the line religious Democrats use when talking about abortion, and that is the canard about legislating one's religious faith, or sometimes call ramming one's religion down your throat. Civil rights are very much a moral issue, but does Sen. Kerry have the same problem with legislating that? No, he's very willing to impose his view on KKK members, and rightly so. It's right, it's moral and it's the law. Legislators all throughout our country's history, and more so in our early history, based many of their decisions partly or mostly on their religious faith. This excuse is disingenuous.

Regarding Hillary Clinton, NARAL gave her a 100% score on her 2006 voting record (PDF), and she's a big supporter of Roe v Wade. See here for other details. You won't curb abortions by voting the way she does. Like her husband, she'll talk the talk, but watch the way she votes.

When voting, as Ms. Rice says, "Conscience requires the Christian to vote as a Christian". If there is a substantial difference between Ms. Rice's vote and Sen. Kerry's or Clinton's vote, I'd like to know what she thinks it might be. Both votes affect more than just the voter, and one's Christianity shouldn't be compartmentalized between private and public life.

In one sense, votes by representatives will, to different extents, reflect the people represented rather than the representatives views. At the same time, by that very title, the representative represents their constituents views and values, and his or her own views are part of that; he or she was voted in partially or mostly because of their views. It's certainly not always a perfect fit between the politician and the constituents, but Sen. Kerry's statement takes his religious beliefs totally and completely out of the equation. If Democratic politicians, in general, can't bring themselves to vote against abortion, how in the world they be better in stopping the horror of it?

I have heard many anti-abortion statements made by people who are not Democrats, but many of these statements do not strike me as constructive or convincing. I feel we can stop the horror of abortion. But I do not feel it can be done by rolling back Roe vs. Wade, or packing the Supreme Court with judges committed to doing this. As a student of history, I do not think that Americans will give up the legal right to abortion. Should Roe vs Wade be rolled back, Americans will pass other laws to support abortion, or they will find ways to have abortions using new legal and medical terms.

I agree that repealing bad legislation or overturning court decisions will not bring an end to abortion in and of themselves, but without them, how can we make real headway? For too many people, what's legal is what's right, or at least what's neutral. Our government's laws should reflect our country's shared morality. Do we or do we not value life in our culture?

The idea that Americans will just pass laws to support abortion is akin to saying that kids will just use drugs anyway, so let's give them clean needles, or that they're going to have sex anyway, might as well give them condoms and a clean room. None of those remedies will even stem the tide, so neither is a "solution to the horror". People are going to steal from each other and hurt each other and kill each other anyway; they do all the time. Should we throw our hands up and legalize those actions? And thus, keeping abortion legal isn't going to somehow reduce the number of abortions.

And while we're on the subject, one might ask if I'm also against passing laws against anything I find morally wrong. One might say that I'm inconsistent in my views if I favor the continued legalization of alcohol or tobacco. Fair question. I would also ask the religious left if they are in favor, morally, of state-sponsored gambling, since it's typically politicians on their side of the aisle pushing for state lotteries and the like. Just as fair. Let me answer that by saying that I believe there are some moral issues that should be decided on an individual basis, but there are other issues that should have the weight of our representative government behind them. Whether one drinks wine with dinner is, I think we can agree, an individual choice. Whether one is allowed to be born or not is the first right of them all, without which none of the others matter, and should have the force of government behind it.

And referring back to Sen. Kerry's statement on abortion, I wonder if Ms. Rice finds his comment "constructive or convincing". How constructive to the pro-life cause is that sort of declaration?

And much as I am horrified by abortion, I am not sure -- as a student of history -- that Americans should give up the right to abortion.

Try saying it this way: "As much as I am horrified by sucking a living being out with a hose and killing it, I am not sure -- as a student of history -- that Americans should give up the right to sucking out living beings with hoses and killing them." Depending on your opinion of the living-ness of the fetus, this is one reading of that statement, and it sounds almost comical, if not utterly incredible. How horrible can you really believe something is if you think we should retain some "right" to it?

And if you don't think the fetus is a human being, then how could it be described as a "horror"? It's no different than cutting off a fingernail. This is a major inconsistency I see with people who say they're pro-life, but think abortion should remain a right. If the fetus is alive, why are you for allowing it to be killed without cause, and if it's not alive, why use the label "pro-life"?

I am also not convinced that all of those advocating anti-abortion positions in the public sphere are necessarily practical or sincere. I have not heard convincing arguments put forth by anti-abortion politicians as to how Americans could be forced to give birth to children that Americans do not want to bear. And more to the point, I have not heard convincing arguments from these anti-abortion politicians as to how we can prevent the horror of abortion right now, given the social situations we have.

I have to refer to Sen. Kerry's statement and Sen. Clinton's voting record again. Are they "practical or sincere" with regard to ending abortion? I honestly don't think so.

Ms. Rice is either deliberately framing the issue here to benefit her argument, or is naively parroting Democrat & Planned Parenthood talking points. The point at which the determination of whether or not to have a child is made is at the time of conception, but she doesn't mention this issue of responsibility. She might be talking about it regarding the "social situations we have", but she doesn't elaborate.

If that is what she's talking about, that our overly sexualized culture has to be addressed, then I would agree with that. But again, who is in the better position to work at retreating from that? Was it liberal or conservative values that brought us this rise in teen sexualization? Was it liberal or conservative values that brought us "free" "love" in the 60s? Was it liberal or conservative values that gave us a welfare system that allows absentee fathers to assuage their guilt? Again, the Republican party has not been completely true to conservative principles, but Democrats are certainly not anywhere near them, and many times deriding them.

And here's a nice irony: "I have not heard convincing arguments from these anti-abortion politicians", so her solution to the horror of abortion is to vote for pro-abortion politicians? Completely upside-down.

Do I myself have a solution to the abortion problem? The answer is no. What I have are hopes and dreams and prayers --- that better education will help men and women make responsible reproductive choices, and that abortion will become a morally abhorrent option from which informed Americans will turn away.

I heartily agree that education is one of the keys to this; winning the hearts and minds. But that alone, like overturning bad court rulings, is not enough, yet essentially that's the only solution she talks about, and frankly overturning Roe v Wade by itself would curb more abortions than education itself. (Don't believe me? Say what you want about Prohibition, while it was in force as law there was less alcohol consumption. Generally, people respected the law. Legislation works.) Suggesting this remedy alone, I would argue, is what is not convincing.

Who would fund that education? Can we count on Democrats, who lobby for government money on behalf of Planned Parenthood, be the ones to entrust with this? Hen house, meet fox. Again, the unintended irony (and it is unintended, as far as I can tell) is just all over this letter, and especially with the next paragraph.

There is a great deal more to this question, as to how abortion became legal, as to why that happened, as to why there is so little talk of the men who father fetuses that are aborted, and as to the human rights of all individuals involved. I am not qualified as a student of history to fully discuss these issues in detail. I remain conscientiously curious and conscientiously concerned.

As much as Ms. Rice appeals to history, you'd think she would consider these questions rather important. Who got us into this mess is a serious question that would need to be answered as part of an informed decision as to which party is best to lead us out of it. For the edification of those interested, let's hit all her points.

How abortion became legal, and why it happened: Let me ask which side of the argument the two political parties were on at the time Roe v Wade was decided, and have been since then. The answer is obvious. The only dissenters in that decision were conservatives, and at least one conservative justice voted for it not understanding the gravity of that decision

In his concurring opinion, [Justice Warren E. Burger] explained, "I do not read the court's holdings today as having the sweeping consequences attributed to them by the dissenting justices; the dissenting views discount the reality that the vast majority of physicians observe the standards of their profession, and act only on the basis of carefully deliberated medical judgments relating to life and health. Plainly, the court today rejects any claim that the Constitution requires abortions on demand."

.
Apparently, physicians make 1,300,000 carefully deliberated medical judgements a year. So much for that thought. Conservatives, in general, opposed the decision. All the liberal justices voted for the decision.

Why there is so little talk of the men who father fetuses that are aborted: Ask John Kerry, who, in his list of people who the woman should consult about the decision, leaves out the father. This is the standard Planned Parenthood response, supported by the Democrats.

The human rights of all individuals involved: Indeed those of us who are pro-life are very concerned about the human rights of all individuals involved, including the one dead after the abortion. If you consider abortion a horror, I would hope you would be, too. It's not just a question that should be hand-waved away.

Conclusion

And so we wrap up.

But I am called to vote in this, our democracy, and I am called, as an American and a Christian, to put thought and commitment into that vote.

Again, I believe the Democratic Party is the party that is most likely to help Americans make a transition away from the abortion crisis that we face today. Its values and its programs --- on a whole variety of issues --- most clearly reflect my values. Hillary Clinton is the candidate whom I most admire.

The Democrats brought us here, and somehow Anne Rice thinks they're the ones to deliver us from it, too. She thinks a voter should consider their commitment to Christ in their vote, but backs a party that, in general, won't. She values charitable giving, won't support a party who's members give more, and yet supports a party that uses force to collect and inefficiently distribute "charity" money. She believes abortion is a "horror", but supports its continued legalization, and believes that a party that brought us that horror and has huge conflicts of interest regarding solving it will, in fact, solve it.

I repeat: I am a Christian; I am a Democrat. I support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.

I'd respectfully suggest that Ms. Rice, and any Christian considering voting for a Democrat and for whom these issues matter, reconsider.

Posted by Doug at 09:49 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 23, 2007

Christians & Political Parties: A Response to Anne Rice, Part 1

This is one of my longer posts, possibly the longest I've done on the blog. What happened was, I was reading an open letter from a Christian planning on voting a particular way, and as I read further and further into it, one objection after another kept coming to my mind, and one problem after another regarding the writer's reasons kept getting in the way. Finally, I realized I'd have to just set aside some of my typical day-to-day blogging of the link-and-quick-comment type, and go in-depth into the problems I see with the author, and Christians in general, who vote Democratic for specifically Christian reasons, and especially regarding the social issues brought up in the letter. Pull up a cup of coffee and sit back.

Anne Rice is a Catholic author. I'll admit to not being too well-read, but as a Protestant my knowledge of Catholic authors is even more limited. Therefore, I'm not sure how much Ms. Rice's views are mainstream Catholic, although whether or not they are really isn't the crux of this post. I do want to discuss the views she espouses, and espouses quite well as an author. That she is a Catholic and I am a Protestant has really no bearing on my criticism of her recent public letter dated August 10. I know Protestants who would agree with her on these issues, so this is not a denominational thing. She professes Christianity, as do I, and we have very similar goals, as far as I can tell, on the topics she discusses, and yet we're voting differently. Ms. Rice wrote a lengthy letter to her readers on her main web site (no permalink so don't know how long it'll stay on the front page) about why she is endorsing Hillary Clinton for President. They reasons she lists for that endorsement, to me, run completely counter to her list of important issues and goals. If she is truly concerned about those goals, I don't follow her endorsement, nor the endorsement of other of my friends and acquaintances of any Democrat in the current group. I want to address the inconsistencies I see in this post.

Ms. Rice starts out with her Christian and Catholic creds, which I respect and am willing to accept. She talks about how, while the separation of church and state is a good idea, the voter does not have that prohibition, and in fact must consider their vote based on their religion.

Conscience requires the Christian to vote as a Christian. Commitment to Christ is by its very nature absolute.

I agree wholeheartedly. But, she also correctly notes, we have only 2 political parties in this country. (She believes, as do I, that a vote for neither Democrat or Republican, whether it's a non-vote or a vote for a 3rd party, is essentially a vote for one of the two major ones, no matter how you slice it.) In short:

To summarize, I believe in voting, I believe in voting for one of the two major parties, and I believe my vote must reflect my Christian beliefs.

Bearing all this in mind, I want to say quietly that as of this date, I am a Democrat, and that I support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.

And that last clause is where the disagreement begins.

Charitable Giving

The first paragraph of explanation deals with giving.

Though I deeply respect those who disagree with me, I believe, for a variety of reasons, that the Democratic Party best reflects the values I hold based on the Gospels. Those values are most intensely expressed for me in the Gospel of Matthew, but they are expressed in all the gospels. Those values involve feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, and above all, loving ones neighbors and loving ones enemies. A great deal more could be said on this subject, but I feel that this is enough.

First of all, neither the religious right nor the religious left have a lock on charitable giving. At the same time, as was noted on this post regarding a study by Arthur Brooks, conservatives outgive liberals by quite a significant amount. How does this relate to how the political parties differ in their view of the government's role in this? Ms. Rice, I believe, falls into a trap by simplistically equating the advocacy of government charity with Jesus' admonition to the individual to be charitable. Democrats say the government should give more, so by her reckoning thy are more in line with her Christian view. However, it has always made me wonder how when Jesus tells me, personally, to be charitable, that somehow this means that I should also use the government to force my neighbor, under penalty of jail, to be "charitable". I put "charitable" in quotes because when there's force involved, there's no real act of charity. How Democrat Christians get from point A to point Z on this boggles my mind. Another statistic from Brooks' study brings this point home; People who believe the government does not have a basic responsibility to take care of the people who can't take care of themselves are 27 percent more likely to give to charity.

On top of this, the bureaucratic inefficiency filter that we're all forced to funnel our "charitable" taxes through siphons money away from the needy, as does the massive fraud that goes on in a big government program that has little accountability.

Conservatives believe that forcibly taking money isn't charity, and that it is not government's role to rob from Peter to pay Paul, and that the way the government handles this creates dependency and causes further problems, like giving fathers a disincentive to stick around. Because of this, conservatives give more of their own money to local charities where the administrative costs are much lower. The Republican party, the current home of most conservative political ideas in this country, purports to support these goals, and while they don't always follow those principles, they have done better at this than Democrats. An expanded role of government in the area of giving to the poor is not the best way for that to happen, and as a Christian I believe it's not moral to force others to give when they don't want to. Again, Jesus asks me to give; He didn't ask me to force others to.

Ms. Rice, in ticking off a laundry list of values, seems to be falling for the framing of the issue that Democrats have put forth; welfare = caring. There are other ways to care, which can have much better results.

Part 2 tomorrow.

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August 20, 2007

Artificial Life

And not the robotic kind.

Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways—in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

What's interesting to me is how they plan to solve some problems.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step—creating a cell membrane—is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step—getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

This will be an interesting test of the evolution theory, but we're years away from that.

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August 15, 2007

Al-Qaida Is in Iraq

Christopher Hitchens is no fan of religious folks, and enjoys the infighting he sees among religions. However, there is one argument at least that he finds even lower than those.

Arcane as these disputes may seem, and much as I relish seeing the faithful fight among themselves, the believers are models of lucidity when compared to the hair-splitting secularists who cannot accept that al-Qaida in Mesopotamia is a branch of al-Qaida itself.

Hitchens takes apart the arguments that are used by folks to try to convince themselves that Iraq isn't really a front in the war on terror. A short but meaty read. He closes by putting it all in context.

We can not only deny the clones of Bin Ladenism a military victory in Iraq, we can also discredit them in the process and in the eyes (and with the help) of a Muslim people who have seen them up close. We can do this, moreover, in a keystone state of the Arab world that guards a chokepoint—the Gulf—in the global economy. As with the case of Afghanistan—where several provinces are currently on a knife-edge between an elected government that at least tries for schools and vaccinations, and the forces of uttermost darkness that seek to negate such things—the struggle will take all our nerve and all our intelligence. But who can argue that it is not the same battle in both cases, and who dares to say that it is not worth fighting?

Isn't that sort of idea, and indeed reality, worth fighting for?

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August 14, 2007

Eyes Wide Open at Venezuela

In Mark Weisbrot's article, "Eyes Wide Shut: The International Media Looks at Venezuela" at the Huffington Post yesterday, Mr. Weisbrot just glosses over the importance of some of the actions of Hugo Chavez in the recent RCTV controversy. According to Mark, it's no big deal, really.

Most consumers of the international media will be surprised to find that the controversy over Venezuela's oldest TV station, RCTV, is still raging. We were repeatedly informed that President Hugo Chávez "shut down" the station on May 27th. But in fact the station was never "shut down" - since there is no censorship in Venezuela. Rather, the Venezuelan government decided not to renew the broadcast license that granted RCTV a monopoly over a section of the publicly-owned frequencies.

This is a big distinction, although the U.S. and international press blurred it considerably. Jose Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States, noted last month that the "Venezuelan government is empowered to do what it did (non-renewal of the license)" and cited Brazilian President Lula Da Silva's statement that not renewing RCTV's broadcast license was as democratic an act as granting it. Insulza added that "democracy is very much in force in Venezuela."

See, it's legal for Chavez to do it, so nothing to see here, move along. All you thousands of Venezuelans who protested the closure, er, non-renewing action, you just don't know what's really going on in your own country.

The fact that it's legal doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. The fact that the Venezuelan government has survived lo these many decades with RCTV often being a thorn in the side shows just how out of the ordinary this action was. And to blame whatever perceived misunderstanding there might be on the international press blurs the fact that Venezuelans themselves were outraged at this. Some polls put the number of those against this as high as 70%. Who's eyes are "wide shut", exactly?

Agreed, RCTV has behaved rather poorly in the past, as Mark notes.

RCTV's owner, Marcel Granier, is an opposition leader who seeks to de-legitimize the Venezuelan government. He has had some success in this effort, most importantly in April 2002 when his station faked film footage to make it look like pro-Chávez gunmen were shooting down demonstrators on the streets of Caracas. This and other manipulations by the Venezuelan media helped provoke a military coup against the elected government. This is one of several reasons that the government of Venezuela declined to renew RCTV's broadcast license.

Wrong, even from a "free speech" point of view. That still doesn't mean that what Chavez did is right. Chavez took action against a media outlet for political reasons, and that brings the stakes up even higher regarding the politicizing of the media. A more appropriate action would be to bring Granier up on charges, not attempt to turn off the station.

And Mr. Weisbrot is completely failing to place the RCTV controversy in the context of further restrictions on free speech made by Chavez. Foreigners are not allowed to speak ill of him and his policies while in-country. Weisbrot says:

Granier is betting that the international media and other U.S.-dominated institutions will also frame his current battle as a "free speech" issue, rather than a legal dispute over whether his station is a national channel and hence subject to the same regulations as other Venezuelan cable stations. This is a good bet.

But regardless of the other reasons the Venezuelan government would use to attempt a shutdown, there is a free speech issue at stake. Perhaps not with the RCTV situation taken individually, because there's a lot more going on than just free speech, but it is an element of that and many other actions that the Congressinally-uninhibited Chavez has been taking recently. All of it must be looked at, but Mr. Weisbrot doesn't look that far.

So Venezuelans know that there is no "free speech" problem in their country. While there are problems with the rule of law, including street crime - as throughout most of the region - Venezuelans have not suffered a loss of civil liberties under the Chávez government, as we have for example in the United States since 2001. That is one reason why Hugo Chávez was re-elected in December by the largest margin of the 12 most recent Latin American presidential elections, despite facing an opposition-dominated media. Democracy is indeed "very much in force in Venezuela."

Does any of this sound like the Liberal descriptions of the Soviet Union back in the 60s? "They have it better than we do." "There's is a more fair government." Back then, eyes were wide shut, too.

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August 09, 2007

A Tale of Two Texts

Glenn McCoy says it all with one picture from August 2nd.

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August 08, 2007

Live By the Polls, Die By the Polls

Many on the Left try to disparage any action Bush has taken by citing his poll numbers, especially regarding the war in Iraq. If the public doesn't like it, it shouldn't be done, or so goes the argument. Well, as I've said here many times before, I hate polls, but if you want to live by them, are you willing to die by them? Whatever you said about Bush when his poll numbers were dropping, is the opposite true now that they're rising?

We're seeing some slight hints of positive news for the Bush administration. For one thing, Bush's job approval rating has stopped its downward trajectory. Bush hit bottom with his administration low point of 29% in early July (based on our USA Today/Gallup poll readings). Now - in the data just about to be released from our weekend poll - Bush's approval rating has recovered slightly to 34%. That's not a big jump, but it is the second consecutive poll in which the president's numbers have been higher rather than lower.

Is the war a better idea now because the "surge" numbers are going up? (Emphasis mine, for a point to be made later.)

Also, we are seeing a slight uptick in the percentage of Americans who say the "surge" in Iraq is working. That may not be a total surprise given the general tone of news out of Iraq recently, including the positive light on the situation put forth by Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack in their widely-discussed New York Times op-ed piece "A War We Just Might Win" on July 30. But it represents a change.

Indeed, the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll itself found a slight increase in the percent of Americans saying that the U.S. did the right thing in taking military action in Iraq, and were so uncertain about it that they redid the survey. And found the same results.

While public opinion can be important with regards to a war, the very transient nature of it shows that it's not a good idea to lean too heavily on it regarding public policy.

The role of the media should not be discounted, either. Most of the media folks are down on the war, and the stories they cover and how they cover them mirrors much of that. And, as emphasized above, those reports and opinion pieces shape the way people think about the war and other topics, so when the media ignore all the good stories coming out of Iraq and then trumpet poll results as bolstering their view, it is very disingenuous. They know full well how their actions game the numbers. A single opinion piece by liberals who finally decided to see for themselves what was going on was a big factor, Gallup says, in bringing the numbers up. This says to me that if the public knew all the good things happening in Iraq -- if they got the fair and balanced full story -- the poll numbers would be quite different.

I say again, I hate polls. My opinion on whether we should have gone to war in Iraq is not based on the feel-good (or feel-bad) story of the week, or how well the war is going today. But for enough folks, it does matter, and thus polls are the worst kind of "news" story. However, I am more than happy to hold those who do hold polls in high regard to their own standards.

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China's Economic Threat

This is another reason why the US government shouldn't be spending borrowed money to finance extra-constitutional spending.

The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress.

Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.

Described as China's "nuclear option" in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.

It would also cause a spike in US bond yields, hammering the US housing market and perhaps tipping the economy into recession. It is estimated that China holds over $900bn in a mix of US bonds.

When the federal government is asked to do things the Constitution doesn't tell it to do, and when more and more money flows through it, and with that more and more power, it's hard to stop spending. And with that comes borrowing. And with that comes slavery. The same thing could happen even if spending were kept in the context of the Constitution, but once you escape its limits, there is then no limit.

The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. - Proverbs 22:7 (NIV)

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August 07, 2007

Media Hall of Shame

What do Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, Gavyn Davies, Howell Raines and now Thomas Beauchamp all have in common? They're all in John Wixted's Liberal Media Hall of Shame for ruining their own careers because of lies told to promote a liberal agenda. Wixted notes that this appears to be very one-sided.

Career-ending journalistic insanity -- mostly attributable to the war in Iraq -- appears to be almost exclusively a phenomenon of the left. If you know of some prominent counterexamples, though, please set me straight.

This is why diversity of opinion within journalism is required, rather than the incredibly left-leaning crowd we currently have. As fair and balanced as they might believe they are, whenever we have scandal like this, it always seems to be coming from one side.

Wixted does try, though, to scrounge up at least one example from the right.

By way of comparison, who are the conservative reporters who are torpedoing their own careers by fabricating stories about Clinton or Reid or Pelosi? I can't really think of any. The only conservative reporter who comes to mind is an extremely minor one by the name of Jeff Gannon whose "offense" was to ask a softball question of Bush during a press conference. If liberal reporters were similarly slimed for asking questions of an opposite nature (i.e., questions designed to make Bush look bad), we would not have a White House Press corps.

But somehow the Left in this country can't see past their own partisanship, and instead whine about Fox News and the Washington Times.

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, this is pot.

Update: Link fixed.

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August 03, 2007

Could a Same-Sex Divorce Result In Same-Sex Marriage?

Two women "married" in Massachusetts (and yes, I'll continue to put that in quotes) are seeking a "divorce", 3 years later, in Rhode Island, where they live. However, Rhode Island does not officially recognize the union. So the question is, if they are granted a "divorce", does this imply that Rhode Island considers their union a marriage and thus is a back-door to "same-sex marriage"?

Rhode Island politicians are divided.

PROVIDENCE — A state court can grant two Providence women a divorce without answering the highly charged question of whether a same-sex marriage performed in Massachusetts should be recognized in Rhode Island, Governor Carcieri and Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch agreed in legal briefs filed with the state Supreme Court yesterday.

But Carcieri and Lynch differed sharply over what the outcome of the case should be if the high court does take up the larger issue.

Carcieri, a Republican and a Catholic who has opposed bills to legalize same-sex marriage, argued that Family Court should not recognize the marriage between Margaret R. Chambers and Cassandra B. Ormiston.

“Marriage as a legal union of one man and one woman is clearly the bedrock of Rhode Island family law,” Carcieri’s brief said, citing gender-specific terms such as “husband and wife” in state law. “Because of the pervasiveness of this position throughout its family law statutes, Rhode Island has a strong public policy against recognition of any other marriage than that between one man and one woman.”

Lynch, a Democrat and a Catholic who has a sister who married a woman in Massachusetts, argued that Family Court should recognize the Chambers/Ormiston marriage under principles of comity, in which states recognize the laws and judicial decisions of other states.

“The crucial issue is whether there is a public policy in this state that is so strong it will require Rhode Island to except same-sex marriages from the traditional respect and recognition it has shown to laws of its sister states,” Lynch’s brief said. “Rhode Island’s case law and legislative enactments do not support such a finding.”

Predictably, the Republican insists that the people, via their representatives, should decide, while the Democrat believes that the osmosis that comes with free travel between states should be enough to change the laws. And actually, Lynch foresees a Family Court system that treats same-sex couples the same as married couples. While that by itself doesn't institute "same-sex marriage" in and of itself, once the precedent is set and the legal system is conditioned, it becomes much harder to keep it out. Lynch is innocently shortsighted at best, or an underhanded activist at worst.

And frankly, I believe that same-sex marriage supporters were banking on this all along. To simply get a friendly state to pass the law is all they would need, and then claim "comity" to make it a de facto law in the other 49 states. Never mind the people and their constitutions.

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The Salvation Army at the Minneapolis Bridge Disaster

One Salvation Army officer (minister) was in their car just before getting on the Minneapolis bridge when it collapsed, while an IT employee was on the bridge when it happened. Both were able to help those who were stranded. You can go to the web site for The Salvation Army's Minnesota and North Dakota Division to see more pictures and news, and contribute to the effort.

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August 01, 2007

The Roeaux Effect

James Taranto has given a name to the idea that the country is getting more and more anti-abortion partially due to abortion being legal. Calling it "The Roe Effect", it postulates that since those who favor legal abortion are more likely to get one, and assuming children generally follow the political leanings of their parents, more abortion foes are being born than abortion advocates, and thus over time support for legal abortion will dwindle. (See the Wikipedia entry for links to other articles on this.)

After the Roe decision, it would take at least 18 years for the effect to start being seen, when the post-Roe kids were of voting age. However, there's another trend occurring that may have an effect on American politics without the waiting period.

Blame Canada!

It may seem like a quiet country where not much happens besides ice hockey, curling and beer drinking. But our neighbor to the north is proving to be quite the draw for thousands of disgruntled Americans.

The number of U.S. citizens who moved to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, with a 20 percent increase over the previous year and almost double the number who moved in 2000.

In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies.

According to this survey, the increase is mostly politically-related.

The current increase is fueled largely by social and political reasons, says [Jack] Jedwab [ACS's executive director].

"Those who are coming have the highest level of education - these aren't people who can't get a job in the states," he explains. "They're coming because many of them don't like the politics, the Iraq War and the security situation in the U.S. By comparison, Canada is a tension-free place. People feel safer."

If most of these folks are generally Democrat voters, depending on the places and districts they moved from, over time this could also help swing American politics more to the right. 10,000 may not be enough to swing a presidential election, but a Senator here and a Congressman there would matter after a while.

So I'm going to coin a term here for what happens when liberals move to Canada and take their politics with them: The Roeaux Effect (pronounced "the roe effect").

Aside from its effects on American politics, the article notes the reasons of a couple of the 10,000 emigrants, and they are indeed political and social.

One person is Tom Kertes. One of his thoughts on the move gives a peek into the liberal mind and its thoughts about soaking off the money of others.

Kertes, who moved with his partner, is happy in his new home. "Canada is a really nice country. My mother is thinking about it. My stepfather has diabetes and has health issues. So, he'd be taken care of for free if he moved up here."

Sure, his stepfather could go up and get it for free -- really free -- because he hasn't paid in to the system for his whole life. He'd essentially be living off the "forced charity" (oxymoron) of others. And, of course, it all depends on how long he wants to wait for treatment.

And here's another testimonial:

Jo Davenport, who wrote "The Canadian Way," moved from Atlanta to Nova Scotia in December 2001. She also cites political reasons for her move, saying that she disagreed with the Bush administration's decisions after 9/11.

"Things are totally different here because they care about their people here," she says, explaining that she's only been back home once or twice.

By December 2001, Iraq wasn't even on the Congressional funding docket, so Ms. Davenport couldn't even abide going after those who harbored bin Laden. Definitely a reliable Democrat vote gone north.

Her comment that "they care about people here" insinuates that they simply don't here. Well, there are some folks who might think differently about that. Earlier in the article it adds just a bit of perspective.

Of course, those numbers are still outweighed by the number of Canadians going the other way. Yet, that imbalance is shrinking. Last year, 23,913 Canadians moved to the United States, a significant decrease from 29,930 in 2005.

So over twice as many people come here as go there every year. First of all, you'll note that none of them were interviewed for the article. Secondly, if people here simply didn't care, I daresay the numbers would be quite different. One wonders how many of them come here to escape the waiting lists in the Canadian health care system.

And it would be interesting to find out the political and social leanings of those folks. It could be that the Roeaux Effect is not just about the 10,000 going north, but also the 20,000 coming south. Again, no mention of that in the article.

So now I'm going to put out the call to whoever has the resources to do a study on the effect of immigration & emigration from & to Canada has on American politics. If you just read the ABC News report, you'd think quite a lot, based on the interviews. But then again, this is the MSM. There might be nothing to it.

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July 31, 2007

Name That Scientist

Jeff Jacoby presents, in a style not unlike Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story", a story about a scientist, and the school that he applied to, that will amaze you.

DID YOU hear about the religious fundamentalist who wanted to teach physics at Cambridge University? This would-be instructor wasn't simply a Christian; he was so preoccupied with biblical prophecy that he wrote a book titled "Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John." Based on his reading of Daniel, in fact, he forecast the date of the Apocalypse: no earlier than 2060. He also calculated the year the world was created. When Genesis 1:1 says "In the beginning," he determined, it means 3988 BC.

So we have a young-Earth guy who seems really into this Christianity thing, and who is applying for a science job at a very prestigious university. Did he get the job?

Hire somebody with such views to teach physics? At a Baptist junior college deep in the Bible Belt, maybe, but the faculty would erupt if you tried it just about anywhere else. Many of them would echo Oxford's Richard Dawkins, the prominent evolutionary biologist, who writes in "The God Delusion" that he is "hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. . . . It subverts science and saps the intellect."

In today's academic climate, things don't sound promising for our intrepid physicist. Religion and science don't mix, so they say.

But such considerations didn't keep Cambridge from hiring the theology- and Bible-drenched individual described above. Indeed, it named him to the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics....

To find out who this guy was who beat all the odds to get hired, click here for the full column. (And if you're a regular reader of this blog, you may already know the answer. I covered it last month.)

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Chavez Slips Down the Slope

First they came for the TV stations, but I didn't say anything because I didn't own a TV station. Then they came for the critical foreigners, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a critical foreigner.

President Hugo Chávez said Sunday that foreigners who publicly criticize him or his government while visiting Venezuela will be expelled from the country.

Chávez ordered officials to closely monitor statements made by international figures during their visits to Venezuela -- and deport any outspoken critics.

''How long are we going to allow a person -- from any country in the world -- to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?'' Chávez asked during his weekly television and radio program.

So if someone comes to his country and calls him "the devil", that's a deportable offense. But if Chavez does it in America, the world applauds. (Well, the UN at least.)

Closed circuit for Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Cindy Sheehan, and other Chavez supporters: Can you say "stifling of dissent"? Can you recognize it when it's really happening? Do you remember this ever happening before in history? Do you remember how it all ultimately turned out?

Hat tip The Liberty Papers via Q&O (who points out the similarity with North Korea).

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New Blog

A work buddy of mine and fellow Christian has started his own blog "A Dim Light in a Dark Place". Rather eclectic in nature (family, politics, faith, humor (especially his proposed bumper sticker for use in Atlanta)), so give it a look.

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July 30, 2007

About Face!

James Taranto's analysis and humor on events of the day is not to be missed. On a daily basis, he writes Best of the Web Today for Wall St. Journal's Opinion Journal. Today is definitely no exception, and the rest of this blog post will be his analysis of a NY Times op-ed piece from today. It's something that needs to be said, and said loudly and often. When, instead of reading what the liberal media writes about the war, journalists actually go to Iraq and see what's happening, the results are amazing. And now, James Taranto.

On Second Thought, Don't Surrender
In an important and surprising New York Times op-ed piece, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, both from the liberal Brookings Institution, describe a visit to Iraq, where they find that things are not as bad as--well, as New York Times readers have been led to believe. The piece is titled "A War We Just Might Win":

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated--many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

O'Hanlon and Pollack report that Sunni sheikhs in Anbar province "are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies," that "the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate" in the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul, and that "the American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners."

They say the situation "remains grave," especially on the "political front," but they counsel against a quick retreat, as many Democrats on Capitol Hill have been advocating:

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

In a way, though, what is most telling about this piece is the introduction:

Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration's critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

For the sake of argument, let us suppose that the authors are right when they claim the Bush administration has "lost essentially all credibility." Does this excuse the administration's critics for being "unaware of the significant changes taking place"--especially when some of those critics have, for reasons of partisanship, ideology or just plain animus, actively campaigned to destroy the administration's credibility?

In the critics' defense, one may say that they have not, by and large, been in positions of responsibility; that if things have gone wrong in Iraq, the administration deserves the lion's share of the blame.

On the other hand, those critics now include the leaders of both houses of Congress, as well as several politicians who would like to become president. For them, at least, it is a serious failure of leadership if they base their views on Iraq on their own disdain for President Bush, or the hope of exploiting voters' disdain for him, rather than on reality.

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July 24, 2007

Sunni and Shia Brought Together By...

...the US military.

TAJI, Iraq — U.S. forces have brokered an agreement between Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders to join forces against al Qaeda and other extremists, extending a policy that has transformed the security situation in western Anbar province to this area north of the capital.

The extremists struck back yesterday with a suicide car bomb aimed at one of the Sunni tribes involved in the deal, killing three militiamen and wounding 14.

Members of the First Calvary Division based at nearby Camp Taji helped broker the deal on Saturday with the tribal leaders, who agreed to use members of more than 25 local tribes to protect the area around Taji from both Sunni and Shi'ite extremists.

Our fighting men and women in Iraq are not some dumb, poor folks who got "stuck in Iraq" (thank you John Kerry), and they're not just fighting men and women, either. They're bringing peace (real peace, not the Saddam Hussein kind) to Iraq, one province at a time. It's slow going, no question about that, but I do hope the American people will let the military have the time to do the job right, because it is getting done.

Similar agreements in Anbar province have been credited with putting al Qaeda and its foreign extremists on the defensive while bringing relative peace to some of Iraq's most violent areas.

The Taji agreement, however, is the first involving both Sunni and Shi'ite sheiks, and the U.S. military hopes it will help temper the increasing influence of the Mahdi Army in and around Baghdad.

"A month ago, every single one of these people was shooting at us," said Sgt. Richard Fisk as he walked through Falahat pointing out places where his troops had been hit by roadside bombs.

Capt. Wohlgemuth said the tribal leaders approached the United States for support after a number of raids and detentions, coupled with increasingly brutal treatment of the local population by the group calling itself al Qaeda in Iraq.

The captain said that in some cases he has helped members of the new militia to get relatives released from U.S. and Iraqi custody, provided they were not linked to al Qaeda.

Things are getting better. But will Democrats notice come September?

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July 23, 2007

A "Subversive" Film

Arnold Kling exposes a new movie.

The Acton Institute has produced the most subversive movie I have ever seen. The Call of the Entrepreneur, which is being released on an agonizingly slow schedule, is a threat to tyranny everywhere, including here at home.

The movie's message is that entrepreneurs are creators of wealth, Wall Street financiers are enablers of economic progress, and the villains of the world are people like the Communist leaders in China and American religious leaders who rail against capitalism.

Here's the short description from the movie's website:

A merchant banker. A failing dairy farmer. A refugee from Communist China. One risked his savings. One risked his farm. One risked his life.

Why do their stories matter? Because how we view entrepreneurs - as greedy or altruistic, as virtuous or vicious - shapes the destinies of individuals and nations.

But there are probably too many impediments to it to be shown widely in this country. Kling explains:

But it has very little chance of being shown in public high schools in America. It is far too explicit. "Call of the Entrepreneur" features the Reverend Robert A. Sirico, including a full-frontal shot of his clerical collar. As producer Jay W. Richards points out, the movie uses "the G word."

As a Jew, I am certain that I missed a number of the religious aspects of the movie. There were subtle references to Christian doctrine that went right past me. Perhaps there are Christians who would be more aware of the context and, based on their knowledge, might even take offense at the film's stance. I imagine that passionate atheists would tend to be turned off. But I think that a typical high school student could be exposed to the religion in "Call of the Entrepreneur" without being permanently scarred or corrupted.

I would argue that "Call of the Entrepreneur" and "An Inconvenient Truth" are both religious films. However, unlike Al Gore's movie about global warming, "Call of the Entrepreneur" steers clear of sensationalism, dogma, and misleading half-truths. It is ironic that public teachers and parents are happy to see "An Inconvenient Truth" in the classroom, but "Call of the Entrepreneur" would probably be greeted with protests if it were shown.

Kling's being sarcastic, of course, but makes his point clear. The more we see government as savior, the less freedom we have. The more the entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged, the better it is for all of us, the poor included. Don't give a man a fish, teach him to fish, and allow him to open his own fish business without excessive interference. That's how freedom works.

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The Iran Hostage Crisis

Mark Steyn wonders...

How do you feel about the American hostages in Iran?

No, not the guys back in the Seventies, the ones being held right now.

What? You haven't heard about them?

Odd that, isn't it?

Very much so, especially since we're planning on negotiating with them regarding their nuclear program. Read the whole thing.

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July 19, 2007

...And the Walls Came Tumblin' Down

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Danbury Baptists, attempting to clarify the roles of government and organized religion in the new United States, Jefferson wrote this:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Taken out of context, the "wall of separation" line has been misused over the generations. And the context is not just the letter Jefferson wrote, but it is a specific answer to a specific question from the Baptsts. Here is their concern, with emphasis added:

But sir, our constitution of government is not specific. Our ancient charter, together with the laws made coincident therewith, were adapted as the basis of our government at the time of our revolution. And such has been our laws and usages, and such still are, [so] that Religion is considered as the first object of Legislation, and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights. And these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgments, as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen. It is not to be wondered at therefore, if those who seek after power and gain, under the pretense of government and Religion, should reproach their fellow men, [or] should reproach their Chief Magistrate, as an enemy of religion, law, and good order, because he will not, dares not, assume the prerogative of Jehovah and make laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ.

The Baptists were concerned specifically about the government imposing laws on religion that would tell them what to do with regards to their beliefs and the practice of them. Jefferson said government would not do that.

There could be no real question as to whether or not religion could have an effect on the government, since a chaplain and an opening prayer were part of Congress from the beginning. Jefferson himself used government money for the express purpose of evangelizing the American Indians. This from the man who wrote about a wall? By his words and his deeds, and in the full context of his words, it is clear that the wall he spoke of was one erected around religion to protect it and its followers from government intrusion, but the reverse situation was not addressed but, in fact, encouraged to a point.

I say this as a prelude to this news story coming from the BBC about an event in England that could occur here in the near future.

A gay man has won his case for unlawful discrimination after he was refused a youth official's job by a Church of England bishop.

The employment tribunal said John Reaney, 42, was discriminated against "on grounds of sexual orientation" by the Hereford diocesan board of finance.

And what law was broken?

Under the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003, it is illegal to discriminate against people as a result of their sexual orientation, but the law does contain an exemption for organised religion.

The Church of England has a position on the moral status of homosexuality. It is based on their religious beliefs. But today in England, not even the established church is allowed to act on its beliefs if the government has said otherwise. That "exemption for organised religion" isn't worth the paper it's written on.

This is the beginning of the end of religious freedom, when the government becomes the new arbiter of religious practice. And if you don't think it could happen here, then you're likely in for a surprise when the walls come tumblin' down.

Hat tip: Go, Pundit, Go!

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Christian Fantasy Literature, Minus Hogwarts

Someone once said (I'm thinking C. S. Lewis, but if you know the quote, please note it in a comment) something to the effect that we don't need more good Christian literature, we need more good literature by Christians. Does the trend mentioned in this news story portend more of the former or the latter?

Could the next Harry Potter be a devout Christian?

As the days tick down until Saturday, when a breathless world learns the fate of the teenage wizard, a new breed of fantasy fiction, with Potter-style stories, is emerging.

Like the Potter series, it has mystical creatures, macabre events, epic battles and heroic young protagonists.

But, unlike the Potter books, this genre has overt Christian tones: messiah-like kings who return from the dead, fallen satanic characters and young heroes who undergo profound conversions. What you won't generally find: humans waving wands and performing spells.

Christian fantasy, which had been a slow seller, has caught fire recently, industry analysts say, ignited by the success of the Potter series, which has sent some Christian readers looking for alternatives.

What could come of this is a boatload of Narnia knockoffs, most with the same redemption allegory. Now, I'm not knocking the allegory itself, per se; there's certainly nothing wrong with presenting the "old, old story" in a new way. But not everything written by Christians has to be a thin veneer overlaying the New Testament.

And there are a lot of good books written that happen to be written by Christians. In our house, Ted Dekker is a big name, not only for his incredible thriller and suspense novels, but because he went to the same missionary boarding school in Indonesia as my wife and was just a grade or two ahead.

The article notes that the Potter controversy continues (interestingly, Dobson has praises for the series), while the array of other options is on the increase. But with great popularity comes great mediocrity, and just because the author's a Christian doesn't mean it's a masterpiece. But trust me, those masterpieces do exist, and we need more of them.

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July 18, 2007

A Million Here, A Million There...

Pretty soon, you're talking real money.

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July 17, 2007

Bee Replaces Mouse as Kiddie Suicide Symbol

Ain't Hamas television just so cute?

Hamas’s Al-Aqsa television station recruited a new children’s character to “continue” the legacy of its star martyr, Farfur – the Mickey Mouse lookalike who was beaten to death by an Israeli on the previous program.

The new character on the children’s show Tomorrow’s Pioneers, a bee named Nahool, tells the hostess he is Farfur’s cousin and that he wishes to “continue the path of Farfur… the path of martyrdom, the path of the Jihad warriors… and in his name we shall take revenge upon the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets...” The expression "Murderers of the prophets" is an Islamic expression used by the PA religious leaders to refer to Jews. Defining the Jews as the enemies of God is common in PA religious broadcasting.

Entertaining and educational as always.

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How Nuclear Disarmament Should Be Done

Surprisingly (to me) but welcome is the news that North Korea is shutting down its plutonium processor. Wasn't this supposed to be impossible with a president that talked tough to enemies rather than appeasing them with food and money? And wasn't this what the Carter administration was supposed to have accomplished?

Washington's chief negotiator on North Korea outlined a dramatic programme of rapprochement with America's long-time Stalinist foe yesterday after international inspectors verified that it had closed its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed a North Korean statement that the reactor, which processed the plutonium for the country's nuclear weapons test last October, had been shut down.

In response, Christopher Hill, American assistant secretary of state, said talks to sign a formal peace treaty between the two countries, which ended the 1950-53 Korean War only with an armistice, could begin next year.

America would also consider removing North Korea from its list of "state sponsors of terrorism".

"We'll see when we can complete that because we'll see how far the North Koreans are prepared to move on denuclearisation," he told reporters in South Korea, where he held talks.

For perspective, Saddam Hussein did not do this when given the chance.

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Title of the Post

The song, "Title of the Song", is by DaVinci’s Notebook, and is a hilarious take-off on every boy band song ever written. The video is by a group of guys from my alma mater, Asbury College and is a take-off on every boy band video ever produced. Nice to see scenes from the campus. Gotta go back there soon.

Click here for a good laugh.

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July 16, 2007

Gaza, Meet Rock and Hard Place

The popularity of Hamas in Gaza is tanking. Color me unsurprised.

Hamas swept through Gaza last month, vanquishing numerically superior forces aligned with Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who responded by dismissing the Hamas-led government and installing a new one with his backers.

The poll of Gaza residents shows a backlash. Hamas got only 23 percent support, down from 29 percent in the previous survey last month, while Fatah climbed from 31 percent to 43 percent.

The poll, the first major survey since the Hamas takeover, also showed that 66 percent of Hamas supporters said they would vote Fatah if it undertook reforms.

The Rule of the Masked Gunman proves to be inferior to the Rule of Law. Apparently this is a lesson that the Gaza Palestinians just had to learn the hard way. And learn it they have, but at quite a price. But there's a significant group of them that have learned even more; 43+23 = 68, so 32 percent don't support either group. Hopefully, this key demographic will encourage another party into power and (even more hopefully) seek peace with Israel.

The Captain has more information about the state of the Gazans and their plight at the hands of Hamas. Why voting for a terrorist organization ever made sense is beyond me, but things might be -- might be -- looking better. From the article:

Trust in the Gaza-based deposed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas stood at 37 percent, compared to 63 percent for Abbas. Prime Minister Sallam Fayad got higher trust marks than Haniyeh, 62-38 percent.

"A lot of people answering this question said we like Haniyeh more, but we want people who can really deliver," Rabah said. "People are becoming more realistic."

After 50 years of antagonism against Israel, it's about time. Becoming more realistic would mean suing for peace. Let's be watching to see how realistic they have become.

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Quick Takes

A couple short items for Monday morning.

* Heard a caller on "Bill Bennett's Morning in America" talk about an idea for a bumper sticker. "If you liked The Killing Fields, you'll love The Killing Dunes." And I would ask Democrats, if you didn't like the former, why would you want to do something to allow the latter?

* "Iran to invest in $4 billion Venezuela oil JV" Just what we need; an Iranian foothold in the western hemisphere.

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July 11, 2007

Anaylizing the Pope's Pronouncement

Danny Carlton analyses the Pope's latest document asserting that the Catholic church is the real Christian church and the rest of us are just posers. He thinks, as do I, that this is no real cause for concern among Protestants, since this is essentially a restatement of what the Roman Catholic church has always taught. No surprises there.

Well, except it does get a few folks in a knot. Read the post for details.

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July 10, 2007

The Greatest Threat to World Missions

You'd expect Glenn Penner's idea of the greatest threat to world missions is the persecution of the church. After all, he blogs for "Voice of the Martyrs", an organization who's central focus is the persecution of Christians worldwide. But you'd be wrong.

No, I do not believe that persecution is the greatest threat to the continuing spread of the gospel. I am much more concerned about something that, at first glace, seems benign and even helpful but which I contend is far more insidious. I am referring to the dependency creating practices that ministries are increasingly promoting in the name of "partnership."
Such programs are varied and wide-ranging. Some claim to be "revolutionizing" world missions through their approach of having western Christians sponsor national missions, churches, evangelists, missionaries and pastors. Claiming to be more efficient and culturally adaptable, such groups appeal to the western desire to be cost and labour effective by claiming that such an approach provides more "bang for the buck." Or alternately, they bemoan the fact that these poor servants of God have to labour so hard to meet the needs of their families that they have no time to spread the gospel (to which I respond, "Paul didn't seem to have that problem. See 1 Thessalonians 2:9." Indeed, Paul seemed to think that his approach was the best possible strategy for spreading the gospel. But then again, I suppose we know better in the 21st century).

A careful study of the issue, however, demonstrates that dependency on western resources to spread the gospel has proven, in most cases, to be an absolute disaster.

Read the whole thing for why he believe this is the case.

(The political animal in me also noted that this "absolute disaster" mirrors quite amazingly a US government program that is also, in my opinion, an absolute disaster, and for almost all the same reasons. Read Glenn's blog post and see if you find the same thing I did.)

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July 09, 2007

Why They Hate Us

In case you're still under the impression that al Qaeda hates us because of our foreign policies, here's some perspective.

The leader of an al-Qaida umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shiites in Iraq within two months, according to an audiotape released Sunday.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads the group Islamic State in Iraq, said his Sunni fighters have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Shiite-dominated Iran.

"We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention ... otherwise a severe war is waiting for you," he said in the 50-minute audiotape. The tape, which could not be independently verified, was posted on a Web site commonly used by insurgent groups.

It is not primarily a political struggle, but a religious one, at least on their part. If attacks by al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia weren't enough to sway opinion, perhaps this might. We are not Muslim, and we're the big guy on the block, so we make an enticing target. But al Qaeda's issue is their form of Islam.

Al-Baghdadi criticized Kurdish leaders for their alliance with Shiites in Iraq's government and accused them encouraging unsavory morals.

"The leaders of apostasy ... have impeded the march of Islam in Muslim Kurdistan and helped communism and secularism to spread. ... They insulted the religious scholars ... encouraged vices and women without veils," he said.

Insulting scholars and missing veils. Does this sound like a political group to you?

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Name That Film

What Warner Bros. movie has been translated into 1,000 languages (the most recent being finished this month), the most of any film (beating #2 by about 900)?

Click here for the press release.

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July 06, 2007

Million Man March Against Terrorism

Would be nice to see here. Instead we get marches supporting illegal immigration and against a President fighting terrorism. We'd need both sides of the political aisle to pull something like this off, but methinks one side would be difficult to recruit.

In the meantime, Gateway Pundit takes us to Colombia.

Over one million Colombians marched from the Amazon jungle outpost of Leticia to the Caribbean city of Cartagena to demand liberation of the country's kidnap victims from Leftist terrorists.

People attend a protest against violence and kidnapping, in Medellin July 5, 2007. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians headed for the streets on Thursday to show outrage at last week's news that 11 provincial politicians had been killed while held hostage by leftist rebels.

And guess who is backing the terrorists? The Left's favorite socialist.

The BBC reported that this was a rare national unity protest against the FARC terrorists who are known to be supported by the Chavez government.

Color me unsurprised.

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When Does a Massacre Matter?

Confederate Yankee has some serious questions for the AP.

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Scooter vs. Sandy

As I've said, I disagree with the clemency that the President gave Scooter Libby, but for perspective, here's Ace's suggestion:

Suggestion: Bush should have reduced the fine to a more reasonable $50,000, which just so happens to be how much Sandy Berger was fined for stealing and destroying classified documents and lying about it to investigators (he wasn't charged for the latter, but subsequent revelations has made it clear he did just that).

Making the fine $50,000 would have been more in line with Libby's transgressions, and it would have made it harder for Democrats to argue against it. The penalty -- no jail time, $50,000, probation -- would have been so similar to Berger's that one could scarcely mention it without also mentioning Berger.

I've noted before that the Sandy Berger situation has received far less press for a far larger transgression than the Libby trial. And now the disproportionate punishments are getting the same double standard applied. At least the press and the Democrats are consistent, if disingenuous.

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July 03, 2007

"Chavez and Farfour and Lenin, Oh My!"

When I returned from vacation and caught up on my news reading, a couple of items caught my eye.

Farfur the Mouse is dead. Back in May on my personal blog, I talked about the Hamas children's show "Tomorrow's Pioneers" and it's main character Farfur the Mouse, an obvious Mickey Mouse knock-off, that told kids of the wonders of martyrdom and of the ultimate destruction of the terrorist state of Israel. Fun for the whole family, no? At the time, the head of the Palestinian version of the FCC (a Fatah fellow) said the program would be removed and reviewed. The Hamas station basically said, "Nuts to you" and kept it on the air. Well now, for whatever reason, the station did cancel the show. According to this Jerusalem Post report, it had nothing to do with the government; they're just making room for new programs. Either that's a final statement of defiance just before succumbing to a government order, or it's the actual reason and the government really was toothless in this area.

Regardless, the mouse is dead. Literally. In the final episode (click here for the video) Farfur is martyred by a Jewish character in sunglasses when Farfur won't sell him his land. He's punched out on camera, and the little girl who co-hosts the show announces Farfur's martyrdom. Remember, this is the official TV station of the government that the Palestinian people voted to be their representatives to the world.

Hugo Chavez is still...Hugo Chavez. He's making common cause with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an "axis of unity" against North America, he's making enemies of his South American neighbors after they rightly criticize his silencing of dissent, and he's asking Russians to remember the lessons of Lenin. Chavez is talking about Lenin's anti-imperialism views (though the Soviet Union certainly had its imperialist streak), but I think there are other lessons of Lenin that millions of the dead in Russia would like to teach us.

And here's an interesting tidbit.

Insecurity, "malignant narcissism" and the need for adulation are driving Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's confrontation with the United States, according to a new psychological profile.

Eventually, these personality traits are likely to compel Chavez to declare himself Venezuela's president for life, said Dr. Jerrold Post, who has just completed the profile for the U.S. Air Force.

Chavez won elections for a third term last December. Since then he has stepped up his anti-American rhetoric, vowed to accelerate a march towards "21st Century socialism" and suggested that he intends to stay in power until 2021 -- a decade beyond his present term.

But Post -- who profiled foreign leaders in a 21-year career at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and now is the director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University -- doubts that Chavez plans to step down even then. "He views himself as a savior, as the very embodiment of Venezuela," Post said in an interview.

"He has been acting increasingly messianic and so he is likely to either get the constitution rewritten to allow for additional terms or eventually declare himself president-for-life."

Post portrays Chavez as "a masterful political gamesman" who knows that his popularity largely rests on being seen as a strong leader who takes on the United States, the Venezuelan elite and a host of other perceived enemies -- often with public insults that are rarely used by other leaders.

"To keep his followers engaged, he must continue outrageous and inflammatory attacks," Post said.

Even Chavez's most determined opponents concede that he is a gifted orator and has a rare ability to mesmerize audiences. In the language of political psychology, this is a "charismatic leader-follower relationship."

We've watch this script played out enough in history. Are we just going to sit back and watch the next act, or are we going to resist it?

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The Libby Clemency

President Bush's clemency for the prison time for Scooter Libby is, in my estimation, wrong. Certainly there is the case that the President said that whoever was responsible for the leak should be punished, and even though Libby wasn't the source of the leak (and the source of the leak goes uncharged for any crime) he was still found guilty of lying to a grand jury. That's the same crime that brought impeachment onto Bill Clinton. In my mind, Democrats are right in protesting this decision. Is 2 1/2 years too long for Libby, with the punishment being overkill for the crime? The President's statement notes that he thinks so, especially when the judge didn't take into consideration a number of mitigating circumstances. Nonetheless, even though Libby will still be on probation and still have a felony on his criminal record, I think the President should have stayed out of this. Lying in the justice system shouldn't be any easier when a politically-aligned President is in office.

President Clinton, in defending his pardon of Mark Rich, et. al., had this to say.

First, I want to make some general comments about pardons and commutations of sentences. Article II of the Constitution gives the president broad and unreviewable power to grant "Reprieves and Pardons" for all offenses against the United States. The Supreme Court has ruled that the pardon power is granted "[t]o the [president] . . ., and it is granted without limit" (United States v. Klein). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that "[a] pardon . . . is . . . the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare will be better served by [the pardon] . . ." (Biddle v. Perovich). A president may conclude a pardon or commutation is warranted for several reasons: the desire to restore full citizenship rights, including voting, to people who have served their sentences and lived within the law since; a belief that a sentence was excessive or unjust; personal circumstances that warrant compassion; or other unique circumstances.

The exercise of executive clemency is inherently controversial. The reason the framers of our Constitution vested this broad power in the Executive Branch was to assure that the president would have the freedom to do what he deemed to be the right thing, regardless of how unpopular a decision might be. Some of the uses of the power have been extremely controversial, such as President Washington's pardons of leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, President Harding's commutation of the sentence of Eugene Debs, President Nixon's commutation of the sentence of James Hoffa, President Ford's pardon of former President Nixon, President Carter's pardon of Vietnam War draft resisters, and President Bush's 1992 pardon of six Iran-contra defendants, including former Defense Secretary Weinberger, which assured the end of that investigation.

All true, none of it in question, and all of which applies here, too. It's just that most folks who would be inclined to do this don't pick up on the nuance and unique circumstances of a particular pardon. Punishment not only helps deter the offender from doing it again, it helps convince others not to try it. It needs to be allowed to work.

Sorry Dubya. Can't get behind you on this one. (In the post below, Tom agrees with the clemency. See, we don't march in lockstep here. >grin<).

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June 22, 2007

Liberals Miffed, See Government as Savior

OK, that's a "dog bites man" headline if there ever was one, but here's the latest example. A report by CAP, the Center for American Progress (PDF is here, though I had trouble loading it into Acrobat Reader), entitled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio" notes how many more conservative talk radio stations there are than liberal ones. No news there.

What the report suggests is that the government should step in and "fix" this. Again, no news there. What's really funny is how they frame it. They play both the race and gender card, and bring up the non sequiter of who owns the radio stations. From the coverage on "Think Progress", here's the two paragraph they quote from the report discussing this (emphasis theirs).

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]

Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.

So if only more radio stations were owned by women and minorities, we'd have more liberal talk radio.

Short answer: No.

Liberals once again demonstrate their lack of familiarity with that concept called the "free market". People don't listen to a radio program -- music, talk, news, entertainment, whatever -- based on who owns the station. They listen to what they want to listen to based on content. They have their preferences, and that's what they listen to. This isn't to say a rock-and-roller won't occasionally peek over to the jazz station, or that folks can have very eclectic tastes, but by and large people stick with their preferences.

Now, a radio station stays in business, generally, by making money. (This is central to the "free market" thing. Liberals, please read this. Others can skip to the next paragraph.) They do this by finding a need or want in the community and filling it. Not enough hard rock? Play it! Not enough 18th century classical? Get it! Not enough hard news? Report it! Not enough comedy? Program it! But here's the catch: if you're wrong -- if there is enough 18th century classical music on the radio -- you won't have enough listeners to allow the advertising revenue pay for your expenses.

If you're operating at a loss, generally you go out of business, or try another idea (not enough 20th century avant-garde new age pipe organ music?). Unless you're Air America, in which you just get infusion after infusion of cash from big, corporate rich guys, and if that fails, you legislate.

And that's precisely what CAP is suggesting; making laws to determine how much anybody can own in a market so that they can, maybe, get people to listen to their programs. As I said, a non sequiter. When Air America came to Atlanta, the radio station carried the whole slate of talkers, morning til night. I would occasionally listen to Randi Rhodes on the way home just to hear how the other half thought, but I just couldn't believe that's what the other half really thought. Way too much conspiracy theory. So I didn't listen to her with any regularity. A year or so later, the station is sold (most likely due to coming in last in the market with a 0.0 rating), changes format to an Eclectic Arts station and Air America was off the air in Atlanta. Didn't matter who the owner was. It was unprofitable in the extreme. (And the new owner went from owning 1 to 2 radio stations; definitely an "independent local owner".)

And that's why Air America and "progressive" radio in general isn't out there on the airwaves as much as conservative talk. Hardly anyone listens to them. It's a simple business calculus. But instead of making their product better, the Left seeks to get the government to force the issue.

Are you now waiting for the Left to propose the same thing for the newspaper or broadcast TV media as well? Hold not thy breath. A "Fairness Doctrine" that covers more than just radio? That'll never happen, because those other outlets generally lean left. Which goes to show that when the Left whines about fairness, it's all one-sided. Nothing fair about it.

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June 21, 2007

Meet the New Boss, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

From Redstate.org:

Freshman PA Democrat says no new investigations needed

U.S. Representative Chris Carney, under pressure from constituents in his Pennsylvania district to probe fellow Democrat Paul Kanjorski, now says he believes previous Republican Congresses have done all they could to investigate possible corruption and ethical lapses.

Now that they're in power, all of a sudden Democrats are loathe to do anything about "the culture of corruption", especially in their own ranks. "Move along, nothing to see here. The Republicans already cleaned up this mess."

Carney, like most members of his Democrat freshmen class, ran his 2006 campaign on an anti-corruption platform. “I came to Congress with a promise that corruption should not be tolerated from either party,” Carney recently noted.

But following a call to initiate an investigation into a fellow Democrat, Carney balked, with his office telling the Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice “if the Republican-controlled Congress chose not to investigate this matter in 2002, I’m unclear as to why the issue would be resurfacing now.”

Carney and his freshmen class should be charged with a "truth in labelling" violation.

And here's his leading indicator of whether or not someone is corrupt.

Not long after being elected, Carney told the Pittsburgh Press Gazette “Jack (Murtha) has our back,” and that he didn’t believe ethical questions would harm Murtha, who has been a controversial figure since being named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1980s ABSCAM trials.

Despite his anti-corruption platform, Carney has come to Murtha’s defense. “If it's questionable,” Carney said of Murtha’s reported ethical lapses, “why has he been elected with such large majorities over the years?”

Well there you go. If the people love you, you must be OK.

Obligatory disclaimer: Neither party has a lock on the "culture of corruption". Washington, DC and any seat of power foments it. The problem is that the American people have been sold on the idea that if there's a problem, it requires a central government solution, and thus money and power flow in ever increasing measure to one place. We need to decentralize both to reduce the corruption in Washington and bring the solutions back to the states (who are closer to the problem and have a better track record in general). I'm not saying the states are pure as the driven snow, either, but the locals keep better tabs on their own close to home. If you really want to reduce corruption, the solution is smaller government.

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Christians Persecuted, Major Christian Group Silent

Meryl Yourish gathers up the information. First off, here's the first paragraph from the World Council of Churches web page about "Who Are We?":

The World Council of Churches (WCC) is the broadest and most inclusive among the many organized expressions of the modern ecumenical movement, a movement whose goal is Christian unity.

So this is a specifically Christian organization. Yet their "Latest News" page, as of now, has an article condemning the Israeli "occupation" and how it hurts human dignity, but absolutely nothing about this 3-day-old story on Muslims in Gaza attacking a Christian school and church. How about any stories about the endless rockets launched into Israel from Gaza ever since Israel held up their part of the peace process and pulled out? Nothing.

Nope, Israel is the big problem. Odd, then, that those in Gaza are fleeing...to Israel.

Many Christians said they were prepared to leave the Gaza Strip as soon as the border crossings are reopened.

Where they can't get along and where they kill innocents in order to take power, the WCC is silent. But they condemn the country where the refugees flee to. What an awful double-standard.

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Only At the UN Does This Pass For "Reform"

I've criticized the UN on human rights before. Their Human Rights Commission was a sham and a joke, often headed by countries with the worst human rights abuses, and very often condemning those with better records on it while ignoring egregious acts by member states.

The Commission was disbanded in a "reform" move, and the Human Right Council was created. Living up to my low expectations, the Council is virtually identical to the Commission in its actions.

Members of the UN's new human rights watchdog on Tuesday formally agreed to continue their scrutiny of Israel while halting investigations into Cuba and Belarus - a move that immediately drew fire from Canada and the United States.

Palestinians are trying to get into Israel to escape the human rights abuses in Gaza (the subject of an upcoming post). Yet they excuse Cuba, ignore Hamas and Fatah, and single out Israel. Such "myopic zeal".

The United States - which is only an observer to the 47-nation body - has been skeptical since the beginning.

Any wonder?

The large Muslim and African groups, which dominate the council, had lobbied hard to minimize the scope for naming and shaming countries over their human rights records, ...

Any wonder?

...but make an exception for Israel, the only government explicitly criticized so far by the body.

This is absolutely preposterous. The United Nations has absolutely no credibility in this area, and its pronouncements on this should no longer be taken seriously.

And if this is what they call "reform", they make their own case for dismantling.

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June 20, 2007

Mixing Science and Religion (It Can Be Done)

Richard Dawkins, scientist, atheist, and author of "The God Delusion":

Refusing to believe that science and religion could ever be happy bedfellows, the self-confessed atheist said that professional scientists who did promote that theory needed to prove the existence of god because it was a scientific question.

Emphasis mine, to point out that there have been many scientists who indeed were very religious. For instance:

Three-century-old manuscripts by Isaac Newton calculating the exact date of the apocalypse, detailing the precise dimensions of the ancient temple in Jerusalem and interpreting passages of the Bible — exhibited this week for the first time — lay bare the little-known religious intensity of a man many consider history's greatest scientist.

Newton, who died 280 years ago, is known for laying much of the groundwork for modern physics, astronomy, math and optics. But in a new Jerusalem exhibit, he appears as a scholar of deep faith who also found time to write on Jewish law — even penning a few phrases in careful Hebrew letters — and combing the Old Testament's Book of Daniel for clues about the world's end.

Any scientist who does that today would no doubt be considered a nut by Dawkins and his supporters. And yet I'm certain that Dawkins has no problem accepting the scientific conclusions of someone he'd consider a religious fanatic today.

In one manuscript from the early 1700s, Newton used the cryptic Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the Apocalypse, reaching the conclusion that the world would end no earlier than 2060.

"It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner," Newton wrote. However, he added, "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."

In another document, Newton interpreted biblical prophecies to mean that the Jews would return to the Holy Land before the world ends. The end of days will see "the ruin of the wicked nations, the end of weeping and of all troubles, the return of the Jews captivity and their setting up a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom," he posited.

This is not someone with just a passing interest in a popular religious text of the time, this is someone who takes it seriously. Oftentimes, this sort of religious display is handwaved away as purely cultural, but I don't think you can do that here.

Yemima Ben-Menahem, one of the exhibit's curators, said the papers show Newton's conviction that important knowledge was hiding in ancient texts.

"He believed there was wisdom in the world that got lost. He thought it was coded, and that by studying things like the dimensions of the temple, he could decode it," she said.

The Newton papers, Ben-Menahem said, also complicate the idea that science is diametrically opposed to religion. "These documents show a scientist guided by religious fervor, by a desire to see God's actions in the world," she said.

They are not mutually exclusive.

Posted by Doug at 12:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 18, 2007

BBC Internal Report Admist Bias

As if we needed them to tell us this.

The BBC has failed to promote proper debate on major political issues because of the inherent liberal culture of its staff, a report commissioned by the corporation has concluded.

The report claims that coverage of single-issue political causes, such as climate change and poverty, can be biased - and is particularly critical of Live 8 coverage, which it says amounted to endorsement.

OK, first off, major kudos to the BBC for looking into this and admitting it. However, this is long, long overdue. The Biased BBC blog could have told them this, for a lot less money, I'm sure.

Continuing on in the Telegraph story comes another "shocking" revelation.

The report concludes BBC staff must be more willing to challenge their own beliefs.

It reads: “There is a tendency to 'group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.”

Indeed when it's pointed out that 80+% of American journalists voted for Clinton, the retort is that it doesn't matter since they can still be impartial. However, the lesson from this is that the herd mentality is stronger than the Left gives it credit for, and that real diversity in the newsroom should consist more of diversity of opinion than just skin color. After all, the news businesses' product is information, and "group think" (or perhaps "myopic zeal") is more likely to slant news coverage than ethnic makeup is.

And this is just rich.

A staff impartiality seminar held last year is also documented in the report, at which executives admitted they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended.

No real need to expound on that; the bias (and fear) speaks for itself.

So now what? The Times of London's editorial on this nails it.

That the BBC should investigate itself is perhaps admirable, but only if it acts on the conclusions. The likelihood is that it will lament its shortcomings, pledge to do something and carry on much as before. Changing its cosy culture will take more than a report; some who have worked there say it would require a small neutron bomb. The BBC is a self-perpetuating liberal arts club. Recruitment is the key. It needs to employ more nonconformist journalists whose paper of choice is not The Guardian.

Indeed, diversity of opinion is what's required. Will it happen? Well, another arena that supposedly encourages full debate on subjects is academia, and the Left is heavily entrenched there as well, and they show no signs of wanting their orthodoxy and stranglehold challenged. A prediction that the Left in the media will do so is equally slim.

Posted by Doug at 09:56 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 13, 2007

Congressional Approval Ratings Tank

I'm not a big fan of polls, but there have been so many on the left who have trumpeted Bush's low approval ratings that I just had to report on this.

Fueled by disappointment at the pace of change since Democrats assumed the majority on Capitol Hill, public approval of Congress has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.

Just 27% of Americans now approve of the way Congress is doing its job, the poll found, down from 36% in January, when Democrats assumed control of the House and the Senate.

And 63% of Americans say that the new Democratic Congress is governing in a "business as usual" manner, rather than working to bring the fundamental change that party leaders promised after November's midterm election.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the first woman to hold that position, has also failed to impress many Americans. Only 36% approve of the way she is handling the job, the poll found.

In contrast, 46% of Americans in the current poll said they approved of the way Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia handled the job after he led the GOP into the majority in 1994.

Live by the poll, die by the poll.

Frankly, the Gingrich number surprises me. Perhaps the emotions of the time, and the awful press coverage ("The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas", indeed) have ebbed so that folks are looking more objectively, and comparatively to what's happening now. Or perhaps it's just they've forgotten their specific qualms with Newt. But really, to have the general public looking more fondly of the Gingrich past than the Pelosi / Reid present doesn't speak well of the Democrats.

Again, polls like this don't mean much to me. I want a President or Congressman to lead, not follow the polls. But I've had Bush's poll numbers used as some sort of argument against him, so I just thought these numbers worth noting.

Posted by Doug at 12:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Deaths During the Iraq War

Almost 5 and a half million have died during the Iraq war, and you hear virtually nothing about them on the news. They were not killed with guns, bombs, chemicals or nukes, but the mass destruction is real, all the same. And the killing continues day after day. If you really care about violence and deaths, this is where we should start.

Abortion as WMD may sound over-the-top, but consider that George Bush has been called the worst terrorist on the planet because of deaths one or two orders of magnitude lower than this. Some perspective is in order.

(Click on the graphic to be taken to a page with how the stats are arrived at.)

Posted by Doug at 10:09 AM | Comments (24) | TrackBack

June 12, 2007

Speaking Truth to Evil

Twenty years ago today, the President of the United States did what every single diplomat told him not to do, but he did it because he believed it was the right thing to do.

And it was.

Powerline highlights Peter Robinson's story of how he researched and then wrote a speech to be delivered by Ronald Reagan at West Germany's Brandenburg Gate. It was Robinson who wrote the lines, "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." No one at the State Department or the National Security Council liked it because it was too confrontational and raised false hopes.

Indeed it was confrontational, but you don't slink away from confronting evil. It only raised false hopes if you had no faith in your cause and a belief in the ultimate victory for what was right. If you didn't want to offend evil, and if you didn't think winning was really possible, you really wouldn't like that tone.

But that tone was what was needed then. And too many haven't learned the lesson even today. Read the whole thing to find out what Robinson learned in Berlin that gave him the idea for the line.

These days, the world talks tough to countries like Iran and Syria, and groups like Al Qaeda. But the difference is that Reagan acted on his words. He walked away from the table in Iceland when he determined the Soviets were acting in bad faith. The Left was hysterical, condemning this action as confrontational. They were right, it was. But they were wrong, because they didn't realize that that's the language the Soviets understood. They learned that Reagan would act on what he said, and they respected it. And thus, without the nuclear exchange the Left was sure Reagan was leading us to, very soon the gate did open and the wall did come down.

Bin Laden's lesson from observing America's retreat from Somalia was that we would tuck tail and run at the first sign of a serious resistance. That is why he was bold enough to plan the 9/11 attacks; because a different President sent a different message.

BIN LADEN: We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. We found they had no power worthy of mention. There was a huge aura over America -- the United States -- that terrified people even before they entered combat. Our brothers who were here in Afghanistan tested them, and together with some of the mujahedeen in Somalia, God granted them victory. America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.

America left faster than anyone expected. It forgot all that tremendous media fanfare about the new world order, that it is the master of that order, and that it does whatever it wants. It forgot all of these propositions, gathered up its army, and withdrew in defeat, thanks be to God.

To bin Laden and his supporters, this is not a policy war, nor a political war, but a religious war. It must be fought differently than the Cold War, but some things never change. Speaking truth to evil, and backing up your words with confident actions, whether on the diplomatic field or the battle field, are required to defeat that evil. Reagan understood that. It's a lesson that needs to be relearned by the diplomats of our present time.

Posted by Doug at 10:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 11, 2007

"Stop Sending Us Aid!"

An Kenyan expert in economics, James Shikwati, was interviewed by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The interview got off to a quick start as Shikwati surprised the journalist.

SPIEGEL:Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...

Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

Massive injections of money, good intentions, and virtually nothing to show for it. Sounds just like the welfare state here. The journalist is confused, bewildered.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Why is it a paradox if it simply a case of doing what doesn't work on a much larger scale? This exposes the incredibly simplistic assumption on the part of liberal ideology that throwing money a a problem really should work...in theory. As conservatives have been arguing for decades, however, an understanding of economics helps explain this "paradox". In answer to the question, Shikwati explains.

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

Being taught to be beggars, dependence on government, dampening entrepreneurship, and government corruption involved in the cash transfer. Sounds just like the welfare...well, you get the idea.

Well, now our journalist is flummoxed. Doesn't someone have to help them? Shikwati slaps down this dependency thinking, and explains how food shipments both prop up corrupt governments and at the same time destroy the local economy's incentive.

SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.

Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there's a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program -- which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It's only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it's not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa ...

SPIEGEL: ... corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers ...

Shikwati: ... and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It's a simple but fatal cycle.

And it just gets better after that. It included an admission from a tyrant that they indeed waste the aid, a exposure of exaggerated AIDS numbers for profit, and an African biochemist stuck being a chauffeur to aid workers. You simply must read the whole thing. It really turns on its head the idea that huge amounts of aid helps a nation, or even a continent. Giving to the poor is one thing. Destroying the individual spirit by destroying their livelihood is entirely another. The interview concludes with the journalist, playing the part of the liberal to the hilt (and, based on the full interview, not really play-acting) asking in desperation...

SPIEGEL: What are the Germans supposed to do?

Shikwati: If they really want to fight poverty, they should completely halt development aid and give Africa the opportunity to ensure its own survival. Currently, Africa is like a child that immediately cries for its babysitter when something goes wrong. Africa should stand on its own two feet.

Rugged individualism, combined with personal, not massive, charitable giving. That is the responsible position.

Posted by Doug at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 07, 2007

Will They Step Up and Do the Right Thing?

Republicans have ejected legislators in the recent past who have done wrong (Foley, Ney). Now the Democrats, who ran on the issue of getting rid of "the culture of corruption" in Washington -- a culture they attributed to Republicans -- have a chance to finally stand up for that conviction of theirs.

An indictment charging Rep. William Jefferson, D- La., in a long-running bribery investigation is being announced Monday, federal officials said.

The indictment is being handed up in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. A press conference was being organized for late Monday in Washington to discuss the case.

A Justice Department official familiar with the case said the indictment outlining the evidence against Jefferson is more than an inch thick and charges the congressman with crimes that could keep him in prison for up to 200 years. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

Almost two years ago, in August 2005, investigators raided Jefferson's home in Louisiana and found $90,000 in cash stuffed into a box in his freezer.

Jefferson, 63, whose Louisiana district includes New Orleans, has said little about the case publicly but has maintained his innocence. He was re-elected last year despite the looming investigation.

As I've noted before, Republicans have plenty of examples to point to of people who are gone -- not censured, not reprimanded, gone -- such as Foley, Ney, Cunningham, DeLay, and Livingstone. The Democrats have an opportunity to show that, unlike how they handled Bill Clinton, they can kick out those in their party who break the rules.

It's not like Jefferson is the current Majority Leader (as was DeLay) nor nearly the next Speaker of the House (as was Livingstone). If Republicans could do that, Democrats should be able to do this.

True, Jefferson hasn't yet been convicted, so technically speaking he's still innocent in the eyes of the law. The news story notes, however, that two associates (who have already pled guilty) and a videotape are waiting in the wings as witnesses for the prosecution. Things are not looking good for the Congressman.

But he's not convicted yet. If he is, the question is, will Democrats hold their own accountable? If they do, Washington and the nation will be better for it, and I'll be glad to give them their due credit. Accountability is key. If they don't, the Democrats completely lose any moral high ground they've claimed.

It's not that one party's politicians are more corrupt than the others; humanity is what it is. It is all about accountability. Without that, there is no check on the fallibility of our elected representatives.

Posted by Doug at 10:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 04, 2007

Dems Demonstrate Why Smaller Government Is Needed

I'm shocked. Or not.

After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress' pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify "earmarks"-lawmakers' requests for specific projects and contracts for their states-in documents that accompany spending bills.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.

Smaller government is the only way this kind of abuse can be reduced, not just a change in party power. The more Washington does -- the more responsibility we hand over to them -- the more money they get. The more money, the more abuse of it. Divide up some of that power into 50 pieces (commonly referred to at "states"), and you have more accountability and less abuse, mostly because when you centralize things in Washington, abusers have one-stop shopping for largesse.

Posted by Doug at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 01, 2007

Serve Me, Or Else!

With a tip of the hat to Ron Coleman at Dean's World comes word of a certain clientele that will take a company to court for not catering to them.

Now, would it make sense for used of Macintosh computers to sue software companies that only write for Windows, complaining that they should have equal access to that software as well? No, it would be silly, and certainly not allowed. I mean, after all, those Windows programmers know the PC, not the Mac. You'd want someone who knows the hardware you're using to write for it. And besides, can't a company choose it's market?

Perhaps not. Depends on who you are.

The popular online dating service eHarmony was sued on Thursday for refusing to offer its services to gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

A lawsuit alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of Linda Carlson, who was denied access to eHarmony because she is gay.

Define "denied access" for me, will you?

Lawyers bringing the action said they believed it was the first lawsuit of its kind against eHarmony, which has long rankled the gay community with its failure to offer a "men seeking men" or "women seeking women" option.

They were seeking to make it a class action lawsuit on behalf of gays and lesbians denied access to the dating service.

So to "deny access" means to not offer the specific options in a service that you want. Mac users, your time is coming if this lawsuit makes it through the court system.

eHarmony was founded in 2000 by evangelical Christian Dr. Neil Clark Warren and had strong early ties with the influential religious conservative group Focus on the Family.

There might even be some anti-Christian bias going on here. But that doesn't even really have to enter the picture to show how meritless this suit is, or should be. Using my previous example, would you want Windows programmers writing your Mac software? Dr. Warren has said that he doesn't consider himself an expert in homosexual relationships, and eHarmony is essentially selling his knowledge.

eHarmony could not immediately be reached for comment. Commenting in the past on eHarmony's gay and lesbian policy, Warren has said that he does not know the dynamics of same-sex relationships but he expects the principles to be different.

Let's sue the butcher for not knowing how to prepare tofu.

And this is just silly...

"This lawsuit is about changing the landscape and making a statement out there that gay people, just like heterosexuals, have the right and desire to meet other people with whom they can fall in love," said Carlson lawyer Todd Schneider.

How in the world does one business not catering to you somehow deny you the right to do...anything? The very first comment at the "Likelihood of Success" blog (second link above) puts the lie to this immediately.

I’m happily married now for 18 years, so I have zero experience with the on-line dating world. So it was news to me that eHarmony didn’t offer same-sex services.

But it wasn’t news I learned here. No, I learned it when one of their competitors’ ads came on: a somewhat clever ad where a guy looks at some listings of attractive women, and then says, “Nope. Still gay.” Point made: “Hey, if eHarmony won’t help you, we’ll be happy to.”

So the market has already solved this problem: eHarmony’s business choice created an opportunity, and a competitor is taking advantage of the opportunity. If this leads the competitor to get better known and better liked overall, then you can bet eHarmony will reconsider. If this remains a niche market and doesn’t have any carryover impact on brand loyalty, then eHarmony will continue to ignore the niche, and the competitor will find it a profitable niche to serve.

Problem solved. Leave the courts out of it.

(I've left off the last line of his comment, since it would become obvious where I got the Mac/Windows analogy from.)

If this lawsuit succeeds, it will cement homosexuality as a seriously privileged class, and be a giant step towards telling churches that consider homosexuality a sin that they don't have the religious freedom they thought they did. If this lawsuit does not succeed, it will not be because society is homophobic. When Catholic adoption agencies decide not to give children to same-sex couples due to religious reasons, it's the same situation. And in both cases, the market can, and has, dealt with it. A lawsuit over it is just narcissistic.

Posted by Doug at 03:04 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Real Human Shields

Before we went into Iraq, there were folks who volunteered to be human shields to protect the country. But instead of being placed near schools and hospitals, these folks were shocked to find out that they were being located, by Saddam, near army bases. Having been whacked by reality, they bailed out.

But today's human shields have a lot more honor and courage. And they know who the real enemy is. This picture highlighted by Gateway Pundit, and appropriately tagged with a Psalm by Military Motivator, is what a real, honorable, human shield looks like. A soldier mom commenting at Gateway Pundit describes it best.

The boy doesn't know why or care why that soldier is in Iraq: he simply has learned that the American soldier is the Good Guy and that the Soldier would give his own life to protect the child.

Posted by Doug at 02:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2007

Blogs4God Relaunches

Blogs4God used to be a Yahoo!-like categorization of blogs by Christians. It's now been relaunched as a digg-like social bookmarking site for the same target audience. If you sign up, you can nominate and vote on blog posts you find interesting (hopefully, including some of ours).

Posted by Doug at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 30, 2007

Freedom of Religion Returning to Texas

The right to freely exercise one's religion outside of the 4 walls of a place of worship was affirmed by the Texas legislature. It's unfortunate that it had to be affirmed at all, but in today's church-and-state climate, it's necessary.

The House embraced legislation Monday that seeks to clarify the rights of Texas public school students to offer public prayers at football games or graduation, hand out religious messages or hold religious meetings during the school day if they want.

Supporters said the Schoolchildren's Religious Liberties Act, which passed on a 110-33 vote, would protect districts from lawsuits by setting guidelines for students' religious expression while protecting students from being admonished, for example, if they talk about Jesus in an assignment about Easter.

You can't keep people insulated from each other, and this bill takes the common sense step of acknowledging that.

"Freedom of religion should not be taken as freedom from religion," Gov. Rick Perry said. "This was a vote for tolerance of diverse views in our education system so that students are not admonished for wishing a soldier overseas a 'Merry Christmas' or for any other harmless forms of expression."

Precisely. The "diversity" crowd is the very group trying to remove diversity in the public square.

The bill has its opponents, who, as usual, use exaggerated language when describing religious speech.

"The intent of this bill is to enable people to impose their religious beliefs on people, and I stand four-square against that," said Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, who is a Quaker.

"I was one of those students of a minority religion who was frequently subjected to unwanted ... advice and insults when I was in the public schools. I do not believe the intent of the author [to avoid lawsuits]. I believe the intent of the author is to facilitate imposing certain religious values on students regardless of their religious faith."

Sorry, but freedom from getting unwanted advice is not in the US Constitution. Those who insult you because of your faith should be punished by their parents or, for adults, marginalized, but it's still not a legal issue, and it doesn't mean that because some kids were mean to you in school that now all kids must be silenced on religious issues. Bathwater, meet baby.

And rather than dream up your own view of what the bill's author intended, let's just ask him.

Author Charlie Howard, R-Sugar Land, said repeatedly that the bill "does not allow anything that isn't in the current law."

What the bill does is specify that "a school district shall treat a student's voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint, if any, on an otherwise permissible subject in the same manner the district treats a student's voluntary expression of a secular or other viewpoint" as long as the expression isn't obscene or vulgar and doesn't discriminate against homosexuals or religious beliefs.

Further, the bill says students may not be penalized for expressing religious views in classwork, and they may organize religious meetings and use school facilities like any noncurricular group.

Not sure why homosexuality was specifically singled out, but this is a good step in the right direction.

Plano ISD has been at the center of this debate since 2003, when school officials told a student he could not hand out candy cane pens with a religious message during a holiday party.

Rep. Burnam can hand-wring all he wants about how hearing religious speech is somehow imposing values onto him (is he that impressionable?), but if we can't give away pens in the name of religious freedom, things really are upside down.

Posted by Doug at 12:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 24, 2007

The Rising Tide Works as Documented

It raises all boats, including, and especially, the poorest. (Via Captain Ed, because I don't have a WSJ subscription.)

It's been a rough week for John Edwards, and now comes more bad news for his "two Americas" campaign theme. A new study by the Congressional Budget Office says the poor have been getting less poor. On average, CBO found that low-wage households with children had incomes after inflation that were more than one-third higher in 2005 than in 1991.

The CBO results don't fit the prevailing media stereotype of the U.S. economy as a richer take all affair -- which may explain why you haven't read about them. Among all families with children, the poorest fifth had the fastest overall earnings growth over the 15 years measured. (See the nearby chart.) The poorest even had higher earnings growth than the richest 20%. The earnings of these poor households are about 80% higher today than in the early 1990s.

A vibrant economy for all is a better long-term solution. Government taking a smaller percentage of peoples' earnings give the poor more to spend and encourages investment by the rich which creates jobs. When government doesn't encourage welfare, the poor, indeed, work, which is inherently better.

What happened? CBO says the main causes of this low-income earnings surge have been a combination of welfare reform, expansion of the earned income tax credit and wage gains from a tight labor market, especially in the late stages of the 1990s expansion. Though cash welfare fell as a share of overall income (which includes government benefits), earnings from work climbed sharply as the 1996 welfare reform pushed at least one family breadwinner into the job market.

Earnings growth tapered off as the economy slowed in the early part of this decade, but earnings for low-income families have still nearly doubled in the years since welfare reform became law. Some two million welfare mothers have left the dole for jobs since the mid-1990s. Far from being a disaster for the poor, as most on the left claimed when it was debated, welfare reform has proven to be a boon.

Far from throwing families out on the streets, welfare reform encouraged work. The work was there because the richer folks had money to start businesses or invest in them. The moral advantage of work over hand-outs should be self-evident. That doesn't mean there should be no hand-outs, but policies that give families little incentive to work do not help them in the long run, no matter how it makes the policy makers feel in the short run.

More stats are discussed by the Captain.

Posted by Doug at 12:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 21, 2007

A Dictator in All but Title

Hugo Chavez isn't officially "President For Life", but the permission he has for ruling outside Venezuela's legislative body and his crackdown on dissent shows he's acting like one.

Tens of thousands of protesters on Saturday denounced President Hugo Chavez's plans to close an opposition television channel, accusing their leader of maiming Venezuelan democracy as he forges a socialist state.

Chavez says RCTV, the country's oldest private broadcaster, supported a bungled coup against him in 2002. He has had a long-running battle with opposition television stations, calling them "horsemen of the apocalypse."

"Let us defend democracy, let us defend freedom, let us defend free independent media such as RCTV," RCTV's managing director, Marcel Garnier, told demonstrators in Caracas.

The majority that voted him in is now getting a taste of what real dictatorship is like. Buyer's remorse is setting in.

Chavez, re-elected by a landslide last year, still enjoys support of about 60 percent of the public on the back of massive social spending. But a leading pollster has also found a majority of Venezuelans oppose the closure of RCTV.

Datanalisis found almost 70 percent of Venezuelans would rather RCTV kept broadcasting, but worried more about the loss of their favorite soap operas than free speech.

RCTV has been showing a nostalgic collection of clips from comedies, soap operas and Christmas specials that have been part of life in the Caribbean country since it started transmission in 1953.

"It is like losing a close relative," said Renaldo Gonzalez, a student at the protest, whose family members have worked at RCTV as actors, producers and directors.

Do Venezuelan's really aspire to be like Cuba? It's a few steps backward. Hopefully, this will wake up the populace, even if their concept of free speech comes mostly from which entertainment shows are available.

Posted by Doug at 10:14 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 17, 2007

Mental Torture in George Bush's America

The BBC reports on claims that we're mentally torturing inmates at Gitmo.

US detainee 'mentally tortured'

A Pakistani-born US resident detained at Guantanamo Bay has said he was "mentally tortured" there, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon.

Majid Khan, who has been accused of planning to blow up petrol stations in the US, also described how he tried to commit suicide by chewing on an artery.

After tales of how Mr. Kahn denies being an enemy, the last 3 paragraphs of the story described this awful "mental torture".

Mr Khan complained about how US guards had taken away pictures of his daughter, given him new glasses with the wrong prescription, shaved his beard off, forcibly fed him when he went on hunger strike, and denied him the opportunity for recreation.

This led him to attempt to chew through his artery twice, Mr Khan said.

Later, Mr Khan produced a list of further examples of psychological torture, which included the provision of "cheap, branded, unscented soap", the prison newsletter, noisy fans and half-inflated balls in the recreation room that "hardly bounce".

Oh, the ever-luvin' humanity. And this is what passes for "news" from the BBC. You can't just scan the headlines at the BBC; they may say the exact opposite of the truth. No mention in the headline that this was just a "claim" of mental torture.

And is this really newsworthy; a guy at Gitmo proclaiming his innocence while claiming that cheap soap and noisy fans are mental torture? It is to the BBC, apparently. Wild claims of torture where there is none are featured on their "Americas" front page. It has about as much validity as the latest UFO conspiracy theory, but that doesn't make the front page.

It's still all about the narrative.

Posted by Doug at 02:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Global Warming...on Neptune

The World Climate Report blog notes a report about the warming temperatures on Neptune, and how closely they correlate with Earth's changes.

Neptune is the planet farthest from the Sun (Pluto is now considered only a dwarf planet), Neptune is the planet farthest from the Earth, and to our knowledge, there has been absolutely no industrialization out at Neptune in recent centuries. There has been no recent build-up of greenhouse gases there, no deforestation, no rapid urbanization, no increase in contrails from jet airplanes, and no increase in ozone in the low atmosphere; recent changes at Neptune could never be blamed on any human influence. Incredibly, an article has appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters showing a stunning relationship between the solar output, Neptune’s brightness, and heaven forbid, the temperature of the Earth.

Click on the link to find graphs of how changes in Neptune's temperature, Earth's temperature, and the Sun's output are strangely similar; about a 90% correlation.

Posted by Doug at 02:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 15, 2007

Jerry Falwell Dead

Jerry Falwell has died at the age of 73. Love him or hate him, he did have a huge impact on US politics; US News named him one of the 25 most influential people in America in 1983.

Put a person in front of a camera long enough, and you're sure to get fodder for plenty of Saturday Night Live skits. Falwell was certainly no exception to that, and did his share of apologizing for comments he made. Little is typically noted about what he did that didn't cause a stir--schools, homes for unwed mothers, a home for alcoholics--but those weren't headline-grabbing.

Falwell's fumbles were sometimes notable, sometimes infamous (the Tinky-Winky incident, and where he placed blame for 9/11, for examples), but he did get many conservative Christians out of the closet, so to speak, and get them involved in politics.

He was the go-to guy for many media networks whenever a Christian perspective was needed, giving the impression of a monolithic interest group that all thought like him. That's more a reflection on lazy journalists than it is on Falwell, but he handled them with aplomb, virtually always with a smile.

(And now that he's gone, what'll the MSM do for "Christian reaction"? Pat Robertson, clear your calendar. >shudder<)

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May 14, 2007

An Inconvenient Debate

While some schools are showing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" without rebuttal, a university class is demonstrating that perhaps the global warming alarmists can't handle balance.

Nick Shipley, an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University freshman, had just spent a week of classes watching two films with polar-opposite conclusions about global warming.

"After watching 'An Inconvenient Truth,' I was relatively convinced," Shipley said one day last month in class. "(Al Gore) did a good job in presenting his points very methodically one after the other. They all build up to essentially prove his point.

"After watching 'The Great Global Warming Swindle,' my thinking completely changed," he said. "I kind of did a complete flip-flop."

It appears that the reason we have more global warming alarmists, especially on college campuses, is that the liberal activists and media are simply not...well....fair and balanced.

To be fair, both sides do their share of exaggeration, but both sides should still be allowed evaluation.

[James] Wanliss [space physicist who teaches the class] said he doesn't necessarily subscribe to either film, but believes his students -- and the public -- should remain skeptical of theories such as Gore's explanation of global warming.

Other Embry-Riddle scientists are less outspoken than Wanliss, but one -- John Olivero, professor and chairman of the department of physical science -- allowed that skepticism is an essential tool of the scientific method.

"Science lives with internal conflict all the time," Olivero said. "Part of what we have to do is continually challenge each other."

That process, they say, leads scientists closer to truths that may be elusive for lifetimes.

The truths of global warming are, if not inconvenient, incomprehensible, Wanliss argues.

"The atmosphere is incredibly complicated, and we know very little about it," he said. "We are studying a system which is so big . . . we don't know what all the variables are."

Pointing to quotes in magazine articles, Wanliss says Gore and the producers of the "Swindle" film are purposefully overstating their science as a means to a political end.

And yet the Left talks of their foes in Holocaust-denial terms. The stifling of dissent in Al Gore's America.

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May 11, 2007

The Blame Game, CBS Edition

Why are Katie Couric's ratings in the tank? Linda Mason, CBS News' Senior Vice President for Standards and Special Projects has a thought during this interview.

Linda Mason: I'm just surprised at how, almost 30 years after I worked on the "Evening News" as the first woman producer, that Katie is having such a tough time being accepted by the public, which seems to prefer the news from white guys, and now that Charlie's doing so well, from older white guys. I guess they want the reassurance of a Walter Cronkite.

So why, then, has CBS been in 3rd place since the mid 90s? Couric didn't start that trend. Neither did she start the trend of a ratings dive. That's been going on for at least a quarter century.

So blame the viewers. Suggest sexism and racism. Keeps you from having to answer the hard questions.

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Newsworthy. Or Not.

With a hat tip to Clayton Cramer, a not-so-hypothetical question. If 3 retired generals (out of several thousand) come out against the war, and if almost 3,000 active-duty military come out asking for full support and full funding and don't want to retreat, are both these items newsworthy?

If you said Yes to the first part and No to the second part, you too could work for CNN or just about any other mainstream media outlet. (Except Fox News, of course. They covered both news items.) As of this posting, two days after the presentation to Congress, CNN has no mention at all of the "Appeal for Courage". Were it not for blog coverage, this might well have been swept under the rug by a media for whom this doesn't fit the narrative.

As John Hinderaker notes at Power Line, this is sort of a lab experiment. And the media failed, as is their habit.

Click here for more details on this petition.

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"Public School? Aren't You Worried About Socialization?"

That's the bumper sticker that Linda Whitlock used to have on her car. She's got a great article on the socialization of homeschool kids, including her grandchildren. OK, she may have a conflict of interest, but she still makes great points.

Posted by Doug at 09:35 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 09, 2007

Pope Warns Catholic Politicians Who Back Abortion

In no uncertain terms.

Pope Benedict on Wednesday warned Catholic politicians they risked excommunication from the Church and should not receive communion if they support abortion.

It was the first time that the Pope, speaking to reporters aboard the plane taking him on a trip to Brazil, dealt in depth with a controversial topic that has come up in many countries, including the United States, Mexico, and Italy.

The Pope was asked whether he supported Mexican Church leaders threatening to excommunicate leftist parliamentarians who last month voted to legalize abortion in Mexico City.

"Yes, this excommunication was not an arbitrary one but is allowed by Canon (church) law which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving communion, which is receiving the body of Christ," he said.

"They (Mexican Church leaders) did nothing new, surprising or arbitrary. They simply announced publicly what is contained in the law of the Church... which expresses our appreciation for life and that human individuality, human personality is present from the first moment (of life)".

And he took on the motivations of those who pass pro-abortion legislation.

"Selfishness and fear are at the root of (pro-abortion) legislation," he said. "We in the Church have a great struggle to defend life...life is a gift not a threat."

Well said.

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"Under God" Gains Ground in Texas

Michael Newdow must be having a conniption.

The Texas House voted early Friday to inject a little religion into the Texas pledge.

House lawmakers voted 124-5 to put the words "under God" in the Texas pledge of allegiance recited by thousands of school children every day. The change mirrors the national pledge, which has included "under God" since 1954.

Under the bill, the Texas pledge would be: "Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God and indivisible."

The bill still needs a final vote later Friday before it is sent to the Senate.

The bill overwhelmingly passed in the Texas State House, and doesn't appear to have much opposition in the State Senate.

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May 08, 2007

Santorum Validated

Time magazine reminds us of a little history.

When the Supreme Court struck down Texas's law against sodomy in the summer of 2003, in the landmark gay rights case of Lawrence v. Texas, critics warned that its sweeping support of a powerful doctrine of privacy could lead to challenges of state laws that forbade such things as gay marriage and bigamy. "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are ... called into question by today's decision," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, in a withering dissent he read aloud page by page from the bench.

Rick Santorum was one of those critics.

"If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual sex within your home," Santorum said at the time, "then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."

As [Boston Globe columnist Jeff] Jacoby noted, Santorum was given "holy hell" and handed "nail-spitting" by some critics.

Where are the folks now who gave conservatives such a hard time? Given what Time is reporting, they're probably being very, very quiet.

It turns out the critics were right. Plaintiffs have made the decision the centerpiece of attempts to defeat state bans on the sale of sex toys in Alabama, polygamy in Utah and adoptions by gay couples in Florida. So far the challenges have been unsuccessful. But plaintiffs are still trying, even using Lawrence to challenge laws against incest.

The key phrase is "so far". I'm glad to hear that lower courts are now expanding the Lawrence decision, but these attempts at overturning state laws (joined by the ACLU, unsurprisingly) are unprecedented, and the outcome is by no means assured.

The issue does not appear to have been challenged in federal court previously, though the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2005 that a Wisconsin law forbidding incest among blood relations (but not including step-relations) did not conflict with Lawrence's ruling. But in upholding prison sentences for a brother-sister couple in that case, the court acknowledged that the language in Lawrence is all but certain to prompt more challenges to prosecutions for sex-related crimes on privacy grounds.

Hey there, liberals. Pandora left this box for you. Enjoy.

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May 07, 2007

Environmentalist Roundup

Found a number of interesting articles regarding some of the radical environmentalist mentality, although the "radical" adjective is becoming less and less applicable, soon to be replaced by "mainstream", methinks.

Paul Watson, one of the founders of Greenpeace and now founder and president of "Sea Shepherd Conservation Society", says that humans are a virus (the "AIDS of the Earth"), and that we should reduce the earth's population by 83%. Watson may have broken away from Greenpeace because they weren't radical enough, but Wikipedia notes some high-profile supporters, some adored by the Left.

Sea Shepherd has many critics, but also many outspoken supporters including actors Richard Dean Anderson, Pierce Brosnan, Martin Sheen, Sean Penn, and William Shatner, environmental activists Dave Foreman and Farley Mowat, and the late writer Edward Abbey. Corporate sponsors include John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patagonia.

Sean Penn is often held in high regard with respect to his Iraq war sentiments, and he's in the company of others not typically considered fringe. (I'll still watch "Stargate SG-1" until the upcoming end of the series, in spite of Anderson's name being on this list.)

In a similar vein, the "Optimum Population Trust" (Wikipedia entry) says that having more babies is a bad thing, at least with respect to carbon dioxide output. Well, at least here's one left-wing organization that can say without a hint of irony, "Don't have children, for the sake of the children." The article notes that the developed world isn't really the problem; it's the developing countries (who probably won't read the report) that he has issues with.

The population of developed nations is expected to remain unchanged and would have declined but for migration.

The British fertility rate is 1.7. The EU average is 1.5.

(As an asidee, this really proves Mark Stein's point when he says that the Arab/Muslim world could install a Caliphate without firing a shot, by simply migrating and reproducing, since the Western world isn't.)

What I find ironic is that the Left, where you often find imagery of back-alley abortions to buttres their points, is likly encouraging another back-alley practice.

China faces a looming baby boom as newly-rich couples find they can afford to pay fines incurred from having more than one child.
...
[G]rowing numbers of pregnant women are risking their own lives and those of their children by seeking back-alley deliveries to avoid fines for having more than one child, Xinhua quoted vice health minister Jiang Zuojun as saying.

Back-alley procedures are bad if more babies are saved overall, but they're acceptable if they save the atmosphere. I'd rather that people didn't choose either of these dangers, but look at the priorities on display. Someone's holding a magnet to these folks' moral compasses.

And then, appealing to our spirituality, Al Gore holds an evangelistic meeting.

"It's in part a spiritual crisis," Gore told the crowd in the Convention Center at the American Institute of Architects national convention. "It's a crisis of our own self-definition — who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not."

I will agree that poor stewardship can be a spiritual issue, but I see some problems with the connection he's trying to make. First, self-definition is circular, and from my religious point of view Someone Else does the defining. Secondly, in spite of evidence to the contrary, Gore continues to preach about that global warming / hurricane connection that the climatologists say doesn't exist.

These looming problems involve flooding and severe coastal erosion from rising seas and increasingly severe storms, more common and prolonged drought, and changes in the growing seasons and migration patterns of many wild species.

He's got his own crisis to deal with. He shouldn't bring in a generic religious message for pandering purposes.

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May 04, 2007

MSNBC: Fair and Balanced?

From watching the Republican debate, Mark Kilmer at Redstate notes some nuttiness on the part of the host.

Chris Matthews was moderating, and he used his forum to blast the Bush Administration in front of a group of Republicans who needed to keep their distance from that Administration. (NOTE: It was the same with Clinton (Bill) when he left office with half the contents of the White House in tow.) He asked Jim Gilmore if President Bush should shakeup his Administration. It's not a question for a Presidential candidate, one who would serve after the Bush Administration had left town, but it was part of Matthews' prank. He later asked Gilmore if he would keep Karl Rove in his Administration.

Is this the kind of shenanigans that Democrats allege would happen on Fox News, and why some of them decided to opt out? Fox-sponsored debates have had, as other debates have had, multiple questioners asking their own questions, and not just questioners from Fox. This one, however, essentially was a platform for Matthews to get in his digs. If MSNBC ever hosts a Democratic debate, it's a safe bet that none of them will opt out. It's not, by any means, a complaint about bias. It's simply that Fox doesn't drink the KoolAid (tm) that apparently MSNBC has a fridge full of.

But we're Republicans. We can take it. >grin<

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May 03, 2007

ABC to Webcast Christian/Atheist Debate

Kudos to ABC for webcasting a debate between 2 Christians and 2 atheists this coming Wednesday. It won't be on network TV, but will be on their website live. Speaking for the Christian side will be Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron (yes, that Kirk Cameron).

Two Christians are meeting two atheists in a televised debate with the subject the existence of God, and Ray Comfort, a best-selling author and expert on Christian evangelism, says he can prove the existence of the Almighty in his allotted 13 minutes – without mentioning the Bible or faith.

"The network originally offered me only four minutes to present my case," Comfort said. "After speaking with Kirk [Cameron, former Growing Pains and Left Behind series movie star] and conferring with the atheists, they settled on 13 minutes. I'm ecstatic. I can prove the existence of God in that amount of time."

The debate will be Saturday in New York, and ABC had originally planned a live webcast of the 90-minute event, but changed plans to capture a larger audience, officials said.

ABC instead will broadcast the entire debate on ABC.com on May 9, at 1 p.m. EST.

The old adage goes that no one was ever argued into heaven, but some are at least influenced by reasoning. I'm not really concerned about what the atheists might say.

The idea for the debate developed after several atheists launched the Internet site Blasphemy Challenge, which offers to send people a DVD if they post on Youtube.com a video of themselves condemning themselves to hell.

The self-described "Rational Response Squad" said its DVDs, "The God Who Wasn't There," was described by the Los Angeles Times as "provocative – to put it mildly."

These guys have some sort of special vendetta against Christianity specifically, and their MO is shock. No, not worried about what these guys will come up with.

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May 01, 2007

How Did They Survive Before?

Muslim cabbies refusing to service customers who have alcohol or a dog, even a guide dog. Muslim cashiers refuse to scan pork products. Now, they're asking for, and getting, special ceremonial foot basins to wash their feet just prior to their prayer time.

How did these folks survive 20th century America? Or is this, as the first link asks, a battle of the vision for the Muslim religion? And are the radicals winning?

Posted by Doug at 02:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 27, 2007

Coretta Scott King Memorialized in Israel

Now here's a very fitting memorial to Coretta Scott King.

Israel will name a forest in northern Galilee after Coretta Scott King as the country replants thousands of trees destroyed during last year's war with Hezbollah.

The Coretta Scott King Forest, which will contain at least 10,000 trees, will be a living memorial to King's legacy of peace and justice, Israeli Ambassador Sallai Meridor said Thursday at a Washington ceremony launching the initiative.

I may not agree with points in her politics, but she and Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly deserve to be honored, and this forest--one that is being reborn after a war--seems to me to be appropriate.

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April 25, 2007

Check Your Religious Beliefs at the Door

Left-wing activists are trying to keep religious ideas from informing anyone's opinion or public behavior.

A coalition of religious leaders took on the Catholic Church, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bush administration on Tuesday with a plea to take religion out of health care in the United States.

They said last week's Supreme Court decision outlawing a certain type of abortion demonstrated that religious belief was interfering with personal rights and the U.S. health care system in general.

The group, calling itself the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, said it planned to submit its proposals to other church groups and lobby Congress and state legislators.

I think these folks would be really surprised to learn how the religious beliefs of our Founding Fathers informed their lawmaking.

And it's not just judicial opinions they're trying to censor.

The group also complained about Catholic-owned hospitals that refuse to sterilize women who ask for it, refuse to let doctors perform abortions and do not provide contraception.

"Doctors, pharmacists and nurses are also increasingly exercising a so-called 'religious or moral objection,' refusing to provide essential services and often leaving patients without other options," the group said in a statement.

They don't want religious organizations to be able to practice their religious beliefs, at least (for now) where those beliefs contact the public. Keep 'em in the closet.

As usual, a history lesson would go a long way.

"And now, to make it worse, the government is codifying these refusals, first through legislation and now with the recent Supreme Court decision, where five Catholic men decided that they could better determine what was moral and good than the physicians, women and families facing difficult, personal choices in problem pregnancies," it added.

What lovely anti-Catholic bias and sexism going on from these "tolerant" Leftists. But let's not forget that the 281 House members and 64 Senators were a combination of religions and genders, and that they were democratically elected by the people. Doesn't matter to these folks; any vote for a law that can be traced back to the beliefs of Catholic men should not be counted.

For the two-fer, we have some media bias at work here as well. As noted above, this group is initially characterized as "a coalition of religious leaders", giving it the appearance of broad support in the religious community. Not until the 11th paragraph do we get a hint of the size and makeup of the group. "The group includes ordained Protestant ministers [how many?], a Jewish activist [one], an expert on women's reproductive rights [one, and religious leader?] and several physicians [how many? religious leaders?]." The initial description of the group is charitable in the extreme, but something we've come to expect from our ever-vigilant, left-wing media.

(Hat tip: James Taranto.)

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Religious Freedom, Canadian Style

If you are requested to do something that goes against your religious beliefs, and you refuse, but you refer those who asked to someone who will, are you guilty of anything? Perhaps not here in the US, but in Canada, the same-sex marriage legislation's draconian measures consider you so.

A Canadian Christian civil marriage commissioner in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Orville Nichols, could face up to $5000 in fines for having referred a homosexual couple to a different commissioner.

Human Rights Commission lawyer Janice Gingell asked the tribunal to find that Nichols contravened the code and order him to pay $5,000 in compensation to the complainant.

The 70 year-old Mr. Nichols used a clearly religious-based conscience argument for his refusal, saying his faith guides his daily life, that he prays and reads the Bible every day. He told the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal that his faith “takes first place” in his life. He said, “I couldn't sleep or live with myself if I were to perform same-sex marriages.”

The other commissioner to whom the two men were referred performed the ceremony on the same date they requested of Mr. Nichols.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists as its first "fundamental freedom" the freedom of conscience and religion". But for those pushing this agenda, the plain language of a Charter or a Constitution is not worth the paper it's written on, and your "fundamental rights" are not recognized. Americans should take note.

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April 24, 2007

Gideons Cleared, then Re-Charged

In February, a couple of folks from the Gideons were arrested for trespassing while on a public sidewalk in front of a school handing out Bibles. A comment on my personal blog to that story noted that the trespass charges were related to the two men staying in their cars on school property after being asked to leave. Well, regardless of the actual act that was the cause of the charges, they have been dismissed by the state.

Only to be replaced with new charges.

"Following the initial motion to dismiss filed by [Alliance Defense Fund] attorneys, the state dismissed the charges but then filed new ones under a different statute," the ADF said.

"The distribution of Bibles on a public sidewalk is not a criminal offense," said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David Cortman. "The attempts by Florida officials to continue pressing for the prosecution of Mr. Mirto and Mr. Simpson is not only blatantly unconstitutional, it borders on religious persecution."

The incident developed Jan. 19, when the two men were distributing Bibles on a public sidewalk outside Key Largo School but did not step onto school grounds, the ADF said. Both men were arrested, booked, and charged with trespassing after the school's principal called police. On March 8, ADF attorneys filed a motion to dismiss and the state did dismiss those counts.

However, it filed new charges under a different law that prohibits anyone from being within 500 feet of any school property, including on public sidewalks and streets, without having either "legitimate business" or permission, the ADF said.

"The facts are clear: Mr. Mirto and Mr. Simpson are guilty of nothing more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights," Cortman said. "For whatever reason, the state is grasping at straws in order to justify the punishment of these men."

The state of Florida is now in the "untenable position of trying to justify the punishment of fundamental First Amendment activities in a quintessential traditional public forum," the law firm said. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedents over the last century, that is a "blatant violation of their constitutional rights."

The school disputes that they were on a public sidewalk, saying that they were in fact on school property, but one imagines that if that were so then the initial charges would have stuck.

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April 23, 2007

From the Heart

Our pastor's sermon this week, as I imagine for many pastors, was regarding the Virginia Tech massacre. A one-sentence summary I'd use to describe it (that doesn't do it justice) is "The problem with evil in the world is that it exists and is active, and this is a wake-up call to the church." I want to touch on these two points, and riff off Mark's earlier post. (UPDATE: Audio for the message can be downloaded here.)

What I read Mark as saying is that society wasn't asking the right questions about what really is affecting our youth. There are surface issues that, I believe, are just symptoms, not the causes, that Mark touched on; video games, movies, meds, etc. But in his post was an assumption he makes that I don't think society accepts, at least not like it used to. And without that assumption, even his list of real issues can't be addressed until this one is.

Chuck Colson, in a recent Breakpoint podcast, noted that in at least one society, we can't even agree on this base assumption.

I witnessed an extreme example of this therapeutic thinking during a visit to a Norwegian prison years ago. Throughout the tour, officials bragged about employing the most humane and progressive treatment methods anywhere in the world. I met several doctors in white coats.

That prompted me to ask how many of the inmates, who were all there for serious crimes, were mentally ill. The warden replied, "Oh, all of them." I must have looked surprised, because she said, "Well, of course, anyone who commits a crime this serious is obviously mentally unbalanced."

Stated differently, there is no such thing as sin and evil, and the only reason why people might commit serious crimes is that they are mentally ill. Thus, the best-and perhaps, only-response to crime is behavior modification and all of those other up-to-date psychological techniques.

The assumption I refer to is the existence of evil, and of man's predisposition to it. I know how some folks avoid church because they don't want to hear that, but without understanding the very nature of our being, how can we ever hope to properly deal with it. Here's how Jesus put it in Mark chapter 7.

He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' "

Jesus tells us that evil is primarily a spiritual issue, not primarily a psychological one. This is not to say that there are no psychological results of evil-there certainly are--and this does not absolve society, video game makers or Hollywood writers of their role in creating an environment where we marinate in and, in many cases, uphold that which is evil.

While we in American generally allow this idea to have some effect on our thinking, it has been less so during this generation. Colson notes that we're not that much different from Norway, and we, like them and anyone else, have one real way out.

While the Norwegian approach would strike most Americans as very naïve, the difference between them and us is one of degree not kind. We also blame crime on external factors, like mental illness, culture, dysfunctional childhood, and the like.

We are uncomfortable attributing events like this to human evil, much less to a kind of evil that seeks to undo God's creation-what Christians call the demonic.

Yet without this idea, events like this massacre can never be understood. We might learn that the killer was "mentally unbalanced" or on anti-depressants. But, absent evidence that he was clinically delusional, this knowledge will not explain why he walked onto a college campus, locked people in a lecture hall, and killed them

Events like this not only horrify us-they unsettle us. We think of sin and the demonic as not-so-quaint relics from a superstitious age. And even more destructive, random events like this remind us how little we know about ourselves and what we are capable of, as well. But failing to call evil evil misleads us about the world we live in and our need for God's grace, the only real answer and hope for any of us.

We cannot save the house until we save the foundation, and only God, the Master Builder, who drew up the blueprints, knows what can be done.

The families and friends of the victims of the VT shootings, and even the family and friends of the shooter, deserve the most love and grace we can give them. Our desire to help them, grieve with them, and comfort them must come from the heart. But going forward, if we ever hope to rescue our society from further events such as this, we must remember what else Jesus said comes from the heart. It is the hearts of people that need God. The psychological, emotional and physiological will follow, but not until the hearts are changed. That's the church's mission; to bring the God that can change the heart to society.

(One thing I would want to note, lest an incorrect assumption be made; I don't dismiss out of hand the science of psychology; not by any means. I believe it has an important contribution to make in understanding the human mind and how it can be helped. But, using my earlier analogy, modifying the house without understanding the foundation may, in some cases, give us relief from problems without dealing with the underlying flaws, keeping us from seeking the One who can truly help.)

Our pastor asked and answered the burning question: "How long will events like this continue to happen? As long as the church lets them." The "salt of the earth" must not hunker down in its salt shaker. As it was used in the first century, it must be rubbed, not on, but into the meat before it rots any further.

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April 19, 2007

Guns By The Numbers

Year Kennesaw, GA passed a law requiring every head of household in the town to own a handgun: 1982
Kennesaw crime rate prior to enactment: 4,332 per 100,000
National average: 3,899 per 100,000
Kennesaw crime rate today: 2,027 per 100,000
Number of residents involved in fatal shootings since enactment, as either victim, attacker or defender: 0
Population growth, 1980 to 2000: 425% (5.095 to 21,675)

Click here for more information and dire predictions about Kennesaw that never came true. More stats here, and a NY Times editorial by the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds here.

Posted by Doug at 05:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2007

Supreme Court Upholds Partial Birth Abortion Ban

Justice Anthony Kennedy voted with the majority on this one, and wrote the opinion.

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long- awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The administration defended the law as drawing a bright line between abortion and infanticide.

Finally, there is some pushback to those who love to keep blurring the line. I believe that this will help hold back those who intend to blur the line even further, beyond birth. This is a good ruling.

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April 16, 2007

Podcasting Again on Shire Network News

It's been over a year since I hosted the last Homespun Bloggers Radio, a podcast of the late, lamented blogging group Homespun Bloggers. I was also a sometimes-contributor to the show, and I'd been looking for a opportunity to do that. Hosting took some time, but I figure I could handle a weekly short commentary.

Well, turns out I'm getting the chance. One of the podcasts I listen to, Shire Network News, recently advertised for more contributors since some of theirs were having scheduling issues. I gave it a shot and sent in an audition that fit their style; right-of-center politically with humor rather than anger. Turns out they liked it and actually used it in this week's podcast, and now I'm officially an SNN contributor, joining Meryl Yourish and another new contributor, Tomer Israeli. I'm honored to have been added and I hope to hold up their standards. (Though if they'll accept me, how high can those standards be, really?)

Click here for the latest show's notes and links.

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April 13, 2007

Apologies for "Gay Marriage"

The group "Restore Marriage, Canada" is giving Canadians an opportunity to apologize for their country's legalization of "gay marriage". It starts:

To the world's leaders and people,

We, the people of Canada who support marriage solely as the union of a man and a woman, apologize to the people of the world for harm done through Canada's legalization of homosexual marriage.

We are grieved and troubled as we consider the impact this is having in weakening the fundamental institution of marriage in countries and cultures around the world. We understand that because Canada does not impose citizenship or residency requirements in order for same-sex individuals to be "married" here, couples are coming to Canada to seek legal sanction for their homosexual relationships with the intent of returning to their own countries to challenge those countries' legal definition of marriage.

Posted by Doug at 01:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2007

Diabetics Cured with Stem Cells. But What Kind?

An amazing medical breakthrough reported in the London Times today. In a small trial of patients, 13 of 15 diabetics given injections of stem cells did not need daily insulin injection 3 years after the treatment. Truly remarkable.

Now, there are 2 types of stem cells; adult and embryonic. What kind were these. The articles doesn't say specifically, but it leaves it to the reader to deduce that.

In a breakthrough trial, 15 young patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes were given drugs to suppress their immune systems followed by transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood.

Unless we're talking about fetal diabetics, the stem cells must be adult ones. Chalk up another win for stem cells that lack any ethical issues.

But note that the writer is more than happy to bring up the other type of stem cells specifically.

Previous studies have suggested that stem-cell therapies offer huge potential to treat a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease. A study by British scientists in November also reported that stem-cell injections could repair organ damage in heart attack victims.

But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

By positioning these two paragraphs this way, the writer begs the reader to make the connection between this breakthrough and Bush's refusal to have the feds fund embryonic stem cell research. Even the linked article about heart attack victims won't use the word "adult" when talking about the stem cells.

What's worse, blatant media bias like this really works. Just read the comment section at the end (which I believe is in reverse chronological order) to find those who are against Bush's position but fail to realize the distinction.

Interesting that a major medical breakthrough, promising hope to millions of Type 1 diabetics and their families gets overshadowed by a debate on morality....

...

If you've had to stick a needle into your 11 year old twice/thrice daily would you object to stem cell research?
Get real this is the 21C. Blair n' Bush should spend the war money on this research!

Kids want fun/childhood, not adult ethics.

...

How sanctimonius some of the opinions on this discussion are. My brother and I have type 1 diabetes. I really don't care what type of stem cells are used if it finds a cure for this disease. Do you really equate a bunch of cells with an actual child or adult life? Is that serious? You would condemn people like me & my brother and countless others to living with this disease for ever because you believe that embryos are so important. That isn't moraility, its drivel.

And one fellow seems to think that if the government doesn't pay for it, it doesn't get anything.

You use your religious beliefs to prevent my tax dollars from funding embryonic stem cell research. Only adult stem cell research is funded, so only adult stem cell cures are produced. Then, you use the success of some adult stem cell research to deny the value of embryonic stem cells? What kind of twisted circular logic is that? Of course there aren't embryonic stem cell treatments if the research isn't funded.

All victims of media reporting.

Finally, one commenter makes a great point. Follow the money.

Let's not forget one of the biggest reasons that pharmas want to use embryonic stem cells. Money. If they use stem cells that come from a source other than a bonafide "Person", they can patent it and make lots of money from the treatment. You cannot patent adult stem cells as they come from and belong to a particular individual.

Posted by Doug at 01:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

Washington, DC

Our Spring Break jaunt this year was to the nation's capitol. I hadn't toured there since I was around 10, so it was high time I went back, this time with my own kiddos. I'm not going to give a full travelogue here (that tome will go out to family), but here are some thoughts.

Point #1: Bring a bike. DC is rather bike-friendly, and the National Mall is a longer walk than it looks. There is a place right downtown to rent some, but bring what you can. You can cover a lot of ground that way.

The first thing we did was a bike tour (free, as are many things in DC) run by the National Parks Service. It hit many spots in DC but I had no idea how much into DC we'd be. I have pictures of us biking down the middle of Pennsylvania Ave. with the Rangers leading the way. Not down the sidewalk; down the center lane. That by itself was cool (though I kept a good eye on the kiddos with me). There were enough stops along the way to rest my 40-something legs, so it wasn't a killer. They like to theme the tour with a "This Week in History" feel, and the week we went was the week World War 1 started, so at each stop there were talks about how this monument or that feature related back to the war, the run-up to it, the culture of the time and/or how events of the period affected the DC landscape. It went from the Jefferson Memorial, down and back up that peninsula, to the Capitol, to the Pershing Memorial (directly related to WW1 of course) and over to the White House, where we broke away from it to rejoin those of the family doing their own thing on foot. (With 6 in the family, you can only carry so many bikes.) A good learning experience and a good workout.

We hit all the usual spots during the week; the monuments along the Mall, the Smithsonian museums, Ford's Theater, the National Archives, Arlington National Cemetery. The Cherry Blossom Festival had just started, and the trees bloomed on cue. Unfortunately, this brings crowds, and while the National Parks Service has a nice Tourmobile bus service for a reasonable price, our use of it was marred by long lines and slow traffic. Again, bikes are your friend.

Point #2: Staying in a hotel close to DC can be worth the money. I was looking at some hotel web sites for places under $100, but everything was way outside the beltway. The Metro Rail is nice, but we'd have had to drive to the farthest out station first, taking lots of time out of our day. Hotwire.com saved the day, and I've become a big fan. For the same price as the Super 8, we stayed near the Reagan National Airport for a couple of days, and then splurged to stay downtown for a couple more. (Nice to just walk 4 block to the Mall.) Now, I said it can be worth the money because there are some things you'd probably get at the Super 8 for free that you either can't get or cost extra at the nicer hotels. Like Internet access ($10 per day), free simple breakfast, microwave ($25), fridge ($25), coffee maker in the room (1 of our hotels didn't have that) and even park (around $25 per day). Now, this may not been news to those who've stayed at these spots before, but this was my first real experience with it, so it was news to me. Fortunately, we brought a cooler with lots of food, and Pizza Hut delivers to the lobby. (Where else in DC can you feed 6 for $20?) A pool the size of my office cubicle was OK...once enough people left to allow us to go in. I understand that we're probably not the target market, but they could do just a bit more to fill those empty rooms and do just a little more to make it family friendly. So yes, it can be worth the money for the location, if you understand the amenity situation.

Point #3: Spend the time. There were a number of things we'd hoped to do but just didn't have time to do after doing the things we did do. DC is big in the two senses that there's so much to do, and that everything is so...big. The monuments are, of course, generally done on a grand scale, but when you go to the Smithsonian museums, there's so much in there. We spend Sunday afternoon through Wednesday, and really just hit the highlights. Maybe this point is better expressed "Spend the time well". Don't try to do a little bit of everything; do some things well and leave the rest for perhaps another visit.

We had a great time. Learned some history, some science, and got to see those things you see only on TV or the back of your money. I highly recommend a visit there some day if you've never gone.

Posted by Doug at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 27, 2007

"The Other Iraq"

Recently on the Public Radio program Open Source, Christopher Lydon did a show on Iraqi Kurdistan, or, as it's PR campaign calls it, "the other Iraq". You can listen to the show and read the show notes here on Radio Open Source. He interviewed Qubad Talabani, Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Representative to the United States and son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, KRG Representative to the United Kingdom, and Peter Galbraith, former (and first) Ambassador to Croatia under Clinton, Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control, and Non-Proliferation Advisor to the KRG.

For some, it may be an eye-opening program. From the discussion of how Americans were indeed greeted as liberators, to the economic prosperity, to the lack of sectarian violence among the Sunni, Shia and Christian Kurds, this program should give pause to those saying we should get out of Iraq ASAP. In fact, both the Kurdish guests warned against a withdrawal too early. (Ambassador Galbraith, predictably, disagreed. More on that in a moment.)

The program was quite a departure from Lydon's show's usual fare. As is typical for public radio, the slate of guests is often slanted liberal, and many time 100% so. Lydon calls his show a "conversation", but it usually is a monologue from the Left. To have a program extolling the good things that have come from the war (even if the host can't bring himself to agree, insinuating that some of the responses sounded like "fantasy") is equal time that has been sorely missing from the media at large. Kudos to Lydon and the PRI folks for finally, if really belatedly, bringing the news.

The cognitive dissonance was deafening when Peter Galbraith did disagree at the end of the show with the idea of staying in Iraq. Here were the very people he's working to help asking for our continued help, and all he can do is shill for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid (by name) and say that, as she does, we need to get out of there because the Iraqi experiment has failed.

I'd ask him, and anyone else who said that the war in Iraq was and is a failure; what do you say to the Kurds? Were they and all other Iraqis not worth the effort to get rid of Hussein and his terror supporting and practicing regime? Just because some may not be handling freedom as well as we'd hoped, should we have left them all to the designs of the Ba'athists? If you blame the US for the violence in the south, are you prepared to credit the US for the peace and prosperity in the north?

Posted by Doug at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 23, 2007

Abstinence Considered Offensive, University Surrenders

Welcome to the age where encouraging abstinence until marriage is considered offensive. OK, truth be told, we've been in this age for quite some time now, except that the sentiment wasn't quite as outspoken. Now that abstinence groups are being formed in places like Harvard and MIT, however, the ridicule is boiling over.

This article talks about the new group at Harvard, secular in nature, that is trying to promote abstinence on campus. Seniors Sarah Kinsella and Justin Murray started "True Love Revolution" in response to all the other overt encouragment of sex on campus, and to the white flag waved by the administration. In response, those oh-so-tolerant folks on the Left are outraged.

Some feminists, in particular, have criticized True Love Revolution's message.

Harvard student Rebecca Singh said she was offended by a valentine the group sent to the dormitory mailboxes of all freshmen. It read: "Why wait? Because you're worth it."

"I think they thought that we might not be `ruined' yet," Singh said. "It's a symptom of that culture we have that values a woman on her purity. It's a relic."

Yeah, who needs self-control, eh?

A little common sense, however, is seeing the light of day.

In the student paper, The Harvard Crimson, columnist Jessica C. Coggins praised the group's low-key approach and scolded Harvard students for their "laughter at the virgin." She said students on the campus, which has 6,700 undergraduates, should "find a different confidence booster than making fun of celibate peers."

As usual, the administration gets it wrong.

Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard health services, disputed the notion that the university promotes sex.

He said students mistakenly think everyone on campus is having sex. The National College Health Assessment Survey, which included Harvard and hundreds of other campuses, found that about 29 percent of students reported not having sex in the past school year. For the 71 percent who are having sex, it is crucial to promote safety, Rosenthal said.

"Some students may have a feeling that acknowledgment is condoning," he said, "and it's not."

But it's not just "acknowledgement", as noted earlier in the article.

True Love Revolution members say the problem starts with the university. They say Harvard has implicitly led students to believe that having sex at college is a foregone conclusion by requiring incoming freshman to attend a seminar on date-rape that does not mention abstinence, by placing condoms in freshmen dorms, and by hosting racy lecturers. (Harvard students have also launched H-Bomb, a magazine featuring racy photos of undergraduates.)

Acknowledging is one thing. But this is encouraging. When you remove the consequences of bad decisions, you get more bad decisions. Shouldn't take a university degree to understand that.

Posted by Doug at 02:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2007

Public Schools Teaching Student to Lie to Parents

When the public school system starts forcing kids to lie to their parents about what they're being taught, you know it's time to homeschool.

And when what they're being taught is homosexual sensitivity training, you have to wonder why they feel they can't be open and honest about it. Yeah, I know the presumed reason; that parent might object. But if parents are not allowed any say as to their children's education, it's no longer public education anymore, is it? It's state education. (And I really hope this school district doesn't ever complain about not enough parental involvement.)

Click here for a link to audio from Concerned Women for America, and click here for the WND news story.

Posted by Doug at 02:15 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

German Homeschool Family Update

It's only getting worse.

A German appeals court has not only affirmed a lower court's decision that ripped a 15-year-old homeschooler from her family and subjected her to a forced stay in a psychiatric hospital because she is homeschooled, but also ordered her parents to be given psychiatric evaluations, an international rights organization says.

The government psychologists, who had previously diagnosed Melissa Busekros with "schoolphobia", would now get a shot at labelling the parents. What's more, the court ignored the fact that the parents have been willing to accept a government compromise.

The appeals court ruling came despite the fact that all three of the lawyers representing Melissa Busekros clearly stated in their request to the court the family had accepted a compromise offered by a lower court for her to return home under government supervision.

"In spite of [that] … the appeals court held that the family refused the court's initial compromise to let Melissa become an outpatient," Thornton said.

Read the whole thing for details, and to get caught up if you hadn't seen this before.

Posted by Doug at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 12, 2007

Democrats Throw Another Tantrum

Of all the childish tantrums and manufactured outrage that have come from the Democrats, this has surely got to be near the top. First it was John Edwards, then the Nevada State Democratic Party pulled out completely from the debate they themselves set up to be hosted by Fox News. The far left essentially owns the Democrats now, as it was pressure from the like of MoveOn.org that nixed the debate.

Not content with the charge that Fox leans right (which I'll grant, but what are CNN and the NY Times; centrist?), they had to make up a reason that might actually carry some weight with the folks who do watch Fox. The supposed reason that "proved" Fox was a right-wing shill were comments by Roger Ailes.

But [state party chair Tom] Collins and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid wrote that comments on Thursday by FOX News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, when he jokingly compared Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, to Osama bin Laden, "went too far," and prompted Nevada Democrats to end the partnership.

"We cannot, as good Democrats, put our party in a position to defend such comments," the letter said. "In light of his comments, we have concluded that it is not possible to hold a presidential debate that will focus on our candidates and are therefore cancelling our August debate. We take no pleasure in this, but it is the only course of action."

And what was this awful comment, comparing Barak Obama to a terrorist?

And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'

For cryin' out loud, this is a joke about George W. Bush! See here for the entire transcript so you can see it in context. If they're going to boycott Fox for that kind of a remark, are they going to boycott Leno and Letterman for the very same jokes? For the state party leader and the Senate Majority Leader to engage in such blatant partisan lying says a lot about their party and a lot more about those who are fooled by such rhetoric.

And we're not done with the lies. On the John Edwards site, on the page trying to drum up campaign money over this manufactured controversy (hmm, maybe this was the whole idea in the first place), his headline is "Fox Attacks". In it, Edwards castigates Ailes for putting forth the perfectly reasonable idea that this sets a bad precedent.

Fox has already started striking backat John for saying no. (There's a surprise - Fox attacking a Democrat.) Last night, Roger Ailes - the life-long Republican operative who is now Chairman of Fox News Channel - said that any candidate "who believes he can blacklist any news organization is making a terrible mistake" and "is impeding freedom of speech and free press."

The Left is so ready to yell "McCarthyism!" and "the stifling of dissent!" if their ideas don't get the publicity they want, and yet here they are dismissing what is a very reasonable concern about McCarthy-like tests for news organizations to pass if they'll be allowed to air Democrats. The irony is that they're trying to accuse Fox of not covering Democrats while ensuring that they can't. What kind of tortured logic is that?

One more thing: the article is called "Fox Attacks" and there is an accompanying graphic, a screenshot of a website. The screenshot is captioned by the Edwards site "Fair and Balanced?" and "You Decide. They'll Retort." And the screenshot is of, not the Fox News site, the Drudge Report, with a headline that the Edwards folks considers biased. Talk about bait-and-switch and misdirection. Conflating the two is simply dishonest, but Edwards contributors are just eating it up.

This is a new low for Democrats.

As usual, ScrappleFace nails it.

Posted by Doug at 04:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 08, 2007

Edwards Doesn't Want Your Vote

At least if you watch the Fox News Channel. John Edwards will simply not tolerate any group that will not tow the liberal line.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards won't participate in a debate co-hosted by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party, his campaign said, as party officials tried to settle a dustup over their partnership with the cable network.

Edwards' campaign said the involvement of Fox News, which is often accused by liberals of having a conservative bias, was part of the decision to pass on the Aug. 14 debate in Reno.

"There were a number of factors and Fox was one of those."

Far-left blogs have been pushing for this,and Edwards has caved. The Left has set yet another lower standard. Unless you can name a Republican that has ever skipped a major debate based solely on the slant of the network carrying it. That may be difficult, even considering, for example, CBS's "myopic zeal" against Republicans. Edwards will take his ball and go home unless you're slanted his way.

This says as much about the media as it does about Edwards. He knows the networks who are in bed with him, and you don't get access if you aren't. Oh, that liberal media.

Posted by Doug at 02:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 07, 2007

Evidence of "The Great Misreading"

After the election, I noted that some right-of-center pundits were saying that while the Democrats won big in the election, conservative values won big as well. No, that's not a contradiction. I said that the actions of the Democrats has been a great misreading of the election results which, as had been noted by others, was the election of more moderate Democrats, not the leftist kind.

Today comes proof of it. Blue Dog Democrats are asserting their power.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faced scorn from fellow Democrats during a recent closed-door meeting for not moving more aggressively on Iraq, it was conservative Blue Dogs _ her ideological opposites _ who rose to defend her.

The unlikely support reflected an emerging dynamic in the House, where the 43 right-of-center fiscal hawks are increasingly asserting their power, working to moderate the policies and image of a party with a liberal base and leaders to match.

The coalition's name is a play on yellow dog Democrats, an epithet that came into being in the 1920s to describe party loyalists in the South who, it was said, would vote for a yellow dog if it ran on the Democratic ticket. Democrats who said their moderate to conservative views had been "choked blue" by the party's liberal flank started referring to themselves as blue dogs and formed their group after Republicans swept control of the House in 1994.

With Democrats in charge again, the Blue Dogs have played a key role in halting an emerging plan to place strict conditions on war funding. Their revolt helped beat back that proposal, by Pelosi ally John Murtha, D-Pa. Leaders are now considering a watered-down version.

These moderate Democrats push fiscal responsibility and are putting the brakes on the Pelosi/Murtha wing who are charting a course for Iraqi killing fields. As much as the anti-war crowd would hope for it, and as much as the Democrat leadership talks it, support for cut-and-run is weak. Further, fiscal irresponsibility (from either party) is not what the election was about, either. The last election was indeed a referendum on how Republicans have been running the government, and while the public doesn't like how the war has gone, they elected more Democrats who don't want to just bail out post haste. Any suggestion otherwise is to blindly ignore those very election results they continue to trumpet.

Posted by Doug at 04:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Search for "The Real Leaker"

"Scooter" Libby was found guilty on 4 of 5 counts of lying to investigators, and the fallout is landing on Dick Cheney.

In legal terms, the jury has spoken in the Libby case.

In political terms, Vice President Dick Cheney is still awaiting a judgment.

For many weeks, Washington watched, transfixed, as the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. cast Cheney, his former boss, in the role of puppeteer, pulling the strings in a covert public relations campaign to defend the administration's case for war in Iraq and discredit a critic.

"There is a cloud over the vice president," the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.

Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, aggressively fighting back against suggestions that he and President George W. Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the press, and backing Libby to the end.

The jury considered Libby the "fall guy", and the prosecutor and Joe Wilson have a lower opinion of Cheney. Yet no one has been charged with the actual leak in this case. I guess, in a similar manner to OJ Simpson looking for "the real killer", pundits and talking heads will continue the hunt "the real leaker". In yet another eerie similarity to the Simpson situation, Wilson has filed a civil suit against Cheney.

There is one major difference, though, between this situation and OJ's. The real leaker has admitted to it. The problem is, the Left doesn't want to focus on Richard Armitage because he was an Iraq war skeptic in the State Department. No neo-con, he. And going after someone who, if not a Democrat, at least had views that the anti-war crowd appreciated, would not fit the narrative that they have written for this whole kerfuffle. "It was a neo-con revenge hit!" "Karl Rove should be frog-marched!" "The stifling of dissent!"

And in the article detailing who lost face in this whole matter, how many times is Armitage's name mentioned: 0. He's not a neo-con, he's not a White House official, and he was, in fact, a voice of dissent. Doesn't fit the narrative, so the Left and the Media stop paying attention to him.

If there was any intellectual honesty left in those pounding on Cheney, we'd see Armitage's name a whole lot more. Instead, it's not about the truth or the policy or whatever high hobby-horse they're riding. It's all about the politics.

Posted by Doug at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Safe Targets

First James Cameron trotted out bones to the Discovery Channel and made claims about them--that they were the bones of the biblical Jesus--that not even the man who discovered them claimed. Now ABC highlights a nut in Houston, giving him a platform to be legitimized, who claims to be Jesus. And the Anti-Christ. And who grew up stealing to pay for his heroin addiction. The headline reads, "Jesus Might Be Alive and Well in Houston", giving the story a "hey, it could be true" air.

(Hat tip to WorldViews.)

Amazing how the ever-sensitive media that blushed and turned away when the Danish cartoons of Muhammad came calling have no problem with airing the flimsiest story that calls Christianity into question. The gatekeepers have a very selective gate. As one commenter to the WorldView post said, "Do you think ABC would do a similar story about some character claiming to be Mohammed, Martin Luther King, Abraham etc?"

Yeah, me neither

Posted by Doug at 09:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 06, 2007

Being Pro-choice (on Education)

Via Betsy's Page comes word of a chance for South Carolinians to get a bit more choice regarding schooling. In the report, Brendan Miniter give the example of a school operating on a shoe-string budget with low-paid teachers and just 42 students, but that is outperforming the local public school on SAT scores by 46%.

The idea that the public school system should be reformed from within has had plenty of time to be tried. It's not working. one member of South Carolina's state House has been there and done that.

Two years ago similar reforms were defeated in the state House by seven votes. But school-choice supporters picked up several seats in the last election, one of which is now held by Curtis Brantley, an African-American from rural Jasper County who picked off an incumbent in a Democratic primary last year. "It's time," he told me recently while sitting in his sparsely furnished office, "to try something new."

As a former public school official who, as he tells it, was forced into retirement after trying to reform the school system from the inside, Mr. Brantley is now becoming a powerful voice for reform in Columbia. And he was only too happy to organize buses for school-choice supporters from his district to attend the rally [at the state Capitol].

I wouldn't call it "something new", exactly. We've had school choice in higher education for a good long time, and it has resulted in one of the best systems in the world, while at the same time not deal a death blow to state schools. It can be done, it has been done, but those with a vested interest in the status quo (and those politicians beholden to them) simply won't let it happen, if they can help it.

As time goes by, they may not be able to help it.

Posted by Doug at 02:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 05, 2007

Conservative Conservationists

Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina had an article in the Washington Post a week ago Friday (just pointed out to me) regarding conservative conservationists. No, nowhere near an oxymoron. His point is how the right should deal with the global warming issue, because if we don't deal with it, the Left will, and you know what sort of big-government, economic takeover solutions they'll come up with. (Think Kyoto Protocol.) Gov. Sanford make 3 points:

First, conservatives must reframe the environmental discussion by replacing the political left's scare tactics with conservative principles such as responsibility and stewardship. Stewardship -- the idea that we need to take care of what we've been given -- simply makes sense. It makes dollars as well, for the simple reason that our economy is founded on natural resources, from tourism and manufacturing to real estate and agriculture. Here in South Carolina, conservation easements are springing up across the state as landowners see the dual benefit of preserving the environment and protecting their pocketbooks.

Second, conservatives must reclaim lost ground from far-left interest groups by showing how environmental conservation is as much about expanding economic opportunity as it is about saving whales or replanting rain forests. When corporations such as BP and Shell America pursue alternative energy sources, they not only cut carbon emissions but help cut our petroleum dependency on OPEC nations. When South Carolina restaurants recycle their oyster shells, they not only restore shellfish habitat but take a job off local governments' plates and ensure continuing revenue streams for local fishermen.

Third, conservatives must respond to climate change with innovation, not regulation. This means encouraging private research and implementation of more eco-friendly construction, more energy-efficient workplaces and more sustainable ways of going about life -- all of which cuts costs and protects God's creation. It means looking past the question of whether your car's exhaust melts polar ice caps and instead treating our environment as an investment our future depends on.

Read the whole thing. That last point is the key, but is predicated on the first two.

Posted by Doug at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 02, 2007

Prayer Request from Former SCO'er

From former SCO contributor Matt Stokes comes this prayer request related to the severe weather we had down here in the South the past couple of days.

---

Those of you who know me know that I'm something of a weather nerd. I always keep a close watch on the news just to see how things will go throughout the week. Today was obviously no different; I stayed close by the internet and I was also pretty excited to my first wall cloud up close. I also realize that in the Deep South, severe weather is not a joke. My dear wife knows how I struggle to not lash out at those foolish knuckleheads in the checkout line who dismiss the weathermen on days like this. It is indeed severe and quite often has very serious consequences. If you've not seen in the news, todays weather has had tragic results in south Alabama. A tornado struck Enterprise High School, killing at least five people; some accounts have that number as high as 18.

For those who don't know, Enterprise is moderate sized town about 100 miles south of Montgomery, Alabama. My dads best friends family is from Enterprise, so I was concerned to see if they were alright. They weren't. My father, Mark Stokes, has served as pastor of Southern Baptist churches throughout Alabama; his best friend is Mike Jackson, a pastor for many years who now serves in a position at the Alabama Baptist State Convention. We learned tonight that Uncle Mikes nephew (his brothers only son) was found among the bodies at Enterprise High School. Hes not my real uncle obviously, but he and my dad have a very close relationship, and my siblings and I regard him and his family as our own. This is particularly hard for Uncle Mikes family both he and his two brothers have all lost their only sons to tragedy. It is an understatement to say that right now the Jackson family is experiencing deep grief.

It is also comforting to know that the Jackson family is one that believes in the risen Christ, and can trust in the mercy and compassion of a sovereign God. I do not know why these things happen, but I believe wholeheartedly in the sovereignty of God. This was no accident, and God was not asleep at the wheel when tragedy struck Enterprise. I cant begin to understand why things like this occur, but I can trust that God will work all things to His glory, even in the midst of our own sorrow and grief. I send this e-mail simply to ask my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to keep the Jackson family, and my own, I suppose, in your prayers. Pray that in the Lord the family will find strength and comfort. Pray that the Church in Enterprise, Alabama will be there for all who mourn the loss of friends and family. And pray that in all things, lives will be drawn to the Cross, whereupon we all may lay down our sorrows and burdens, and find great relief.

Grace and peace to you and yours,

Matthew and Lori Stokes

Posted by Doug at 04:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 28, 2007

What's Good for the Goose...

Now that James Cameron is making a new documentary suggesting he's found the bones of Jesus, will Andy Rooney now castigate him for making money off of Jesus? He certainly took Mel Gibson to task for this. Think he'll do the same for Cameron?

Yeah, me neither.

Posted by Doug at 05:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Name That Warmonger

Who said this in a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting while questioning John Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence?

I was just wondering, does the military have a plan to, if necessary, to go into Syria to go to the source of any weapons coming from Syria? That are going to Sunni insurgents? That are killing our troops? … I think we ought to take action on all fronts including Syria and any other source of weapons coming in, obviously Iran is the focus – but it shouldn't be the sole focus.

What member of the committee asked if the military had a plan for dealing with Syria and Iran?

Are you sitting down? No really, are you?

The answer is:

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI).

No, really, that Carl Levin. Click here for context and video.

Now, Democrats were indeed talking the tough talk against Saddam Hussein as far back as the Clinton administration, who's official policy was for regime change in Iraq, and then later, when it looked like George W. Bush would actually do something about it, they backpedaled and accused Bush of misleading them. (They were misled by Bush as far back as the Clinton presidency? Amazing!) So this moment of acknowledging reasonable precaution and having a plan for dealing with Syria and Iraq may be short-lived. Nonetheless, it's good to hear some bit of sense from that side of the aisle regarding being prepared.

Just hope he increases his contingent of bodyguards. The anti-war Left ain't gonna like this.

Posted by Doug at 01:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 26, 2007

Religious Freedom Inconvenient for Public Schools

Would you believe that here in the United States, someone would suggest that religious freedom and parental right undermine the public school system? It's happened. A US District Judge has used that as part of his reasoning in a recent ruling.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has ordered the "gay" agenda taught to Christians who attend a public school in Massachusetts, finding that they need the teachings to be "engaged and productive citizens."

U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf yesterday dismissed a civil rights lawsuit brought by David Parker, ordering that it is reasonable, indeed there is an obligation, for public schools to teach young children to accept and endorse homosexuality.

Wolf essentially adopted the reasoning in a brief submitted by a number of homosexual-advocacy groups, who said "the rights of religious freedom and parental control over the upbringing of children … would undermine teaching and learning…"

This started in 2005 when David Parker objected to the fact that he couldn't get his kindergarten child opted out of, or even notified of, same-sex household issues when they were brought up. The judge's ruling gives them three options; private school, home school, or vote in enough School Committee members to get things changed. Fair enough, but can you imagine a court telling a black man that if he doesn't like being forced into blacks-only restrooms and schools that these are his only choices? It would be unthinkable, but religious freedom, written quite plainly into the Constitution, is being afforded less protection than civil rights laws.

We are losing our constitutional rights at the hands of the judicial branch of government, and few notice, care, or even agree that it's being eroded. The folks with the latter view are the most blind.

Posted by Doug at 05:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

German Govt. Offers Homeschoolers a Deal

Give us the rest of your kids, and we'll call it even.

German authorities who sent 15 uniformed police officers to take custody of a 15-year-old girl who committed the crime of being homeschooled now have suggested a solution that, in their minds, would "resolve" the situation: the parents should give up custody of their other five children.

The situation involving Melissa Busekros has been in the headlines ever since the beginning of this month, when the officers arrived at her parents' home with a court order allowing them to take her into custody, "if necessary by force."
...
"Melissa’s father, Hubert Busekros, said he and his lawyer were offered a compromise this week that they could not accept," the [Homeschool Legal Defense Association] said. "The authorities wanted the Busekros's to give up custody of their other five children in order to resolve this situation. Hubert said the authorities are considering doing psychiatric exams on the other five children in order to implicate Hubert and his wife as unfit parents and thereby break up the family."

Such actions, the homeschool organization said, are "an outrage."

"There are approximately 40 other cases pending in Germany [against homeschoolers]," the HSLDA said. "Many homeschool families have fled to Austria or another nearby country where homeschooling is legal. The German government is persecuting these innocent families without mercy. The German Embassy has indicated they cannot allow 'parallel cultures.' Christian homeschooling is a 'parallel culture' that Germany does not want."

As always, some of the best updates can be found at the blog "Principled Discovery".

Posted by Doug at 02:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 23, 2007

The "Sunni or Shiite" Quiz

I'm proud to say that I got 8 out of 8 right in this ABC News quiz on whether particular persons, organizations and nations are Sunni or Shiite Muslims. I do have to give most of the credit to Mark Alexander's piece, previously highlighted here, that discussed them. (That and a little luck.)

Posted by Doug at 03:09 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 22, 2007

UN Gives Hizbollah & Hamas Time to Rearm

UN resolution 1701 called for, among other things, the disarming of Hizbollah. The UN is giving it's usual stellar performance. Via the Israel Project:

As Israel and the United States worked together this week to resume peace talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, growing signs indicate a concerted effort by the radical Islamic terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas to rearm themselves in preparation for further conflict.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based, Iranian-backed Shiite militant group that initated a war against Israel this past summer after their gunmen crossed the Lebanese-Israeli internationally recognized border, is now receiving weekly shipments of weapons from Iran and Syria. "We know that Syria is trying all the time to smuggle weapons over the Lebanese border to Hezbollah," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told members of the foreign press on Feb. 20.

In an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper on Feb. 3, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah openly declared that Iran is supplying his group with monetary aid and weapons.

(The text is from an e-mail that is not yet posted on their site.)

I said back in August, when this was all being worked out, that the cease-fire that was supposed to solve everything and keep Hizbollah from further aggression was simply going to buy time for them to rearm. Indeed, that's exactly what has happened. The toothless UN resolution is simply giving cover to those who who wanted to do something about it, regardless of how impotent. I'm sure they feel better about themselves for appearing, if not being, tough on terrorists. Unfortunately, the Israeli citizens on the Lebanon border and those within missile range of Gaza aren't any better off for it.

Posted by Doug at 03:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 20, 2007

Surge in Teacher Sex Abuse Against Students

New York State's Education Department has completed an internal study with results that should disturb parents of any state.

The study found the number of accusations against teachers [of sexual abuse to students] doubled in five years, to nearly one case for every day and a half of the school year. Almost three in four of the "moral conduct" cases involved sex between a teacher and student.

Taken together, the cases show a pattern of a small number of teachers preying on adolescents' need for attention, then exploiting their insecurities to keep the secret out of fear of ridicule or long-lasting damage.

The misconduct is part of a system in which other teachers can be reluctant to report colleagues, administrators are reluctant to act on claims that could result in bad press and lawsuits, and state hearing officers are not trained to spot and deal with sexual misconduct.

A state investigator called one case "almost like a type of mind control" often reinforced by e-mails and instant messages.

Of course, the study can't count or document those incidents that don't get reported, and if colleagues are reluctant to report on each other, there could indeed be a large number under the radar.

UPDATE: The original link is now broken. Click here for another copy of the story.

Posted by Doug at 01:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 19, 2007

German Homeschool Parents Get Visiting Rights

Dana at "Principled Discovery" is keeping close tabs on the Busekros family situation in Germany. She has found out that Melissa's parents have now been told where she is and can visit her. For further developments, keep an eye on Dana's page dedicated to news on this situation.

Posted by Doug at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New Pro-Life Blog

Russ Neglia has created a new pro-life blog under the Townhall.com umbrella. He calls it "Pro-Life Pro-Logic", and it's aptly named. Each post is well thought out and logically and dispassionately presented. He doesn't post every day, but you'll understand why when you read his articles. These aren't quick hits on topic, they are essays that take a little time to read. He's covered topics such as embryonic stem cell research and did a two-parter on how the death penalty relates to abortion. Check it out.

Posted by Doug at 09:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2007

On Sunnis and Shi'ites

I'll admit to not knowing my Islamic sects, but Mark Alexander at the Patriot Post distills it down to 1000 well-written words. Definitely worth a read.

And while you're there, read the rest of today's digest, which includes news about a push to do and end-run around the Electoral College, notice of a report from UNICEF that says the US and the UK are the two worst places to raise a child, and news of a settlement in a "wrongful birth" case. I suggest you subscribe to their e-mails.

Posted by Doug at 01:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 14, 2007

German Homeschool Student Hidden Away

According to CBN, Melissa Busekros, the German homeschool student taken to the nearby psych ward for alleged "school phobia", has been taken to an unknown location by the German government. The state is not telling the parents where she has been taken.

Posted by Doug at 02:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

That's Why It's Called a "Law"

Of supply and demand, that is. McQ at Q&O discovers that--surprise, surprise--the rise in the minimum wage is, in fact, putting people out of work.

The law which is supposed to help the "working poor" does precisely the opposite.

But it's the intentions that matter, don'tcha know?

Posted by Doug at 02:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 13, 2007

How I Learned to Love (the Iranian) Bomb

Are you comfortable with the idea of Iran with a nuclear bomb? Hope you're getting really comfy. All the stern UN resolutions and severely worded reports have done precisely nothing.

Iran will be able to develop enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear bomb and there is little that can be done to prevent it, an internal European Union document has concluded.

In an admission of the international community’s failure to hold back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the document – compiled by the staff of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief – says the atomic programme has been delayed only by technical limitations rather than diplomatic pressure. “Attempts to engage the Iranian administration in a negotiating process have not so far succeeded,” it states.

Imagine that; trying to negotiate with radicals has failed. Who would've thought? The result has been that indeed Iran is going to have nuclear materials.

The downbeat conclusions of the “reflection paper” – seen by the Financial Times – are certain to be seized on by advocates of military action, who fear that Iran will be able to produce enough fissile material for a bomb over the next two to three years. Tehran insists its purposes are purely peaceful.

“At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons programme,” says the paper, dated February 7 and circulated to the EU’s 27 national governments ahead of a foreign ministers meeting yesterday.

“In practice...the Iranians have pursued their programme at their own pace, the limiting factor being technical difficulties rather than resolutions by the UN or the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone.”

If those sanctions had been in place earlier and would've been stronger, then maybe--maybe--they would have had more effect. But everyone's afraid of making the mullahs mad at us. "If we push too hard, it may increase tensions and drive them away from us." Well guess what; they're going their own way anyway, and all the UN resolutions you can muster won't change that.

Not to mention that it's hard to imagine sanctions working when our "allies" like France and Russia were enriching Saddam during the Oil-for-Food program. With friends like these....

The admission is a blow to hopes that a deal with Iran can be reached and comes at a sensitive time, when tensions between the US and Tehran are rising. Its implication that sanctions will prove ineffective will also be unwelcome to EU diplomats. Only yesterday the bloc agreed on how to apply United Nations sanctions on Tehran, overcoming a dispute between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar.

So the diplomatic elite will dither and produce more reports and redundant findings that confirm, once again, that you can't negotiate in good faith with radicals. In the meantime, some say that the military option should be completely off the table, which I'm sure Tehran is very comforted to hear.

What the solution is at this point, I have no idea. I do know, however, that the world, in recent decades, has looked down at the US for its solutions but always lays the world's problems at the feet of the US and scolds us for not doing more long after the world has failed to really do anything. What has Europe really done about the Iran problem? What has the UN done about the North Korean problem? Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. When will the world wake up to the fact that negotiating with dictators and radicals is an insane proposition, for everyone?

Posted by Doug at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 12, 2007

German Homeschool Student Sent to Psych Ward

Since homeschooling is outlawed in Germany, if you do it you should expect the government to get perturbed. However, here's the story of a 7th grader sent to Child Psychiatry Unit of the local clinic and removed from her parents' custody over it. Seems quite an overreaction.

In summer 2004, Melissa was told that she would have to repeat the 7th grade at the Christian Ernst Gymnasium (a high school where one can obtain the Abitur, the highest German high school diploma) due to her bad grades in math and latin. The situation in the class played no small part in creating this state of affairs - the high noise levels and cancelled classes prevented her from receiving the educational assistance she needed during school hours. As Melissa had good grades in all the other subjects, repeating the whole year would be mostly a waste of her time, as well as the fact that she would now be in a class even more problematic than the previous year’s. Thus, it was decided by Melissa and her parents that she would be tutored individually at home to meet her specific needs. At her own wish, Melissa only took part in Music and sang in her school choir. The school and the local school authorities were not satisfied with this solution, and consequently expelled Melissa from the school, allocating her to the local Hauptschule (the lowest in the German three-tier high school system).

So the parents only took her out of public school due to her special needs, trying to avoid the wasted time of going through the one-size-fits-all repeating of an entire grade. The only homeschooled in response to an issue with their daughter. This is not a family that has completely avoided the public system; they have simply responded to the specific issues with their child. Shouldn't parents be allowed to do that. Not in Germany. The state stepped in, though I'd say "overstepped".

On Tuesday 30th January just after 7am, Mrs Busekros and her children – Mr Busekros had already left for work – were startled by the appearance of the judge of the Family Court,social workers and police officials who demanded that Melissa, now aged 15, be handed over to them immediately. They had as authorisation a decision by the Erlangen Court (case no. 006 F 01004/06) of the 29th of January. It stated “The relevant Youth Welfare Office is hereby instructed and authorised to bring the child, if necessary by force, to a hearing and may obtain police support for this purpose.”

Melissa was brought into the Child Psychiatry Unit of the Nuremberg clinic and was subjected to an interrogation in the presence of the specialist Dr. Schanda. After this interrogation, about three and a half hours after she was coerced into the clinic, Melissa was returned home. Her relieved parents and her five younger siblings, who didn’t know when they would ever see Melissa again, as well as Melissa herself didn’t know that the worst was still to come.Melissa (right, top) and her familiy [sic].

On the afternoon of the 1st of February, the judge of the Family Court, representatives of the Youth Welfare Office, along with fifteen police officers, marched up to the Busekros home, to haul Melissa off to the Child Psychiatry Unit of the Nuremberg clinic. The judicial decision authorising this also removed Melissa from her parents’ custody, according to her father, Hubert Busekros.This treatment was justified by the psychiatrist’s finding, two days previously, that she was supposedly developmentally delayed by one year and that she suffered from school phobia. The fact that the less than optimal testing environment and the unexpectedness of the tests could have impacted on Melissa’s performance were not taken into account in this decision. It is not known when Melissa’s parents and siblings will be able to see her again, as the official approach in cases of “school phobia” is to completely prevent the “patient” from having any contact with those closest to him or her, as such contact supposedly enables the phobia.

I guess the state's solution to "school phobia", assuming that's even a valid diagnosis, is to put her back in there. Never mind that, but for bad grades in two subjects, she had done just fine in school, despite this "phobia". No, the government--the Village, so to speak--knows better than the parents.

See also: CBN report and an interview with the father in German (click here for the Google-translation to English).

Posted by Doug at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 09, 2007

Same-Sex Marriage Proponents Throw a Tantrum

This would be funny if it weren't intended to be serious (and frankly, I'm not completely sure that's the intent). Same-sex proponents in Washington State, in an attempt to get social conservatives "dosed with their own medicine", have filed an initiative.

OLYMPIA, Wash. - An initiative filed by proponents of same-sex marriage would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriage annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage.

Under the initiative, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.

All other marriages would be defined as "unrecognized" and people in those marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

If they were a child under the care of Super Nanny, they'd be sent to the Naughty Corner. Instead, we have adults who didn't get their way and are pitching a fit and putting forth an obviously frivolous initiative. And the organizer of this lets us know precisely what his error is (see the bolded word below):

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation ... The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine," said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadow in a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage."

"For many years" this debate has been going on, and he still can't honestly represent his opposition. The faulty logic here is breathtaking, starting with the straw man constructed in the first sentence. When has any mainstream opponent of same-sex marriage ever used the word "solely" in regards to child-bearing in marriage? Even a quote that says it's "primarily" for children or that it is the "best" for children does not imply what this initiative would cast into law, that it must.

In an attempt to sort of sound reasonable, they say they just want a dialog.

Opponents say the measure is another attack on traditional marriage, but supporters say the move is needed to have a discussion on the high court ruling.

They can't talk about it until they get their whining done first. And frankly, the debate was pretty much over in Washington State when the same-sex marriage ban survived the path up to and including the state Supreme Court. This is just the rantings of children who didn't get their way. If you want to talk about it, then talk, and don't waste your neighbors' time and money with ballot initiatives guaranteed to fail.

Posted by Doug at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Wave of Hatred" at an All-Time High

People of middle-eastern descent are being increasingly targeted for hate crimes in Britian. After 9/11 here and the London bombings there, it would be understandable, although completely intolerable, that violence against Muslims might increase in reaction. Except that it's not Muslims that are the targets.

Attacks on Britain's Jews have risen to the highest level since records began.

A study published today shows the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has almost tripled in 10 years, with more than half the attacks last year taking place in London.

The findings prompted the report's authors to warn of a "wave of hatred" against Jews.

The number of incidents increased to 594 last year, up by 31 per cent on the previous year.

Violent assaults soared to 112, up by more than a third on 2005.

Incidents ranged from the unprovoked stabbing of a Jewish man in north London to the sending of hate mail and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues.

Hat tip to the Rev. Sensing, who notes that the numbers in the US, while down slightly in 2006, did hit a 10-year high in 2004. While the Anglosphere bends over backward to be sensitive to Muslims, very little anti-Semitism goes noticed.

Make no mistake, violence against either group on the basis of simply who they are is unacceptable, but one group has the West cowed into not showing cartoons and whose radical suicide bombers target civilians, while the other group can take criticism in a civilized manner and whose radical suicide bombers...well...don't exist. I'm not saying that we should accord special protection to Jews over Muslims, but we should give at least the same sensitivity to the Jews, dontcha' think?

Posted by Doug at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 01, 2007

Making Peace With Religion and Sexuality

A great article on a Christian dealing with homosexual tendencies at Blogger News Network by Warren Throckmorton, PhD, is a must-read. While I think homosexual activity is wrong, this approach to dealing with it in the Christian life makes sense. As I say in a comment to the article, hetero men have the same sexual temptations (aside from the gender), and have to deal with them spiritually and behaviorally. And just because God doesn't heal a particular physical problem--or take away homosexual tendencies--doesn't mean that He can't or that we're bad people.

Loving the sinner and hating the sin goes for sin in our own lives as well. A healthy love of self includes knowing what your weaknesses are. Just continue to seek out God and let Him work through you. Great article.

Posted by Doug at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 30, 2007

Religious Freedom Diminished in the UK

Agencies run by churches in the UK can no longer practice what they preach.

Roman Catholic adoptions agencies yesterday lost their battle to opt out of new laws banning discrimination against homosexual couples when Tony Blair announced that there would be "no exemptions" for faith-based groups.

The Prime Minister said in a statement that the new rules would not come into force until the end of 2008. Until then there would be a "statutory duty" for religious agencies to refer gay couples to other agencies.

Why can't that "statutory duty" be good enough? Why is government coercion trumping religious freedom? Predictably, the results of an attempt at "fairness" will chase off the principled.

Last week the leader of Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, warned that the agencies would close rather than accept rules that required them to hand over babies to gay couples.

One wonders if, in some quarters, that's the whole objective. I mean, given a situation where there are choices, and there usually are, why would a gay couple seek out the Catholic Church for an adoption agency when there are others that have no qualms about it. It's kind of like the standard answer you hear when folks complain about the content of TV programming. "Just change the channel", the Left dismissively says. But when it comes to their preferences, they won't "change the channel" themselves--choose a different agency--and instead insist that government sanction their choices and force it upon everyone to accommodate it.

Posted by Doug at 01:07 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 29, 2007

A Tale of Two Protests

Take two protests, both in our nation's capitol, both heavily attended, both on current hot topics. Should the coverage of the two by the "balanced" media be comparable? You'd think so. You'd be wrong.

Within one week, the liberal bias of the Washington Post has been made perfectly obvious. On Monday, tens of thousands of protesters emerged on Washington for the March for Life, but the hometown paper put the story on the bottom of page A-10 Tuesday morning. On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters emerged on Washington for a rally against President Bush and the war in Iraq. The Post blasted that story across the front page on Sunday, complete with a large color picture taking a wide shot of hundreds of marchers and their signs and banners. Tuesday's story on abortion protests matched carried no wide shot of hundreds. It showed four pro-life marchers, and matched them with another picture of five feminists counter-protesting. There were no photos of conservative counter-protesters in the Sunday paper.

[This item, by Tim Graham, was posted Sunday on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]

The Post not only let the anti-Iraq rally dominate the front page, but devoted an entire page (A-8) to more photos and a story on student protesters. The front-page story carried over to most of page A-9. Jane Fonda's appearance at the march drew another story, placed on the front page of the Style section.

Newspaper coverage of events such as these pose a challenge for appearing fair, no doubt about it. A journalist writing a letter to the editor of his town's big paper, and an attendee of the March for Life, acknowledged this problem. However, he also believes that fear of appearing unbiased is keeping the coverage to a bare minimum.

What they [the local kids he travelled with] weren’t prepared for was calling home to find that their parents missed the minute-long coverage the event merited on the evening news. They weren’t prepared to arrive home on Tuesday afternoon and pick up the paper to find that there was no coverage whatsoever. It was almost as if the whole thing had been an illusion — that it hadn’t really been that big a deal.

As a member of the press, I have a respect for editors and the decisions they have to make about coverage. I know that the coverage of controversial issues and events presents special difficulty for editors, since a fair and unbiased newspaper covers multiple viewpoints. Most often, the press ends up being attacked by both sides for its attempt at what can only be described as a thankless task. The Tribune has covered local pro-life events and issues in the past.

But abortion in general and the March for Life in particular have always presented special difficulties for a newspaper that sets out to present unbiased coverage. How does one present unbiased coverage of an event like the march, which is overwhelmingly one-sided? The solution in past years has been a careful weaving together of this pro-life event and the various counter-protests that have surrounded it.

But recent marches have made this difficult, since the number of counter-protesters has dwindled over the years. It seems that the media has found it difficult to maintain unbiased coverage simply because there are no pro-choice protesters to be found. Following what seems to be a justified editorial philosophy, coverage of the March has likewise dwindled even as the annual event grows in size.

Thus it seems that pro-choice protesters have found their absence more valuable than their presence.

As applied to the Washington Post, however, the sentiment is likely misplaced. The Post didn't seem to have any problem ignoring dissenting opinions. When you show one picture for and one against, you leave the impression that the representations of the two points were similar. The did this with the March for Life, but definitely not for the anti-war protest.

For some newspapers, it may be a tough call. For the Washington Post, the bias has already made the decision.

Posted by Doug at 01:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 25, 2007

Scientific "Consensus"

Back in November, the National Registry of Environmental Professionals asked 793 of their members from 47 states some questions about global warming; its existence and causes, public policy response, and how it affects their jobs. Here's the existence and causes section.

The existence of global warming today

• 82 percent of professionals report they think global warming is a real, measurable, climatic trend currently in effect.


• 66 percent respond that the rate at which global warming may be occurring is a serious problem facing the planet.


• 64 percent attribute certain phenomenon such as rising ocean levels, increased storm activity, severe drought, massive habitat loss, depletion of the Earth’s oxygen sinks, i.e. rain forests and ocean plankton, to the effects of global warming.


• 68 percent agree that global warming is a trend that must be addressed as soon as possible.

The causes of global warming

• 59 percent respond that current climactic activity exceeding norms calibrated by over 100 years of weather data collection can be, in large part, attributed to human activity.
• 71 percent of environmental professionals, however, do consider the recent increase in hurricane activity in the Atlantic through 2005 and the Pacific through 2006, to be part of a larger natural cycle and not, for the most part, attributable to human activity.

82% is a pretty good number for considering the idea that global warming is happening. But beyond that, you can only get about two-thirds to agree on its affects and its urgency.

But it's the causes that really show how little consensus there is. Only 59% believe that the warming that exceeds 100-year norms is caused largely by humans. Put another way, 41% of environmental professionals either disagree or are not sure that humans are a significant contributor to warming. Thus, skepticism of it is hardly in the same league as Holocaust deniers.

The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.

Further, 71% think that the heavy 2005/2006 hurricane season was generally just part of the normal, natural cycle of weather. The NOAA said that and they got targeted by environmentalists. Now, all this does not mean that a former Vice President, in the movie poster for his Oscar-nominated film, can't try to draw a direct line between factories and hurricanes. It just means he's bucking the consensus. [Irony alert!]

So when somebody says to you that the debate about human-induced global warming is over, just have them ask the professionals, not the politicians.

Posted by Doug at 09:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 24, 2007

Good News from the Front

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have opened doors to the spread of the Gospel.

More Muslims converted to faith in Jesus Christ over the past decade than at any other time in human history. A spiritual revolution is under way throughout North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia:

Iraq: More than 5,000 new Muslim converts to Christianity have been identified since the end of major combat operations. ... Also, more than 1 million Bibles [were] shipped into the country since 2003, and pastors report Iraqis are snatching them up so fast they constantly need more Bibles.

Afghanistan: only 17 Muslim converts to Christianity before 9/11/01, but now more than 10,000.

Other Muslim countries have also seen tremendous rates of conversion starting in the 80s and 90s. Read the whole article for the stunning numbers from Egypt, for example.

Posted by Doug at 02:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sexual Predators Get Free Reign in Public School

Another reason to homeschool.

An estimated 5 million students in United States schools have been assaulted sexually by teachers, according to a congressional report. But no one is calling for investigations or law enforcement crackdowns, there have been no campaigns to ban the offenders from schools, and in many states there aren't even any requirements such predator attacks be reported to education licensing agencies.

"We have approximately 5 million children suffering and no one is calling for an investigation, for any kind of data to be collected to find out why that many children are being hurt by teachers," said Terri Miller, who runs probably the only organization in the nation that focuses specifically on assaults by educators on students. "This is an epidemic."

In fact, in many cases, especially where the attacker is a woman and the student a male, such assaults are treated as a joke, with a hand-slap for the teacher, and some ribald locker room humor directed at the student.

WND has documented in recent months an alarming string of dozens of cases of female teacher-on-male student sexual assaults, but those are just part of the overall problem, Miller said.

Her volunteer group, called Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, often feels overwhelmed by the dearth of information, injuries to students, and obstacles posed by opponents such as the National Education Association.

If the government's going to insist on pubic education, it must insist on safety in its facilities. But clearly that has not been a winning battle, neither regarding weapons & drugs nor sexually & psychologically speaking.

Posted by Doug at 02:20 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

Scooter Making News, But Not Sandy

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has been pulling out the details from the Libby trial and the Plame kerfuffle for quite some time. As much as they have covered it, if you get your news from the TV or the paper, you may not have heard much about some of these nuggets. Example from yesterday

Ted Wells drops the news that David Gregory of NBC received a leak about Plame from Ari Fleischer on July 11:

Now shows Ari dislcoses [sic] to David Gregory on July 11 that Ambassador Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Fleischer tells that before Libby was ever indicted. "I told David Gregory." Talks about time difference, says Ari leaked to Gregory first.

Now let's flash back to October 29, 2005, just after the Libby indictment. Russert has gathered the Washington Bureau to discuss the case on CNBC's "Tim Russert Show". At the time, I excerpted the transcript and suggested they were rehearsing their cover story. So let's cut to David Gregory:

GREGORY: And it is interesting--it's also interesting, I should just point out, that nobody called me at any point, which is unfortunately...
WILLIAMS: Apparently not.
GREGORY: ...not the point.
RUSSERT: Does anybody ever?
GREGORY: But I just wanted to note that.
RUSSERT: I've been meaning to talk to you about that.

Basically, given this and other discrepancies, it looks like the journalists haven't been completely upfront with what they knew and when they knew it. And Libby is the fall guy. Joe Wilson wanted to see Karl Rove frog-marched for what Joe thought was Karl's role in the leak (a leak that, still, no one has been indicted for), but perhaps we should be marching some reporters.

(Keep up with Just One Minute. Tons of good information on the Libby trial and the misinformation coming out of it.)

Meanwhile, there's been little to no coverage on the Sandy Berger story. If you have to ask, "Sandy who?", you're forgiven. Libby is being tried for an alleged lie to investigators in a case of the "leaking" of the name of a CIA employee who worked at CIA headquarters every day. Berger didn't do much, really, which explains the lack of interest by the media. All he really did is steal classified documents from the National Archives, hide them in his pants, destroy them, and keep potentially damaging information about President Clinton from reaching the 9/11 Commission. No big deal, right? Especially for those reporters for whom this really goes against the narrative.

Now Sandy reached a plea deal that kept him out of prison, but there's still the matter of knowing what he took. Part of that plea deal included a lie detector test to find out what he took, as a number of those documents were originals that had no copies. The Justice Department is dragging its feet, but some Representatives are trying to get this moving again.

Eighteen House Republicans have urged the Justice Department to proceed with a polygraph test for Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser who agreed to take the test as part of a plea of guilty of stealing documents from the National Archives.

"This may be the only way for anyone to know whether Mr. Berger denied the 9/11 commission and the public the complete account of the Clinton administration's actions or inactions during the lead-up to the terrorist attacks on the United States," the congressmen said in their letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

The congressmen -- led by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia -- said a prompt lie-detector test is needed to determine the extent of Mr. Berger's thievery, especially because the former Clinton administration adviser reviewed original documents for which there were no copies or inventory.
...
Mr. Davis, former chairman and now ranking Republican on the House Government Reform Committee, released a report by his staff on Jan. 9, saying a Justice Department investigation of Mr. Berger's admitted document theft was "remarkably incurious."

The report said the theft compromised national security "much more than originally disclosed" and resulted in "incomplete and misleading" information to the September 11 commission. It said Mr. Berger was willing to go to "extraordinary lengths to compromise national security, apparently for his own convenience."

In October, Mr. Davis led an effort to hold hearings to determine whether any documents were "destroyed, removed or were missing" after visits by Mr. Berger to the Archives. He said the full extent of Mr. Berger's document removal "can never be known" and the Justice Department could not assure the September 11 commission that it received all the documents to which Mr. Berger had access.

In an attempt to get some more attention to the Berger situation, Bill Bennett asked listeners to his radio show, "Morning in America", to come up with songs about it. (You can hear some excerpts of the entries and the well-done winner here.) This just hasn't garnered a lot of press, but with all the talk about implementing all most of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, wouldn't everyone want to make sure that the commission had all the facts? And therefore wouldn't getting full disclosure be a top priority of those wanting to implement them? Then why is it that only Republicans are pushing to get the whole story?

And why isn't more being reported on this? (OK, that question's rhetorical.)

Posted by Doug at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 23, 2007

Punishing Big Oil

Rev. Sensing has a must-read post on how punishing oil companies winds up punishing those consumers of oil.

Which is basically all of us.

Posted by Doug at 03:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Romney Piicks Up Endorsements

We've knocked the idea around about having Mitt Romney, a Mormon, as a presidential candidate for a Republican party that has a majority of evangelical Christians in it. According to Powerline, there are a couple of signs that Romney's political appeal may take precedence over his choice of religion.

First, they are noting (according to the Politico blog) that Denny Hastert will be endorsing Romney sometime today (may have already happened). Powerline notes, "They don't come much more mainstream, middle-American conservative than Denny Hastert."

Second in the comments, it's mentioned that Romney will be the commencement speaker at Hillsdale College, a nondenominational Christian college founded by Free Will Baptists.

Posted by Doug at 02:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 22, 2007

Hoping for Failure

The QandO blog has a post commenting on this Fox poll (PDF file). The results of one particular question are troubling.

Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush 

announced last week to succeed?


16-17 Jan 07

------------------Yes-No-(Don't know)

Average-----------63%-22--15

Democrats---------51%-34--15

Republicans-------79%-11--10

Independents------63%-19--17

This is shocking. On average, 1 in 5 Americans want the troop surge to fail. I can understand disagreements on policies and methods, but hoping for failure is simply beyond the pale.

One wonders where the 1 in 3 Democrats are coming from who hope for failure. Is Bush-hatred become so all-consuming for them that they're hoping our troops can't get the job done and the the Iraqis are unable to work up a stable democracy and the insurgency manages to destabilize the region? That's what a failure to curtail the current problems would mean. This is tantamount to wishing harm on their own soldiers (but please don't question their patriotism).

Posted by Doug at 01:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Emperor Chavez

I'm on a "Chavez kick", I know, but the man just begs for coverage. Hugo and his buddies have created a scene so similar to Star Wars that George Lucas may be able to sue for copyright infringement.

Venezuela's National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months.

President Hugo Chavez says he wants "revolutionary laws" to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Wonder who got to play the Jar-Jar Binks part of officially giving Chancellor Palpatine President Chavez these "temporary" powers?

After making another comparison of the Venezuelan Congress to "the German Reichstag in the 1930s in voting itself into irrelevancy", the Captain notes the grim future, first for outside investors, and ultimately for the Venezuelan people.

Western investors in Venezuela will suffer the same fate as those invested in Cuba before the fall of Batiste, or in Mexico during their occasional efforts to nationalize industries. They will be lucky if they can sell off their assets to Chavez for pennies on the dollar before he can seize them outright. The window for those transactions will close very shortly.

More importantly, Chavez has condemned the people of Venezuela to oppression and further misery. When outside investors stop underwriting projects in the country, their economy will head straight down. Chavez will use what remains -- the oil production -- to make splashy festivals for the poor and open a few schools and hospitals. The vast majority of what profit he can take will go right back into the pockets of Chavez and his cronies.

I'm going to have to bring up again that it's the Sheehans and Belefontes and Glovers of the political spectrum (i.e. the Left) that have embraced this man in a bear hug. I assume they have no problem with a socialist taking dictatorial powers over a country? I know they'd be up in arms if Chavez was Republican, but a socialist dictator (and now he is indeed technically a dictator) is okey dokey? This tells us what the grass-roots left-wingers really want for our country, because socialism has worked so well every other place it's been tried.

Or not.

Posted by Doug at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 18, 2007

FISA Agrees to Bush Admin Reforms

Yeah, you're probably hearing the FISA-terrorist-wiretapping story spun many other ways, most unfavorable to President Bush, but is that really news? In the meantime, here's the real deal