NewsMax.Com states that Senator George Voinovich's opposition to John Bolton is completely a matter of personal pique that has nothing to do with Bolton himself:

What a phony.

The Washington Times ran a little piece a week or so ago which gave the lie to Voinivich's concerns that Bolton's temperament ill-suits him for the role of ambassador to the U.N. It turns out that Voinovich is criticizing Bolton for behavior in which he himself has indulged in the past.

"In 1995 when he was governor of Ohio, he had a temper tantrum at an airport because his plane was kept on the ground while Air Force One was in the sky." John Podhoretz wrote in the New York Post on May 13 (Subscription required). "He ordered his pilot to take off, screaming at air traffic controllers all the while and daring them to 'shoot us down.'"

An AP report at the time quoted Voinivich as using profanity and defying the authorities to put him in jail. Voinivich was fined by the FAA for his behavior.

"Interpersonal skills are important. The way you treat other people - do you treat them with dignity and respect? Very important." This was Voinivich during the senate Foreign Relations Committee vote a couple of weeks ago.

What a hypocrite.

The battle to scrub the public arena free of any hint that God might be lurking in some obscure crevice of our public life opens a new front in North Carolina:

George Daly is, in my opinion, correct in that the government, by inscribing the offending words on the walls of public buildings and on our currency, is claiming, accurately or not, that the American people do, in fact, trust God to protect our nation, and that the government endorses that trust. To defend the inscription by trying to reduce it to a mere expression of patriotism is silly and disingenuous.

Where Mr. Daly is not correct, however, is in thinking that this violates the intent of the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment. By expressing a sentiment such as the one carried by the statement in God we trust, the state is not establishing a religion nor is it interfering in the free exercise thereof. The state may be endorsing a theistic point of view but theism is not a religion. It has no clergy nor churches, it has no dogma nor sacred books. Nor is the government, by stamping its currency with these words, actively striving to establish a state religion of theism. Indeed, it is doing much less than the founders of this country regularly did in their writings, speeches, and other public pronouncements.

First Amendment jurisprudence has drifted so far from what the framers originally intended that it has become a parody of itself and the courts and lawyers which seek to totally secularize public life look like small-minded anti-religious bigots. Any mention of God by a public official is seen as a constitutional breach by the censors at the ACLU. Any acknowledgement of God which is in any way associated with tax dollars is cause for litigation. This is a ridiculous state of affairs which the founders could scarcely have foreseen nor desired, and it is time that our courts and legislators started acting like adults and reformulate the law so that it more accurately reflects what the fathers intended when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

We're back from a Memorial day weekend at what is, in my judgment, the most beautiful place in the United States east of the Mississippi River - Acadia National Park in Maine. Like all of our National Parks, it is a public treasure and needs constant vigilance to protect and preserve it from those who see in such places little more than an opportunity for development and exploitation.

If political conservatism means anything it means having a strong predilection toward preserving and conserving our heritage - our values, our traditions, and our natural gifts. It is as sad as it is puzzling that more conservatives don't see conservation and preservation of land and natural beauty as logical consequences of the conservative ethos.

This is not to suggest that conservatives should not favor, say, drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but it is to say that such exploitation, which would be enormously profitable to the oil companies, should only be permitted if those who benefit from it compensate future generations of Americans by purchasing other significant lands elsewhere for incorporation into the National Wildlife Refuge or National Park systems.

Indeed, there is much land around all of our National Parks, Refuges, and Seashores which still needs to be protected from development. Why not make preserving some of it part of the deal for drilling rights in ANWR?

For those interested in things military Belmont Club is almost always worth a visit. Wretchard's most recent post analyzes the significance of the increase in operational tempo of Coalition forces in Iraq. In his concluding paragraphs he writes:

Faster operational rates also suggest that our intelligence has markedly improved. We know who and where the targets are to a greater extent than we did six months ago and we're not giving them time to catch their breath. It's also a sign that Iraqi troops are much more competent and numerous than they were six months ago and are able to shoulder much more of the load. All of this is very good news, indeed.

The New York Times is in a bit of a snit that the President is, in their view, imposing his moral convictions concerning the humanity and worth of human embryos on the rest of us:

There is so much nonsense contained in these two paragraphs that it almost takes one's breath away.

First, the claim that GWB is imposing his moral beliefs upon others is absurd. Bush isn't forcing people to accept his view of the status of the embryo. He's simply saying that if you wish to destroy incipient human beings that's your business, but you can't expect taxpayers to compensate you for it.

Second, the Times complains that different people view the status of human embryos differently and that Mr. Bush is [unfairly] imposing his views on all of them. But someone's views must prevail in the debate over how these embryos are to be regarded by the federal government. Is the Times' problem that someone is imposing his views, or that the wrong person's views are being imposed?

Third, even if the President were "imposing" his beliefs about morality on others why would that be wrong? If one has the political power and constitutional authority to impose one's beliefs why, precisely, is it wrong to do so? Would the Times hesitate for one moment to impose its beliefs upon the nation were it to have the power to effect such a catastrophe?

In a secular society such as the Times yearns for the U.S. to be, right and wrong are merely functions of whatever the law allows. There is no appeal to some objective moral standard because secularists do not permit any such standard to be brought into play. Thus, whatever a man can legally do he has a "right" to do. In the secular state if Bush has the constitutional authority to impose his values on the rest of us then he has the right to do so, and the Times' complaints are just so much sour grapes.

RLC

Amnesty International's recent condemnation of the United States shows how ideologically blinkered that organization is. Amnesty calls for the arrest of several high administration officials should they stray into another country as did former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who was arrested in London in 1998.

Perhaps we just don't remember but has Amnesty ever called for the arrest of Fidel Castro, or, prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Saddam Hussein? Have they ever called for the arrest of any of the murderous tyrants in black Africa or of Kim Jong Il in North Korea? We don't recall.

Nor have they ever urged the arrest of any of the potentates in the Islamic world which is odd since part of the indictment against the United States is that it practices rendition of prisoners, i.e. we send them to their country of origin in the Mideast to be interrogated. This is severely criticized by organizations like Amnesty because everyone knows what happens to people in the prisons of Islamic countries. Well, if that's all true, why isn't Amnesty putting out an APB on the leaders of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. for the appalling abuses of human rights that occur regularly in those countries? Their focus on the United States seems to suggest an ideological antipathy that ill-becomes an organization which is supposed to be non-ideological.

Nor does Mr. Schulz seem to understand the implications of what it is he's urging some hapless country to do. He's calling for, say, Belgium, to arrest President Bush should GWB ever wander into Brussels. Has Mr. Schulz tried to imagine what would ensue if a foreign nation took into custody the President of the United States? Either the executive director of AI is a complete fool or he's deliberately trying to instigate a military conflict between the U.S. and whatever nation is naive enough to heed his advice.

Amnesty International is an organization which could do much good around the world, and it's therefore especially unfortunate that its manifest bias and ridiculous recommendations are turning it into a discredited and irrelevant voice in world affairs today.

RLC

From time to time the thought has occurred that I am the only person still alive who believes that the left lane of an interstate highway is for passing only. Apparently, however, there are others out there who think the same way and who are growing weary of both the rudeness and the hazard posed by drivers who drive in that lane but don't pass anyone. This article talks about two states that are doing something about it. Some highlights:

Now if they can do something about two other pet peeves I'll be a much happier driver. The first is people who zoom ahead of merging lines of traffic and then cut in at the bottleneck, essentially slowing down the progress of everyone who has already merged. This is an act of incivility so rude as to merit, in my mind, severe flogging.

The second is drivers who make left-hand turns from well to the right of the median, thereby preventing traffic behind them from passing them to their right. Related to this is the driver who wishes to turn left at an intersection but who, while waiting for oncoming traffic to clear, doesn't move into the intersection to make the turn. This causes traffic to pile up behind the turning car, and if there's a traffic light at the intersection the backed up traffic often has to wait another light cycle before they can proceed.

All of us make thoughtless mistakes on the highway from time to time, but some people just never ask themselves what effect their driving has on everyone else. Their obliviousness is inadvertent, of course, but it's nevertheless inconsiderate and discourteous.

The controversy surrounding the use of federal funds to subsidize embryonic stem cell research is culminating in legislation which the president has promised to veto.

It should be noted that research on or with embryonic stem cells is not illegal. The president has simply said that tax dollars will not be used to subsidize what many regard as a deliberate taking of human life.

This position is based upon an important principle: Human life should never be created simply to farm its tissues. We agree with that principle. To permit tissue farming would place us on a slippery slope where ultimately babies could be conceived simply to allow for the sale of their tissues and organs.

Parenthetically, it's curious that Pro-Lifers who oppose the extraction of stem cells from surplus embryos produced at fertility clinics aren't more vociferous in their opposition to the work of those clinics. The clinics fertilize a number of ova in order to insure that at least one will be viable. If it is, then the others are discarded. It's hard to understand why those who oppose abortion from the moment of conception have not been more fervent in their objections to this practice. The fact that they haven't been suggests that there is perhaps some ambiguity in the thinking of at least some of them concerning the deliberate disposal of excess embryos.

Viewpoint's opinion, ill-informed as it probably is and subject to revision upon further argument, is that the government should neither underwrite nor permit the production of embryos solely for the purpose of harvesting tissue. In the age of Roe it may be hard for government to prohibit such a practice, but certainly it can refuse, as GWB has done, to finance it.

It should in any case, however, remain legal to produce embryos in fertility clinics, even though those embryos may subsequently be destroyed, since they are not being produced solely for the purpose of providing cells or tissue. Fertility clinics should be monitored to insure that they're not producing more zygotes (fertilized ova) than is consistent with standard industry practice, and they should be permitted to donate those extraneous embryos to researchers working on stem cells. They should not, however, be permitted to sell them for profit and the government should require a strict accounting of the clinics' practices along these lines.

Nor should the federal government subsidize research on embryonic stem cells (although research on other stem cell lines could, and perhaps should, be subsidized) through grants and other tax-based sources of support. Rather, financing for this work should be sought from private foundations and individual donors.

An article in The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal shows that this is already well underway:

President Bush has taken a stand on this matter that appalls his critics, but seems nevertheless to be a perfectly reasonable position, one which does not preclude those who disagree with him from doing research on embryonic stem cells nor from contributing as much to that work out of their own pockets as they desire.

It's easy to get somewhat discouraged when trying to discuss the controversy surrounding Darwinism and Intelligent Design because it's a complicated issue and some of the concepts are not easily made understandable to lay-people. It's even more discouraging when the local media choose to edit your attempts to explain so as to render them almost incomprehensible.

Recently, a representative of the Ayn Rand Institute named Keith Lockitch had a piece published in the local newspaper which was critical of ID. I wrote a reply to Dr. Lockitch's column which I posted here and forwarded to the paper for publication.

This, however, is what appeared in the paper after suffering the ministrations of the paper's editor.

Oh, well.

The new-found senate comity lasted less than 48 hours before the Democrats voted almost unanimously to prevent John Bolton from receiving a confirmation vote on his appointment to the post of ambassador to the U.N. Four of the seven Democratic senators who agreed not to employ a filibuster unless there were "extraordinary circumstances" have chosen nevertheless to invoke a filibuster on the Bolton nomination.

It's true that the filibuster compromise only applied to judicial nominations, but the whole deal was predicated upon good will and trust in the other side's willingness to abide by the spirit of the agreement. It seems that a lot of the air has leaked out of the spirit of the agreement in the last two days.

Senator Frist is no doubt feeling vindicated; Senator McCain has egg on his face. Senator McCain better get used to it. This surely won't be the last time his Democratic friends let him down.

When next you're at a social gathering and someone remarks that they just don't understand why parents would homeschool their children and thereby deprive them of the socialization opportunities that attach to a public school education you might casually mention The Rainbow Party by Paul Ruditis. The Rainbow Party is geared to Middle School aged kids and Ruditis hopes that teachers will use it to instruct their students in the arcana of human sexual behavior.

Michelle Malkin writes about the book in the Jewish World Review:

It is just astonishing that people like Ruditis can get a major publisher to publish this book and then actually think that such a story is somehow good for children to read and that it should be used by parents and teachers to teach about sex. The guy must be out of his mind.

Captain's Quarters links us to a remarkable story in the London Press:

If this story turns out to be true it almost forces some sort of action against Syria and Bashar Assad. Syria has been indolent in stopping terrorist migration into Iraq and is apparently energetic in plotting mischief in Lebanon and Baghdad. Tah's confessions almost certainly implicate Syria in the death of Hariri.

Assad must feel like he's in his last days as president and perhaps even as a living organism. In order to save himself it's likely that Assad will make some gesture of cooperation with the United States in the war on terror, perhaps by handing over some terrorist major domos hiding out in Syria. The question is whether he's strong enough to get his security apparatus and military to go along.

Today's Philosophical Quotation tells us that the 19th century philosopher Auguste Comte once remarked that, "Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education."

With due respect to Comte, it's probably more accurate to say that the religion of one's childhood is often exchanged for another religion when one becomes an adult. Indeed, Comte is himself a prime example, having attempted in his later years to develop a religion based on humanism and positivist science.

When Comte was fourteen he abandoned the French Catholicism of his parents and embraced atheism, but he evidently lacked a "proper education" because he never outgrew his need for the numinous. His goal eventually became to develop a new atheistic religion, a new faith based on the apotheosis of man. A humanistic clergy would be needed, he believed, to replace the Catholic clergy. Comte proposed that these be taken from a scientific-industrial elite that would announce the invariable laws of a new social order. This clergy of elites, the technocrats, was necessary to meet the problems which ensued from the collapse of the ancien regime as well as those created by the growth of an industrial society.

With his attempt to found his own religion Comte drifted away from his philosophical and scientific interests toward mysticism. He appointed himself the high priest of his new faith which had its holy days, its calendar of saints -- Adam Smith, Frederick the Great, Dante, Shakespeare and others -- and its positivist catechism. It was a non-theistic religion of man and society, an illusion, to be sure, of adulthood.

For another example of the difficulty even atheists have of escaping their need for the religious see here.

As G.K. Chesterton said, "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything."

An erstwhile lefty explains why he has chosen to defect in a remarkable essay in the San Francisco Chronicle. Some excerpts:

The author of this piece is a writer by the name of Keith Thonmpson. You'll want to read the whole thing.

Joseph Bottum has a piece in the current First Things entitled The New Fusionism in which he dissects the coalition that comprises contemporary conservatism. Of the three distinct spheres of political life that define one's ideology - social, foreign policy, and economic - Bottum focuses on the first two. He stresses that those who are pro-life in the social sphere (many paleo-cons) have joined with those (mostly neo-cons) who are supportive of the administration's prosecution of the global war on terror to form an alliance that has reversed the defeatism of the post-Vietnam era. Economic concerns have largely been subordinated to the higher imperatives of remoralizing the nation by defeating the culture of death at home and defeating the violent enemies of Western civilization abroad. Here are a few highlights:

The article is very good and can be read at the link.

If American troops have gratuitously beaten, tortured and murdered enemy soldiers they must be prosecuted. They have tarnished the military, besmirched their country, and violated the law of God. Such crimes cannot be allowed to go unpunished. Having said that, it must be asked why there is such a kerfuffle over alleged "desecration" of the Koran. It is not that we think it acceptable to treat this book disrespectfully, but distinctions need to be made.

Let's start with a question. What exactly is wrong with mistreating the Koran? Is the offense spiritual? Is it moral? Or is it merely political? Unless one believes that the Koran really is the word of God then it's hard to see how it could be spiritually offensive to treat it with contempt. Nor is it easy to see how flushing a book down a toilet (Has anyone asked whether this is even possible)could be immoral, even if it enrages the devout. After all, people are enraged by those who burn the flag and profanate the Bible, but that such acts are immoral seems a hard case to make in a secular society.

That leaves us with political offense. It is argued that it's wrong to mistreat the Koran because such behavior does not endear us to the world's Muslims, and, of course, here we agree. We should be sensitive to the religious sensibilities of those whose hearts we wish to win over, and our troops should for pragmatic reasons be ordered to treat the Koran in a reasonably dignified manner out of respect, not so much for the prisoners, who may indeed be detestable human beings, but for the multitudes of Muslims who are watching how we conduct ourselves. If soldiers violate this order they should be punished, but their punishment should be a consequence of defying an order. It should not be because their conduct is inherently despicable.

It will not do to reply that Muslims hold Christianity in contempt and therefore they have no claim on our respect. First, if we are Christians we are prima facie obligated to treat others with dignity, respect, and kindness. That means respecting, to the extent practicable, their most deeply held beliefs even if they don't respect ours. Second, it may be true that they do not respect Christian belief, but then they're not particularly eager to win our affections either. We are eager to win theirs. Without the support of the world's Muslims we'll never prevail in the war on terror, and we won't have that support if our troops don't display a modicum of deference to their most profound convictions.

Bill Roggio writing for Winds of Change updates us on some of the ongoing military operations in Iraq. Here's part of his post:

There's much more at the link.

Meanwhile, the 28th edition of Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News From Iraq is up. It's an outstanding summary of what's being done to create a viable society in Iraq with emphasis on the news from the last two weeks.

Pat Buchanan notes that if President Bush had nominated John Paul II to a federal judgeship he would have been filibustered by Senate Democrats who would have fought to kill his nomination on the grounds that his pro-life Catholicism places him too far out of the mainstream.

David Limbaugh asks why John Bolton's criticism of the United Nations should make him any more unsuited to serve as our ambassador to that august body than the criticism of leftist Democrats of the United States makes them unsuited to hold political office.

Good observations, both.

Joe Knippenberg at No Left Turns offers some advice to the Republicans in the wake of the filibuster "compromise".

Of course, this would be to tell the truth and telling the truth can be nasty and the last thing Republicans want is for the media to portray them as "mean".

Meanwhile, Captain's Quarters deconstructs the deal and comes to this conclusion:

Captain Ed is harder on Frist than I think the majority leader deserves. I'm not sure that anyone could have kept those seven Republican senators in line. Nevertheless, I agree with the sentiment that the rank and file need to send a message to the party by withholding their contributions. In our opinion, there should be no donations until all of Bush's Supreme Court nominees are confirmed, and anyone who calls to solicit contributions should be emphatically told why their wasting their time.

Froma Harrop of The Providence Journal makes a persuasive case for the Central American Free Trade Agreement. She argues that the jobs which would be lost are going to be lost anyway. It's much to our interest that they migrate to Central America than that they go overseas to China and India. Here are a few highlights from her piece:

There's more at the link. We don't know whether she's right about all this, but it certainly does seem clear enough that American workers making $20 an hour are not going to be able to compete with those making a dollar an hour. Perhaps we can protect our jobs with tariffs, but it's not clear that that is a viable long term strategy. It simply builds anti-American resentments and invites retaliation, which hurts our exporters and consumers.

Maybe some of our readers have a helpful thought or two on this.

What are the pros and cons of the "compromise" on judicial filibusters? The only benefit from a Republican point of view that I can see is that should they ever find themselves in the minority again they may have recourse to the filibuster, but this is bitter solace. If it's wrong for the Democrats to filibuster judicial nominees now it would be wrong for Republicans to do so in the future.

The liabilities, however, are several. It's now almost certain that at least two of Bush's nominees will not be voted on by the senate, which is a gross unfairness. Every nominee deserves a vote. That should have been a non-negotiable principle, but McCain, Warner and the other Republicans caved on it.

There is still the possibility that a future nominee will be filibustered and that the Republicans will invoke a rule change, but after this deal it becomes psychologically more difficult to pull that off.

Moreover, by kicking the can down the road, the Republicans have risked serious difficulties after 2006 should the Democrats pick up a couple of senate seats in that election. They still wouldn't be in the majority, but a gain of a couple of seats would make a rule change much more difficult to pass were it to become necessary, which it almost certainly will.

The Democrats managed to out-maneuver the doppy Republicans yet again. The Dems have essentially given up nothing that they wouldn't have lost anyway and have effectively secured a Republican promise that the GOP will not prevent a filibuster on the two nominees the Dems feel they can safely oppose without looking bad in the eyes of their constituents. This deal is not a compromise. The Republicans gained nothing, and the Democrats get to block at least two of Bush's nominees.

In my humble opinion, John McCain has just forfeited his chances of gaining the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Bill Frist, I think, is relatively unscathed. It's true that he appears ineffective in being unable to impose party discipline on the moderates, but his opposition to this "compromise" will work to his advantage with the Republican base in the 2008 primaries.

Richard Neuhaus discusses the latest demographic projections in an essay in the March issue of First Things and they really are quite startling. He writes:

Neuhaus thinks that declining birth rates are a bad thing. We're not so sure (whether the reasons for the decline are bad is a different question). There are certainly some negative consequences (e.g. a smaller population of young workers to care for a larger population of elderly and proportionately fewer people developing the innovations that make life better), but on balance it's not clear that population numbers commensurate with mid-twentieth century levels would be calamitous either economically or environmentally. Indeed, lower populations would place far less stress on natural resources. Moreover, there must be some upward limit on how many people the planet can sustain before war, pestilence, and famine cause the population to crash. It seems to us better that such a limit never be approached.

The biggest drawback to a declining population in the West would be the disadvantage it would place western civilization in vis a vis third world peoples, and especially the Islamic world, if their birth rates do not also decline. If the drop is universal and not too precipitous, however, it's not clear to us why it should be cause for alarm.

When it comes to sheer savagery in the name of religion Muslims do not have a total monopoly as this story illustrates:

What ever happened to the spirit of Mahatma Ghandi?

One of the amazing things about stories like this is that Christian young people are lining up to go to places like Orissa despite the violence and danger they'll face. They're incredibly courageous and the contrast they create with those who are willing to die only if they can kill others is stark.

Indeed, this is the essential difference between Christianity and many other religions. Christianity enjoins us to love people into the Kingdom of God, other religions enjoin their votaries to kill people who resist accepting their "truth".

ABC News did a blurb on the radio the other night about the rules change vote expected to occur in the senate and mentioned that although liberals want to use the filibuster now, it was conservatives who used it back in the sixties to try to block liberal civil rights legislation.

This was deceptive for two reasons. First, the earlier filibuster was employed to block legislation, not judicial nominees. Legislation is what the filibuster was originally intended to be used for. More egregiously, what the ABC reporter fails to tell his listeners is that those who tried to block civil rights legislation were largely Democrats. Robert Byrd, William Fulbright, Al Gore, Sr. and others resisted advances in civil rights by using the filibuster. To call these Democrats conservatives is ludicrous.

Howard Dean referred to the filibuster on Meet the Press today as a protection of the rights of the minority. This is a silly claim for several reasons:

1. Minority rights as protected by the constitution have to do with civil rights of the American people not political parties.

2. Nothing the Republicans propose to do violates any right of the Democrats guaranteed by the constitution.

3. We have been oft reminded by Democrats and their surrogates that the number of citizens represented by Republicans in the senate is actually substantially less than the number of citizens represented by Democrat senators. This being the case, if a senate rule is to protect the minority, then it should protect the interests of those who are represented by Republican senators.

There was much else in Dean's appearance for which he could be faulted. For example, he repeatedly blasted Tom Delay in harsh language for the House Majority Leader's alleged ethical shortcomings. Dean then went on to criticize Rush Limbaugh for Limbaugh's criticisms of the ethics of Democratic politicians. He argued that Limbaugh certainly has had his own ethical problems, as we all do, Dean noted, and that no one who has ethical shortcomings should criticize the lapses of others. Well, if we all have ethical faults then Mr. Dean has ethical faults, so, by his own logic, why is he criticizing Tom Delay?

He also sought to make political hay from the Terri Schiavo case. He criticized Republicans for intruding into an intensely personal matter that should have been off-limits to government officials. Mr. Dean misrepresented the problem here, however. It wasn't that Terri's family wasn't left alone by government, it was that one branch of government, the courts, actively prevented her family from protecting and caring for her. The debate in the Schiavo affair was about who should have the right to determine Terri's fate, a man who was her husband in the purely legal sense only, who advanced a highly suspicious claim to know Terri's wishes about life and death, and who had demonstrated no real concern for Terri's well-being over the years, or her parents and siblings who stood by her throughout the whole ordeal and stood to gain nothing at all from their fight to protect Terri except to keep their loved one alive.

It wasn't that politicians were sticking their nose into private family matters, it was that Terri's family urged politicians to get involved when the judiciary refused to save Terri's life. I think we should be proud of those who responded to that desperate plea for help rather than ignore it, as Mr. Dean would have had them do.

Mr. Dean also accuses the Republicans in general, and the president in particular, of being dishonest. Tim Russert ran a clip in which Dean says that he "hates Republicans" and states by inference that they're "evil." Yet, during the show an ad by People For the American Way was run which accused the Republicans ("the radical right") of placing the constitution "under attack" and wanting to "break senate rules" in order to impose their will on the country. If Mr. Dean wanted to point out dishonesty, he could have called the viewer's attention to the mendacity of this ad. The majority party in the senate has the constitutional right to change the rules of the senate and, indeed, the Democrats have done so themselves in the past. There is no threat to the constitution in either what the Republicans are trying to do to secure an up or down vote for GWB's judicial nominees on the senate floor or in the kind of judges GWB has nominated. They are nominees who believe that the constitution should not be interpreted according to current political fashion, and are much more respectful of the authority of this document than are the men and women whom the Democrats wish to have placed on the federal bench and the Supreme Court.

If there is a threat to the constitution it is to be found in the sort of judges who espy in the words of that document rights that clearly are not there. The Democrats will not vote to seat anyone who does not accept the right to an abortion, for example, but that right is nowhere in the constitution. The Democrats also approve of the creation of a right not to be executed if one is under the age of 18 notwithstanding that the constitution is silent about such matters.

The reason why Democrats are so hostile to Bush's nominees is precisely because they fear that his judges will be strict constructionists who will rule according to what the constitution says and not according to the tastes and dictates of the New York Times. It is liberal jurists who threaten the integrity of the constitution and whose rulings have created so much dissatisfaction and divisiveness in this country. Hopefully, on Tuesday we'll see the beginning of the end of that threat.

Kausfiles quotes James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal who gives two very good reasons why Democrats might postpone a fight over the filibuster rule:

Kaus speculates that the Republicans could force a rules change vote by voting against cloture. This, it seems to us, however, would be too cynical to be worth doing. If some Republican Senators were to attempt to force a showdown on a rules change vote by causing the cloture vote to fail, they would risk antagonizing the half-dozen or so "moderate" Republican senators. These then might, in a fit of pique, decide to vote with the Democrats to reject the motion to change the rule, and the whole thing would blow up in the Republicans' faces.

Washington politics is Byzantine, but it's probably not that Byzantine.

I find it interesting to watch our present administration as they attempt to blame other countries for problems that are clearly the fault of the current and past administrations.

Specifically, while the administration and congress blusters to China with threats of tariffs if they don't let their currency float against the dollar Dr. Allan Greenspan has this to say.

From the link:

As Dr. Greenspan points out, the only thing that will help the US trade deficit is for Americans to buy less imports and more American products. Not very likely, especially given that America doesn't manufacture much of anything anymore.

It is interesting to note that Dr. Greenspan realizes that Americans will buy from any other country rather than from American manufacturers.

As I see it, there are either of two scenarios that are likely to unfold: American jobs and manufacturing will continue to be exported and the trade deficit will continue to grow until foreign countries cut off our credit - Mr. America, your card has been declined, or there simply won't be enough people in this country able to buy anything from anywhere because they have lost their jobs and are broke. In either case, the exportation of jobs and manufacturing will not stop until a state of equilibrium has been attained. I've mentioned this before. It means the average income and standard of living of Americans will decline as the average income and standard of living of their counter-parts in China, Mexico, etc., increases. This process is well under way. Welcome to the New World Order.

Not only are jobs and manufacturing being exported but also the R&D is being outsourced. This means that products will and are being completely developed overseas from concept to finished product and then imported and sold under an American label while the American companies lay off "non-essential" personnel to save costs and boost their stock price. But the day will come when those doing all the work realize they can go direct to the American consumer and the rest of the world as well, and cut out the middle man i.e. the American corporation who bought into the whole idea of outsourcing leaving them with no reason for being. Now that's the definition of justice.

WSC

One of the oft heard criticisms of Intelligent Design theory is that it is putatively non-scientific, i.e. it doesn't meet the criteria of an acceptable scientific hypothesis. Design or creationist theories have been alleged to be necessarily unscientific for a number of reasons: they do not explain by reference to natural law, they invoke unobservables, they are not testable, they do not make predictions, they are not falsifiable, they provide no mechanisms, they are not tentative, and they have no problem-solving capability.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer addresses the first three of these alleged short-comings in an article at the Discovery Institute's website. The essay is lengthy and somewhat technical, but it's an excellent analysis of the problem of trying to determine what constitutes science and what does not. In the philosophy of science this is called the Demarcation Problem, and, as many philosophers have noted, trying to find the boundaries of science is often counterproductive and is in any event a devilishly difficult task.

Before concluding that Intelligent Design is not science and Darwinism is, one should read Meyer's article. It would also be good, for the individual of a philosophical/scientific turn of mind, to read Del Ratszch's Science and its Limits and William Dembski's Design Revolution.

Here's a switch. The ACLU is actually trying to get the authorities to put lawbreakers into jail. Surprised? Well, the surprise might fade some when you hear that the criminals are not cop-killers or child molestors. No. It turns out that the villainous rogues the ACLU is so concerned about incarcerating are school administrators and teachers who are defying a court imposed ban on school prayer:

The ACLU expends vast resources to keep criminals, even felons, out of prison, but strives to bring the hammer down on Christians who choose to practice civil disobedience. Wonderful folks, those lawyers at the ACLU.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has an interesting test that will pigeon-hole your ideological predilections for you. As with all such tests, some of the questions are irritating because neither of the options given accurately describe one's position, but even so, the overall results seem pretty accurate. Once the test is completed a link takes you to a page which describes the typical person in your political niche, of which there are about seven or eight.

Viewpoint, it turns out, falls into the "Enterpriser" category.

Republicans have called for cloture on the debate over the nomination of Priscilla Owen. A cloture petition requires the approval of 60 of 100 senators, to end debate on Owen's nomination. Under Senate rules that petition must rest two days while the Senate is in session and will thus come up for a vote on Tuesday.

If five Democrats do not join with the Senate's 55 Republicans to give the GOP the 60 votes they need to proceed to an up-or-down vote for Owen, Senator Frist will probably carry through with his threat to change the rule and ban the use of judicial filibusters in the Senate. That vote, known alternately as the nuclear or constitutional option, is likely to occur on Tuesday.

Frist will need 50 senators to vote for the rule change in order for it to carry. He'd win a tie since Vice-president Cheney would vote as president of the Senate to break the deadlock. Assuming he has the votes, and it's highly doubtful he would move to vote on a rule change if he didn't, Bush's nominees will be confirmed, beginning with Owens on Tuesday.

Ironically, the only way the Democrats can stop the ban on the filibuster is to give Frist his 60 votes for cloture on Tuesday. If they do, then the vote to change the rule will not come up until at least the next nominee is considered. In other words, the Dems are in the position of being able to save their chief weapon of judicial obstructionism only by choosing not to use it.

A recent Zogby poll of 18 to 24 year olds finds that:

In other words, doing the right thing is important for a significant fraction of this age group only so long as it doesn't get in the way of their ambitions. Lying is wrong, for example, except when it's necessary to advance oneself or to keep out of trouble. Such devotion to integrity is not very encouraging.

The difference is that our grandparents believed that Josephson's virtues were objectively right, that they were grounded in something beyond ourselves. For many today virtue is entirely subjective and grounded in nothing more than our own feelings. Given that view, there really is no reason to embrace the virtues when they run counter to our own wants and desires.

There's much more on the survey at the link.

Ed Whelan at NRO poses the following scenario:

Democrats don't see jurists like Ginsburg as "extreme", of course, because they agree with her. An extremist, in their lexicon, is anyone more conservative than they are, which is probably 80% or more of the nation and probably every man who as ever served as president of this country.

Here are four posts from Tongue-Tied which show just how unwilling some people are to honor and celebrate the diversity which makes us a great nation, at least when the diversity takes the form of Christian displays and themes:

How many Christian students, do you suppose, would feel uncomfortable were the graduation ceremony held in a Synagogue? Why is it that the only people who seem to be tolerant of other peoples' expressions of faith are Christians? Just asking.

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Yes, and since the cross is often referred to as a tree in Christian hymns and writings, in light of our present sensibilities and our multicultural and interfaith society (whatever that means), we should demand that every tree in our public parks be removed forthwith.

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Evidently, swearing fidelity to, and respect for, one's spouse is hurtful rhetoric, but one wonders who is being hurt by it. The only people we can think of would be the women these men would otherwise be philandering with.

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That's a relief. It would be an additional relief to read that the woman who filed the complaint is receiving the psychiatric care she obviously requires.

Viewpoint has frequently observed that in order for there to be any meaningful morality there must be a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, each person simply decides right and wrong based upon his or her own preferences and predilections.

Dennis Prager has an interesting piece on this very topic in installment XI of his excellent series on Judeo-Christian values. One point Prager makes that is of some interest is that:

This will upset some who recoil from any suggestion that Christian ethics can be situational, but I think Prager is correct about what he says here. Even so, the important point is this: The choice people make as to how they should live is purely arbitrary unless they are following the will of God. If there is a God there is right and wrong. If there is no God then right and wrong are almost completely meaningless terms, and those who believe that God is irrelevant to our everyday life could not be more wrong.

Newsweek's decision to run a false story about military interrogators flushing a Koran down a toilet is of a piece with Dan Rather's decision to run a story, which also turned out to be false, about George Bush supposedly having shirked his National Guard duties. In their lust to discredit the Bush administration by any means necessary both have corrupted the profession of journalism and, in Newsweek's case, incited ignorant barbarians to riot and murder.

Ann Coulter spotlights the stark inconsistency displayed by Newsweek's editors in their decisions about whether or not a story should appear in their pages:

A year or so ago a bunch of Palestinian terrorists entered a Christian church in one of the Palestinian towns and proceeded to desecrate the place, spreading excrement and urine throughout the sanctuary and using pages from the Bible as toilet paper. Not a single Muslim, as far as I know, suffered even the slightest injury at the hands of an outraged Christian over this indecency. Nor did the MSM bestir themselves to expatiate on what disgusting swine those Palestinians must be. The American mainstream media only care about such things when they can be used to make their fellow Americans look bad in the eyes of the world.

Last month we posted some commentary on the 31st National Convention of American Atheists, titled Atheists Convene. We specifically noted some of the comments made to the press by Dr. David Eller, an anthropologist from Boston University. Dr. Eller has replied to our criticism of his remarks and his response can be found in our May feedback forum.

He makes three points which merit a reply:

First, he takes the word "belief" to signify a conviction held in the absence of evidence. This is, in my opinion, an idiosyncratic use of the word. The usual sense of belief is something one holds to be true. Period. It may be something that can be demonstrated (e.g. I believe the Pythagorean theorem), it may be something for which there is good evidence which nevertheless falls short of proof (e.g. I believe the universe had a beginning), or it may be something for which there is little or no evidence (e.g. I could believe that there is life elsewhere in the universe).

Dr. Eller specifies in his reply that he is to be understood as intending this last sense only. Very well, but then his claim that he holds no beliefs is rather uninteresting. There probably aren't very many people who hold a belief for which there is no evidence. We can quarrel about what constitutes good evidence and how much evidence is necessary to warrant a belief, but most beliefs people hold are based on some kind of evidence.

Even so, not all beliefs are based upon evidence, and I suspect that Dr. Eller holds some beliefs for which there not only is no evidence, but for which there can be no evidence. He believes, I'm willing to bet, that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong, that a Mercedes is more attractive than a garbage truck, that a Mozart symphony is more pleasant to listen to than gangster rap. He probably holds beliefs about all of these things, or perhaps their contraries, and yet I doubt that those beliefs are based upon any evidence more substantial than his own subjective preference.

Second, Dr. Eller writes: "if I cannot provide some facts or some logic to support a claim, I should not support that claim; rather, I should reject it, at least provisionally" but what facts or logic can he adduce to support this claim itself? If what he says is true then he should reject it as lacking factual support, yet he obviously doesn't.

We might also ask why a person is not justified in holding to a belief in the absence of supporting facts until the evidence against it becomes persuasive? Why cannot beliefs be considered innocent until proven guilty? Take, for instance, my belief that the world is more than five minutes old, that it did not come into being five minutes ago complete with an apparent history that it does not really have. I have no way to prove this nor are there any facts which support my belief that cannot also be explained by the hypothesis that the world really is only five minutes old. Yet, until I'm shown evidence which contradicts my belief, I'm perfectly justified in holding it, and indeed, would be perverse not to.

Third, Dr. Eller states that my unsympathetic treatment of his claim that atheism is rational but theism "holds onto peoples' hearts even as they lose their minds" is "ugly and condescending" and smacks of "a petty mind that enjoys bringing better minds down".

What I said that elicited these strong words was that "There are few sensations more gratifying to an academic than the satisfaction of knowing that one is intellectually superior to one's fellows. We should avert our eyes from professor Eller's unseemly arrogance, acknowledging that the pleasure he derives from flaunting his superior rational gifts doubtless makes the practice of it irresistible for him."

Perhaps Dr. Eller didn't intend for his suggestion that theists are irrational and atheists are paragons of Reason to sound like an arrogant manifestation of intellectual snobbery, but it does. Moreover, when he declares that labeling as arrogant his claim that atheists are intellectually superior "smacks of a petty mind which enjoys bringing better minds down" he confirms the very assessment he objects to. What sort of person is it, after all, who would insist that his mind is better than that of his opponents if not one who enjoys flaunting what he perceives to be his superior intellectual gifts?

I'm back from five days of birding the cloud forests of Costa Rica and am trying to shift gears from peering through binoculars at the unbelievably gorgeous Resplendent Quetzals which inhabit those remote mountain jungles to peering at a computer monitor trying to catch up with current events.

Evidently, the big news is that the MSM has disgraced itself yet again with a bogus story that this time has cost peoples' lives. Of course, bogus news stories are no longer news. Nor, unfortunately, is it news that the people at Newsweek, which ran the story about Americans having desecrated the Koran, were taken by surprise at the violence their story provoked. These people are amazingly naive about the world in which we live and they're oblivious to the harm their recklessness and mendacities do to real people who have to live in a world of gullible savages.

Newsweek has now admitted that its story was unfounded. We wonder whether they feel any remorse for the fifteen deaths which resulted from it, and we wonder what measures they will take to punish those responsible for its publication.

All in all it's a pretty depressing tale, and it makes me want to hop on a plane back to the rain forest. I think I'd much rather be marvelling at the beauty of Costa Rica's birds and other wildlife than read about journalists, eager to discredit the American military, printing stories which incite riots and lead to the deaths of innocents.

Dr. Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote a column for our local paper last Friday critical of Intelligent Design. His essay can be read here. I replied with the following:

Dr. Lockitch writes that ID theorists are being disingenuous when they claim that their theory does not require that the designer be the Judeo-Christian God. He argues to the contrary that:

This is somewhat misleading. Here are four reasons why:

1. ID theorists ask whether biological information such as we find in the DNA, proteins, cellular machinery, and cellular assembly lines of living things can be produced by blind, purposeless, undirected forces or whether they require intelligent input. It may be that we can never learn anything about the designer at all, but we need know nothing about it's characteristics in order to deduce that there must be one.

If it turns out that we are able to identify the designer of earth-bound life then of course we might ask whether or not this designer itself shows evidence of design, but it is hardly a criticism of ID that it seeks a more satisfactory explanation for the complex, information-bearing structures of life than that these are just accidental products of the laws of physics and chemistry.

2. If ID theorists are going beyond the bounds of science by seeking to take the chain of causation as far as our human limitations allow, then so are cosmologists out of bounds for seeking to probe the origin of the universe as far back to the beginning as we are able. What should cosmologists do if their researches lead to the conclusion that the universe had a cause outside of itself? Abandon their quest for causes?

3. An intelligent entity, even a supernatural one, is not necessarily the God most people think of. The God of theism is not merely intelligent but is in fact the greatest possible being. Nothing in ID theory leads to such a being. For all anyone knows the designer of life could be similar to a Platonic demiurge that fashions pre-existing matter into living things. Just because some ID theorists personally believe that the designer is the God of theism, however, should no more discredit ID than the fact that many biologists think that Darwinian evolution justifies atheism should discredit Darwinism.

4. Even if it should turn out that the designer is a being similar to the God of theism that wouldn't make ID religious. The assertion that a Creator exists is no more religious than asserting the existence of other universes. The belief that there is more to reality than matter and energy is not in itself a religious claim and affirming the possibility of its truth is hardly a manifestation of religion. It would only constitute "religion" if the ID theorist were to advocate some sort of human obligation or responsibility to the designer, which, of course, no ID theorist has.

Indeed, what do we mean by the word religion, anyway? How do we recognize it? Not one person in a hundred who voices the objection that ID is religion masquerading as science can give a compelling definition of what "religion" is. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy acknowledges that the term eludes definition. Some religions have a moral code, some don't. Some religions have a god, some don't. Some religions involve worship of their deity, some don't. ID neither entails the existence of the God of any major monotheism nor does it prescribe worship of one. The fact that ID may lead to an intelligence which transcends the universe is hardly grounds for calling it religious.

Doubtless many ID adherents are religious as individuals and would like to see ID used as a means to point others to the Judeo-Christian God, but then many Darwinians are atheistic and see Darwinism as a useful tool for turning people toward materialism or naturalism. Neither the religious motivations of individual scientists on both sides of the debate nor the religious implications of their theories are relevant to the intellectual merits of their ideas.

RLC

The fallout from appointing a Sunni as defense minister in the new government includes a surge in military enlistments among Sunnis. Arthur Chrenkoff has the story:

Chrenkoff concludes with this observation: "The Sunni involvement in the new government and new security forces is a nightmare scenario both for the neo-Baathist insurgents and Al Zarqawi's jihadis - it means the loss of their only constituency."

We are not at the end of this struggle, but all indications are that we are moving in the right direction. We suspect that if Zarqawi has been captured or killed the morale of the insurgents, which is already very low, will hit rock bottom and thousands of them will just pack it in. The foreign fighters, too, will look for other ways to fight their jihad against a foe that they might be able to defeat at least on occasion. We'll see, perhaps soon.

RLC

Brother Dick is out of town for a couple of days and asked me to post our anniversary message. In my enthusiasm of the fact that we have been online for an entire year, I hastily posted the notice but as it turns out, I was a bit premature as Monday, the 16th is the one year anniversary of viewpoint.

Nonetheless, a special thanks goes out to all of our viewers, yes, you, who consider what we have to say worth your time.

Thank you,

WSC

Today is the one year anniversary of Viewpoint. In the last twelve months Bill and I have compiled over 1060 posts and received over 28,000 hits on our traffic meter. Our sincere thanks to everyone who has visited us. We deeply appreciate your interest and hope to continue offering fare worthy of your time and attention.

RLC

Last month we cited the thread at Evangelical Outpost addressing the free will /determinism problem. It's a difficult puzzle, for which a satisfactory resolution has eluded philosophers for over two thousand years.

The fundamental question is this: Is there more than one possible future, or is the future wholly determined by our environment, our genes, and/or God?

Those who argue for determinism often make two arguments, one stronger than the other. The weaker is simply an untestable assertion that we always act in accord with our strongest desire. Our strongest motives determine our action. As many people have pointed out, however, this is based upon a tautology since our strongest desire is defined as whichever one we act upon. It's therefore true that we always act upon our strongest desire, but its a trivial truth.

We might break out of the tautology and define strongest desire as whichever one we feel most urgently, but then, since it is possible to act on desires that we're not aware of at all, the claim that we always act in accord with our strongest desire becomes problematic. The determinist has no way to demonstrate that we always act in accord with the desire we feel most strongly and his position is thereby undermined.

The determinist's second, more compelling argument, is based on the difficulty of stating exactly what is meant by a free choice. The determinist rightly points out that an absolutely free choice cannot be one which has no causes. If our choices, or at least some of them, were completely uncaused then they would be spontaneous, constantly surprising, and totally unpredictable. But if our choices do have causes then, the argument goes, isn't it those causes which determine the choice? If so, in what sense is the choice free?

We might say that if atheism is true there would really be no point in defending the idea that we are in some sense, at least, free and that the future is open. If atheism is true then the world is almost certainly a closed system of cause and effect under the tyranny of unyielding physical laws. There's no more reason to believe that human freedom can exist in such a system than there is to believe that opposite poles of magnets can choose not to attract.

What difference, then, does God make? The theist believes, first of all, that we are morally responsible. This is implied in the teaching of the Bible, but such teaching would be incoherent were we not free to make moral choices. Responsibility entails freedom to choose. We may be unable to accurately describe what that freedom consists in, but that it exists must be the case if we are significantly responsible for our actions.

Secondly, the theist believes that human beings have dignity and worth, but if our behavior is purely the result of mechanistic forces over which we have no control then we are little more than a particularly interesting form of laboratory rat with no dignity at all. We simply respond to the stimuli in our environment and the pressures of our genetic complement just like the rat does. Since human dignity and worth are the grounds for human rights, if we are just flesh and bone machines there really is nothing upon which to build any notion of "rights". Thus significant moral freedom is a pre-condition for human rights.

Thirdly, theists believe we are created in God's image. Part of what that entails, perhaps, is having the power to choose. God is not constrained by anything outside of Himself, nor by anything in His past that He does not choose. It is possible that we, too, share in God's freedom, at least to some extent.

Fourthly, theists believe that God is good and just, but we confess that these words must mean something completely different to God than they do to us if we are not morally free. If God has created beings to live a vanishingly brief time on earth with no freedom to choose their destiny and then to be divinely consigned to eternal punishment for living and choosing in ways for which they were programmed by their environment, genes, or by God Himself, then we at are a loss to understand what is meant by God's goodness and justice.

Immanuel Kant said that we cannot prove we have free will but we have to assume that we do in order to make sense out of our lives, but the assumption itself makes no sense unless there is a God who somehow grants us a measure of moral freedom.

Our belief that we possess a significant degree of such freedom is based on our belief that God is good and just in ways which are meaningful to us, that we are created in His image, that we are morally responsible for our actions, and that we have dignity and worth. No doubt there are atheistic materialists who believe in free-will but it seems that such a belief is inconsistent with their atheism. Take God away and there is no moral responsibility, there is no human dignity or worth, and there is no basis for believing we are free except the powerful conviction that we are.

In a Godless world, however, that conviction is a chimera.

The Fourth Rail has some analysis of the fighting going on in western Iraq in Operation Matador in which three Marines and over 100 insurgents have already lost their lives.

Perhaps one of The Fourth Rail's more interesting observations is this:

Belmont Club has maps and additional details.

The war is gradually, maybe even quickly, evolving from an indigenous insurgency to a foreign invasion. This is going to make it much harder for the radicals on the loopy Left to claim that the insurgents are just Iraqis patriots trying to expel foreign infidels. We're confident, though, that somehow they'll find a way to turn these alien fighters into naturalized Iraqi citizens.

See UPDATE below.

Word is passing around the blogs about a report that Abu al-Zarqawi has either been seriously wounded or killed in the fighting in western Iraq. The report is encouraging but there's been no confirmation of it as yet. Read Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail for more on this and related developments pertaining to Operation Matador.

A story at Fox News.com on work being done to develop a vaccine to slow or prevent Alzheimer's disease is encouraging:

Follow the link to read the rest of the story.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas makes the case at NRO for giving Priscilla Owen a straight up or down confirmation vote. The fact that a nominee of her caliber has been held hostage for four years to partisan power struggles by the Democrats really is unconscionable. Cornyn begins his piece with this:

The senator goes on to discuss her critics' objections to her appointment - a flimsy and insubstantial lot. The only reason for objecting at all, of course, is that the Democrats have to offer some reason for opposing her other than the real reason, which is that she's Bush's nominee.

The sooner we see that metaphorical mushroom cloud in the senate chamber, the better.

The Saudi government underwrites the propagation of radical Wahhabist Islamic beliefs in mosques all across the United States. A recent examination by Freedom House's Center For Religious Freedom of the literature that is pressed into the hands of the members of these American mosques has turned up some chilling material. Here's part of Freedom House's report:

We're sure that just as soon as the Michael Jackson trial is over the MSM will get right on this story. Until then we can thank Little Green Footballs for their vigilance.

The full report from Freedom House can be read here.

"The way in which the man of genius rules is by persuading an efficient minority to coerce an indifferent and self-indulgent majority."

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

If we substitute liberalism for the words "man of genius" in Stephen's quote, and replace "efficient minority" with the words mainstream media then perhaps we have a pretty fair explanation for the last half-century of American history.

Senator Harry Reid claimed recently that President Bush's judicial nominees, including Janice Rogers Brown, were "bad people". Senator Reid is evidently intent on proving himself a buffoon. It seems that every time he opens his mouth he says something astonishingly intemperate.

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters posts excerpts from an editorial in the liberal Sacramento Bee showing just how silly Reid is and how impoverished is his judgment. The post is worth reading by anyone interested in determining Ms Brown's fitness for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Little Green Footballs tips us to an article that our environmentalist friends ought to read if they can manage to wrest themselves away from bashing the president for his refusal to sign the Kyoto accords. The article comes from Canadafreepress.com and is written by Gary Pritchard. Pritchard says:

The rest of the column explains how the scientists have been blocked from airing their documentary on Canadian television. Apparently, these thousands of scientists have drawn conclusions about man-made global warming which are much at variance with liberal orthodoxy on the subject and must therefore be prevented from corrupting the minds of impressionable viewers with their noxious documentary.

The great liberal tradition of encouraging a free flow of competing ideas is dead in Canada as elsewhere. Today the only ideas that stand a chance of being disseminated in the Canadian media are those bearing the Left's stamp of approval.

We wish the Canadian scientists would bring their documentary to the States. We bet Fox would run it if nobody else would. There's a link at LGF to the full video.

Rush Limbaugh discussed a Roll Call magazine report today that Senators Trent Lott and Ben Nelson are working on a deal that would block the Republicans from invoking the "nuclear option" in the senate. Rush said:

This is essentially the deal floated last week by David Broder and Joe Biden and would allow the Democrats to veto Janice Rogers Brown and any other nominee they deemed to be "extreme". Rush had a lot to say about this that's worth reading (see here), and he says it much better than we could.

We'll repeat what we said last week about this, however. We're quite certain that if the Republicans cave on the matter of getting judges confirmed it will be the end of the Republican party as we know it. The need for conservative judges is the reason why a substantial number of voters cast their ballots for George Bush and other Republicans in November. It was the reason why Arlen Specter almost lost his primary race against Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania last spring and probably would have lost were it not for the endorsements he received from Rick Santorum and George Bush.

If Republicans show themselves unwilling to act like a majority party on this issue then conservatives will abandon it in numbers that will make the Israelite exodus from Egypt look like a few stragglers on a Crop Walk. Republicans scoff and ask where the conservatives will go. They'll go nowhere. They'll simply stay home from the polls and keep their check books in the desk drawer. And the Republican party will once again be the minority party it will deserve to be.

UPDATE: ConfirmThem.com has this from Sen. Lott's office:

We're relieved but still wary. These are Republicans, after all, that we're dealing with. These are people who couldn't find the political jugular if it was circled with magic marker. They think winning is not getting beat too badly. In other words, we'll believe it when we see the votes taking place for the judges on the senate floor.

Abu al-Zarqawi's laptop continues to bear fruit. The latest announcement of a captured high ranking terrorist is of what the military describes as a key associate of al-Zarqawi's named Ghassan Amin who was apparently a pretty bad guy. See the link for details on his apprehension.

Meanwhile, over the past several months, coalition troops and Iraqi security forces have captured or killed more than 20 of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's trusted lieutenants and other high-ranking network members, military officials in Baghdad reported in a written statement on Friday. Hundreds of other members of the fugitive Jordanian's terror network also have been captured and killed as coalition and Iraqi forces continue to degrade his organization, the statement from Multinational Force Iraq headquarters said.

This link has some excellent insight into how Zarqawi's insurgency is being worn down by coalition pressure.

Jennifer Wilbanks apparently has a criminal record, having been arrested several times in the 1990s for shoplifting. We just thought we'd share that on the off chance that anyone might be interested.

It's both strange and sad that her parents can afford a wedding with 600 guests and yet she feels compelled to shoplift.

According to Strategy Page those fourteen bodies which turned up recently in an Iraqi garbage were Sunnis, probably victims of revenge killings by Shia tired of being bullied by the Sunni and angered by the murders of dozens of their fellow Shia whose bodies were found floating in a nearby river.

If this exchange of murders presages a larger conflict between Sunnis and Shia the terrorists may finally be on their way to achieving one of their goals, fomenting civil strife between these two sects.

No Left Turns tips us to the meditations of Mr. David Velleman at Left 2 Right who offers a particularly lucid illustration of the existential problem which atheism poses to its votaries. He approaches the problem with this prelude:

Perhaps I wasn't tuned into the right news sources last Fall, but I don't remember anyone running for major office who indulged in "elaborately flaunted religiosity". Maybe Mr. Velleman considers it "elaborately flaunted religiosity" simply to acknowledge that one is a Christian because in the circles in which he travels, we may surmise, that's an admission which no one would dream of making, nor have occasion to.

It's a quirky thing about the times in which we live that complete strangers can tell us the most intimate details about their sexual preferences, they can inscribe their predilections across their t-shirts even, and we're supposed to take it all in stride like true sophisticates. But let someone happen to mention that he believes in God and is a Christian, and he's accused of elaborately flaunting his religiosity, a breach of manners so egregious that it causes the true sophisticates like Mr. Velleman to shake their heads in disgust and disapproval.

Mr. Velleman then zeroes in on the main point:

Mr. Velleman here puts his finger directly on the sore spot, presses hard, and even rubs it around a bit. His problem is that the project which engages his energies is quite an impossible task. Reason cannot provide a ground for moral values. Reason cannot even provide a ground for trusting our reason. Any argument which seeks to establish the trustworthiness of reason, after all, must presuppose the truth of the very thing it's trying to establish.

Mr. Velleman has been unsuccessful in arriving at a rational basis for his moral sentiments precisely because there is no purely rational basis for any morality except, perhaps, egoism. Reason can offer no answer to the question of why I shouldn't hurt others if doing so benefits me and if I can get away with it. Indeed, reason must actually condone such behavior. It inevitably leads to an ethic of might makes right. Any other outcome to his ethical inquiries can be attained only through one of Mr. Velleman's non-rational leaps of faith.

In other words, he denies the existence of God not because God's non-existence is something for which he has a great deal of evidence, but because he simply doesn't want the world to be the kind of place where a God might be lurking. His atheism, he would have us believe, is consonant with his high view of the value of persons. This claim must have an odd sound to the multitudes of victims of the sundry state atheisms which plagued the twentieth century, but never mind. The really odd thing about Mr. Velleman's last sentence is the complete arbitrariness of his decision to value human beings and the artificiality of the nexus by which he relates it to atheism.

If Mr. Velleman wishes to value persons that's fine, but if his atheism is correct, anyone who chose to treat persons cruelly instead of kindly would not be making a wrong choice, just a different one. There is simply no basis in atheism for his choice to treat people kindly. It's a decision he makes purely on the basis of his subjective inclinations and preferences which could as easily have been otherwise and which in other people are indeed otherwise.

Here's Mr. Velleman's predicament, indeed the predicament of most of his atheist colleagues: They want to hold on to morality while at the same time dispensing with the only thing which gives morality any meaning, the transcendent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator of the universe. If there is no such being then all of Mr. Velleman's moralizing is nothing more than emoting about his feelings. His talk of moral values may be interesting from a psychological point of view, but there's absolutely no reason why anyone should otherwise care about them. He can give his students no rational answer to the question of why he holds the values he does rather than some other.

One would think his reason would have shown him all this a long time ago.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called George Bush "a loser" yesterday. Well. One wonders what facts the senator calls upon to justify such a judgment. The 2000 election? The 2002 mid-term election? The 2004 election? The Afghanistan war? The Iraq war? In what, exactly, does Bush's "loser" status consist?

Perhaps part of the Democrats' slide into political senescence is due to the fact that they regard the above as instances of losing, and presumably consider Al Gore, John Kerry, and Saddam Hussein to be winners. Such an idiosyncratic view of success and failure might explain a lot about the Democratic party's fortunes of late.

If Senator Reid wants to see an example of a real "loser" all he needs do is observe what happens when he seeks to thwart the appointments of Bush's judicial nominees in a week or so. Unfortunately, given the Senator's perverse definitions, he will no doubt hail it as a smashing success for both his leadership and his party as one after another of Bush's nominees is confirmed on the senate floor.

Arthur Chrenkoff has some before and after photos which illustrate the hazards of the terrorist life-style. The profession certainly appears to have taken a toll on these practitioners. The last pair of photos offers an especially vivid lesson to those who are considering the pros and cons of taking up the trade themselves.

Bet you didn't read about this in your morning newspaper or hear of it on the evening news:

The insurgents are still capable of devastating destruction, but their targets grow softer and softer. Their attacks on Americans are generally thwarted or futile, and they haven't been able to successfully attack an Iraqi police station in months. The only way they can do harm, consistently, is by launching suicide attacks against civilians. It's no wonder that they've alienated most of the Iraqi population and much of the Arab world.

There are more details at the link.

Little Green Footballs tips us to a line of clothing, advertised at this site, which encourages the murder of Republicans. Sick folks at work here, to be sure, but this is no longer especially surprising rhetoric coming from the liberal left.

A quick perusal of the site turned up further evidence of the moral degeneracy of people who would emblazon their shirts with the words "Kill Republicans". One of the women who manages the site writes:

We'd finish the quote, but that's about as much as we can stand.

David Hackworth, war hero, author, and columnist is dead at the age of 74 after a battle with bladder cancer. Hackworth enlisted in the army at the age of 15 in 1946 and rose through the ranks to full colonel in Vietnam where he was highly decorated, earning roughly 80 medals.

In his later years he had become an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq.

More details of his life can be found at the link.

Common sense prevails:

The Guardian's Max Hastings finds himself dragged by the facts, his fingernails leaving scratch trails in the dirt, to grudging and qualified admission of George Bush's success in the Middle East. His chief criticism of what the administration has accomplished seems to be that he doesn't like the "triumphalist mode" that the White House exudes. Some of what he writes follows:

Hastings is holding his nose as he gives credit where it's due, but he at least has the honesty to acknowledge that much of what Bush has accomplished, though halting and precarious, would never have been accomplished in any other way by any other nation and certainly not by the U.N:

Although the Bush team knows how to wage war they are inept at diplomacy and stand to lose all unless they become more sensitive to the feelings of others:

We're quite sure that Mr. Hastings is not pleased with President Bush's nomination of the decidedly insensitive and unsubtle John Bolton to be our representative at the U.N. We're confident that Mr. Bolton is emphatically not what Mr. Hastings had in mind, but we wonder whose diplomatic skills he thinks the Bush people should emulate. Those of the esteemed Kofi Annan? Bill Clinton? Jacques Chirac? Gerhard Schroeder? Vladimir Putin? These men are exemplars of the art of getting nothing done while simultaneously filling one's own wallet.

For our part, we think the administration's diplomacy is working just fine considering the difficulties it faces. Unlike the gentlemen listed above, the White House's diplomacy is based upon a realistic assessment of the people with whom we must deal. Some of them, to be sure, can be motivated by emoluments, others can be moved only by fear, still others are intransigently hostile and must be dealt with by force.

The enlightened ones in the salons of Europe believe all men are vulnerable to the blandishments of reason and self-interest. They're convinced that everyone can be seduced by economic bribes if the seducer is skillful enough. Lacking ideology and religious conviction themselves, they fail to understand the power these exert in the lives of others, and have been making this same error since at least the 1930's. They couldn't see the true nature of the Nazis or the communists in the 20th century, and they fail to see what makes the jihadis so implacable today. Their blindness would be the death of the West were it not for men like Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush who have a clearer vision, who recognize that men are often driven by imperatives other than simple greed, and have had the courage and steadfastness to do what needs to be done to preserve us from them.

Former New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips has a delightful piece in Wednesday's Washington Post in which he indicts a number of commentators, but particularly the Times' Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman for their super-heated anti-Christian rhetoric, their secularist paranoia, and their utter lack of historical understanding. He notes that there have been 13 opinion columns in the WaPo and the NYT in a one month stretch between March 24 and April 23 which have been of the "sky is falling and it's the Christians' fault" variety.

Phillips then closes with this:

It's an outstanding column and we invite our readers to read the whole thing.

Recent days have brought us two very significant developments in the war against al Qaida. The first was the interception of a letter written to al Zarqawi by a mid-level commander named al Qusaymi who paints a bleak picture of al Qaida's situation in Iraq.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has some outstanding commentary on the letter. After analyzing its contents he concludes with this:

The other development is the capture announced yesterday of Abu Farj Farj al Liby, bin Laden's third in command. One wonders if his location wasn't gleaned from al Zarqawi's laptop. In any event, he himself should prove to be a treasure trove of information on the whereabouts and operations of other al Qaida bigwigs, perhaps of bin Laden himself and his second in command Ayman al Zarwahri.

Rolling up this terrorist organization is like rolling a snowball down a mountain. Pretty soon it gathers so much momentum that it becomes an avalanche. Each low-level prisoner has information that leads to others which in turn leads to others until top people are being smoked out. When the leadership is interrogated the information inflow takes a huge leap and the pace of shutting down terror operations accelerates even more.

One thing about all this that's important to remember. It's hard to imagine how any of it would have happened had we not invaded Iraq. When the administration told us that draining that swamp was essential to winning the war on terror, it was right. Had we not invaded Iraq, Saddam would bestride the Middle East like the mythical colossus, few if any of the terrorists who've been apprehended would today be in custody, Libya would still be producing nuclear weapons, Syria would still be in Lebanon, Pakistan would be an indifferent ally in the WOT, and the Arab world would be smelling the scent of victory over a decadent west which lacked the will to defend itself against the armies of Allah.

It's good to remind ourselves every now and then.

The problem with so much of skepticism is that it is self-refuting. Flaubert's aphorism is an example. If he really means that we should believe in nothing then he has to admit that he doesn't believe that we should believe in nothing. This, of course, is incoherent.

Flaubert wants to make an exception to his skepticism for Science, but in order to believe in Science he has to believe in a host of other things as well. He has to believe, for example, that Reason leads to truth, he has to believe in the trustworthiness of his senses, he has to believe in the orderliness and uniformity of nature, the reality of an external world, and so on. In order to place his faith in science he must set his skepticism aside, otherwise it's sure to get in the way.

Despite his silly assertion about throwing out all one's beliefs, Flaubert didn't really mean that we should literally believe in nothing. I don't think he was a complete nihilist. But it would be interesting to know what sorts of things he thought unworthy of belief and what his reasons were for not believing in them. Maybe a reader can enlighten us on the matter.

Professional scientists have for a long time been critical of much of what passes for science education in some American public schools. After reading this story in our local paper we're inclined to think they may have a point:

Let's see. Artis tried to avoid paying child support by demanding a DNA test and then sending his brother to submit the sample. How different Artis thought his brother's DNA would be from his own, the article doesn't say. Let's put a charitable interpretation on Mr. Hicks' scheme and allow that perhaps Artis and Walter are adoptive brothers.

A recent poll of Iranian students (Scroll to May 1st: Life and Liberty in Iran) at Regime Change Iran gives reason to think that if we can avert a military showdown with Iran long enough the fundamentalist regime might fall like a rotted tree in the winds of popular contempt.

In other words, only ten percent of respondents supported the regime at all.

The balance of the post discusses why the mullahs still retain their power despite their immense unpopularity. The analysis includes with this:

Perhaps we shouldn't place too much confidence in the poll results, since it was conducted over the net and there's no explanation of the measures taken to insure a representative cross-section of respondents nor of the measures taken to prevent fraud. Nevertheless, it is suggestive.

The discussion of what might trigger a revolution in Iran makes a very interesting and important point about the sources of Iranian resentments. It could be that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities will produce only a shrug from the people themselves. This could be disappointing, but it could also be good news if such an attack becomes necessary. If the popular reaction tends toward indifference it makes such an attack somewhat less perilous.

These are the sort of people with whom moral nullities such as Mike Whitney have cast their lot in Iraq. The following is a MEMRI transcript of an interrogation of a captured Iraqi terrorist:

These are the people that Mike Whitney is championing as the true representatives of the Iraqi people. These are the people he wishes would kill enough Americans to force us to leave Iraq. These are the heroes, in Mr. Whitney's eyes, of the Iraqi people.

These insurgents are not heroes. They are depraved savages and those among us who cheer them on share in their depravity.

There is a putrefying disease afflicting the soul, what remains of it, of the American Left. Mr. Whitney is but one instance of an advanced case of the sickness.

For more see Bill Roggio's commentary at the Fourth Rail. Roggio links to this report on Arthur Chrenkoff's site:

No doubt Mr. Whitney approves.

Newspaper circulation is dropping, in some cases precipitously. Circulation figures for the last six months at the nation's top twenty newspapers can be found here along with the percentage they have grown or declined.

Reasons for the overall decline are no doubt numerous and varied, but surely two of them are the rise of alternative media and the growing feeling among readership that many papers can't be trusted to fairly report and comment upon the news.

There's an irony in this. For years liberal newsrooms have railed against corporate America and have championed diversity in whatever way it manifests itself. Now their own corporate profits appear to be tanking, and they're being undone, in part at least, by the increasing diversity of news sources available to consumers.

I wonder if they're savoring this irony at the L.A. Times.

Little Green Footballs tips us to this exemplary illustration of what passes for moral discourse on the political left. Herewith some excerpts from a disturbing piece by Mike Whitney at Axis of Logic:

Whitney hopes that enough Americans die in Iraq that we pull out, even should his own son be among the fallen. This is the talk of a man who can barely control his hatred. The prospect of American deaths, even of his own son, is more attractive to him than the prospect of peace, if that peace means an American success. I wonder what he'd say if it was his son's head being held aloft by Abu al Zarqawi on a video of his son's execution: "Sorry, son, but you have to understand its better that you have your head cut off than that America succeed in freeing the Iraqis from oppression and tyranny."

The fact that Whitney thinks the insurgency, which is comprised largely of non-Iraqis, which kills Iraqis indiscriminately, and whose support among the people is falling asymptotically close to zero, are the true representatives of the people, makes him either demented, ignorant, or stupid, or all three.

We suspect Father's Day will be a rather subdued event in the Whitney household this June.

Stanley Kurtz has a fine spoof of the anti-Christian paranoiacs at Harper's whom he wrote about last week (see here):

The left had largely managed to keep its hostility toward Christianity muted before the November election. Since then, however, things have changed dramatically. They view Bush's victory as a result of the Christian conservative vote, and they realize that a Republican dominated legislature, elected in large part by Christians, is likely to fill the courts with Christian judges. Jurists operating out of a Christian world-view and a broadly conservative ideology will stop, and perhaps even roll back, our heretofore unimpeded slide into the cultural sewer, our march toward a purely secular society, and our growing death fetish. Such restraints drive the left into a rage, and their frustration and detestation of Christian conservatives has reached the point where they're unable any longer to suppress their incandescent hatred.

Hatred ultimately consumes those who yield to it, of course, but our concern is over how much damage these people will do, how many people they will hurt, before they self-immolate.

You can read Kurtz's whole essay here. Interested readers might also check out an illuminating piece on the same topic at Captain's Quarters.

Christina Hoff Sommers has a report at NRO on the recent spin-off from V-Day at universities all across the country. Political correctness being what it is, of course, the spin-off, called P-Day, has been banned at the campus which has pioneered this great social celebration. Amazingly, it has been dubbed "offensive" even though this campus, Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, has insouciantly observed the far more offensive V-Day for years. But then P-Day is the brain-child, as it were, of college conservatives.

If you have no idea what this is about or would otherwise like to read more, by all means check out Ms. Sommers' account, but understand, it's not for the easily shocked. As you're reading it bear in mind that the sort of goings on it describes are being subsidized by the activity fees you pay to send your children to these citadels of learning.

Steven Calabrisi at the Weekly Standard answers the question why the Democrats are so afraid of George Bush's judicial nominees:

Makes sense to us. The rest of his essay does, too.

Perhaps we're being too harsh, too judgmental. Perhaps we're leaping to conclusions about matters we know too little about. Perhaps we're being uncharitable. Perhaps. If so, we will apologize. Nevertheless, on the face of it, Jessica Wilbank seems to us to be a narcissistic whacko.

How could anyone with the least bit of consideration for her parents, her fiance, her friends and her community put them through the awful ordeal they endured for the reasons she has disclosed? This was not a young girl, frightened by an impending wedding about which she was having second thoughts, who panicked and lost her head. An adolescent might be forgiven her bizarre behavior, but this woman's 32 years old. She apparently thought little about the effect her decisions would have on others and indulged only her own desire to escape.

One feels sorry for the friends and family of Ms Wilbank, who are doubtless deeply embarrassed by her self-centeredness. Our sympathy for her fiance is mitigated somewhat, however, by the fact that he was very fortunate to have discovered this aspect of his betrothed's character before he tied the knot with her.

It may be that capturing Zarqawi's computer was even more important than capturing him. It could turn out that we get more information out of it than we would have gotten out of him, even if he allowed himself to be taken alive.

Dan Darling at Winds of Change discusses some of what we know about the laptop:

Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail adds this:

If there is information on the computer about al Qaida operations elsewhere around the globe, it may be that terrorists and their sympathizers have been quietly rolled up or eliminated over the last few months and major terror threats diminished. If so, those operations will yield even more intelligence on the global terror network. Al Qaida can still do us great harm, but the way things are going, a lot of Muslims must be thinking that it's better to be on our side than on theirs.