Let me see if I understand this. If you see two black men trying to break into a house you're a racist if you report to the police that two black men are trying to break into a house, even though knowing the race of the perps could be of value to the police in eliminating others as possible suspects.

At least that's apparently what we are to deduce from the experience of Lucia Whalen who, be it noted, did not mention the race of the men she was led to believe were trying to break into a home in her neighborhood:

Even if Ms Whalen had reported that the men were black, which they were, why would that be racist? And why should the cretins who are subjecting her to threats and ridicule be angry with her? She's just a good person doing her civic duty and now she's being smeared by the lefty blogosphere, which excels at this sort of thing, for reporting the apparent crime.

I remember the much-cited story of Kitty Genovese who was murdered by a man on a city street back in the 1950s, and although dozens of people heard her calls for help, few actually did anything. They didn't want to get involved. I can imagine that from now on no one who witnesses a crime being committed by a black is going to want to get involved by reporting it for fear of being slandered for his/her efforts. Easier to just let society crumble than to suffer the abuse of those small minds who see racism lurking in every cultural crevice and those fetid souls who relish destroying and defaming whoever they can.

RLC

Alas, no anti-torture absolutists chose to reply to my invitation to watch the movie Taken and explain why the Liam Neeson character was wrong, immoral, or unjustified to use torture in interrogating the men who had information on his daughter's whereabouts. A couple of readers did endorse Neeson's methods, however, and asserted that the circumstances of their use justified their employment. You can read their comments on the Feedback page.

RLC

The New York Times has an article that reveals the horrors Iranian detainees swept up in the aftermath of the massive protests over voter fraud several weeks ago underwent. Eyewitness accounts of atrocities perpetrated by military and paramilitary groups like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij that are outside the structure of civilian law enforcement are now leaking out:

I'm glad Mr. Ahmadinejad is concerned about the welfare of the detainees, but I thought the fact that their murders numbered only in the hundreds was already a sign of "Islamic mercy."

Anyway, more details of the abuses - which make Abu Ghraib look like a Sandals resort - can be found at the link.

One of the especially disturbing revelations about the events in Iran is the role played by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. Why is this particularly disturbing? Because one of the things President Obama wants to do once he has passed the legislation that is currently before us - health care reform and cap and trade - is to establish a civilian security force that will rival the military in its training and funding. In other words, he envisions a paramilitary force at the government's disposal pretty much like the Iranian mullahs have at theirs:

I wonder if he plans on calling it the Basij. I guess we'll see.

RLC

It seems like the only people in favor of the Democrats' plan for health care reform are people who haven't read the bill.

During a speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), who has apparently decided himself not to read it, questioned the point of being expected to do so. He said:

"I love these [House] members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill.' What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"

Well, the point, of course, is that you're getting paid by the taxpayers to read it Mr. Conyers, and if you don't have time to do it then it is criminally reckless of you to vote for it. Indeed, anyone who does vote for such a revolutionary piece of legislation without having read it should be subject to impeachment for malfeasance.

Many of those who have read the 1000 page monstrosity tell us that it's a looming disaster. It will, according to many analysts, end private insurance, putting tens of thousands of people out of work. It will take medical decisions away from you and your doctor and place them in the hands of some anonymous bureaucrat in Washington. It will cause procedures like colonoscopies to be rationed so that rather than getting screened every three years screenings could be extended to, say, every six years, thereby increasing your risk of colon cancer. It will increase waiting times for procedures like MRIs and CAT scans from days to months. It will deny certain procedures like joint or heart valve replacements to people who are judged too old, too feeble, or too heavy. The bright, clean clinics and hospitals that make our stays reasonably pleasant today will likely be deemed superfluous and too costly to maintain. And all of these blessings will cost us trillions of dollars over the next two decades.

Before you and your colleagues kill the best medical care system on the planet, Mr. Conyers, please at least have the decency to learn what you're voting for.

RLC

Rep. Michelle Bachman calls our attention in this video to the economic brutality and corruption involved in the closing of GM car dealerships across the land:

If you're politically connected, you can survive. If not, tough luck. If the Democrats behave this way with the people who own and work for car dealerships, how will they behave when government health care is the only game in town? How much bribery do you think there'll be as people seek to curry favor with congressmen in order to get moved up on the waiting list for a procedure? How much bribery will there be if cap and trade is passed and government bureaucrats control how much carbon a business can use and emit? When government runs things the opportunities for corruption will be massive.

If we want a model of what life will be like if the Democrats get their legislation passed, we might look toward the old Soviet Union. How's that for hope and change?

RLC

Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt and Affirmative Action Baby, has a column in the WaPo that I commend to anyone interested in the conversation about race in this country. As he does in his books Steele argues that affirmative action is not so much about helping blacks, it's more about relieving largely white institutions from the burden of guilt for past racial injustice. It's a way of gaining for themselves a kind of racial absolution. Steele writes, for instance, that:

In order to account for the elusive competitive parity latent racism and discrimination are assumed to be lurking insidiously in the nooks and crannies of society, always working to keep blacks from getting ahead. The proof that these malefactors are still in play is the occurrence of "disparate impact," an indicator not of black failure but of an indelible white racism.

I'd like to post Steele's complete column, but I refer you instead to the link. There's much more there that's worth considering.

RLC

According to Strategy Page, as North Korea moves toward chaos with the imminent succession crisis looming when Kim Jong Il dies, South Korea and China are increasingly concerned about the primitiveness of the refugees that are making it out of that prison state:

Meanwhile, those Norks who can are preparing to flee once the end comes:

Some senior officials are making escape plans, gathering portable wealth and cultivating connections in China that would be useful for a getaway. There is a growing consensus that Kim Jong Il will be gone within three years, and that after that, chaos.

The North Koreans have managed to stunt the development of three generations of their people by forcing them to live in a Marxist paradise. There's a lesson here for the rest of the world: The fewer freedoms a people have the more dehumanized they become.

RLC

There's a very good column at NRO by Charles Krauthammer on the contradictions in President Obama's health care reform plans. It's these contradictions (some might call them deceptions) that are causing the plans to collapse in Congress and with them, perhaps, Mr. Obama's presidency. As we said last week, if he doesn't get health care he'll probably not get cap and trade or another stimulus bill, and if he doesn't get these he won't be able to accomplish much else over the next three years. He will, in effect, be a lame duck after less than a year in office.

Indeed, after the disastrous week he had last week (staying with the wrong side on Honduras, a weak press conference on health care reform, putting his foot in his mouth on the Gates arrest) it would not be surprising to see his approval ratings drop soon into the low forties.

Anyway, the most important part of Krauthammer's column, in my opinion, was the spotlight he cast on the vast distance between Mr. Obama's claim that his health care reform agenda is not about politics and the absence in any of the Democratic plans of tort reform:

No plan that does nothing about the cost to health care consumers of malpractice insurance and defensive medicine can really be called "reform." If and when the Democrats address tort reform they should then proceed to clean out the $60 billion in fraud and waste in medicare and medicaid.

Read the rest of Krauthammer's column. It's worth the two minutes it'll take.

RLC

To get a sense of the sort of people our government has chosen to side with in the struggle for control of the Honduran presidency, read the article at Strategy Page on what's going on in Colombia between the Colombian government, the drug lords, and the leftist FARC rebels. Note the role played by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez and the similarities between ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, Chavez, and Ecuadorean president Rafael Correia. Here's how the report begins:

Read the rest of this report at the link and bear in mind that our president and state department are on the same side of the Honduran imbroglio as those like Chavez and Correia who are supporting the rebels and the drug lords.

RLC

Just because President Obama is trying to turn the U.S. into a third-world country doesn't mean that he was born in one. National Review Online editors think that we've had enough on the matter of whether Mr. Obama is constitutionally eligible to hold the office he's in, and I agree.

I don't have to see his original birth certificate, if such a document even exists, but it would be nice if we could have a peek at his academic records. I'm perfectly willing to believe Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, but I'm really curious about whether he ever took a course in economics.

RLC

We mentioned the other day Brad Pitt's claim that he was "probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it." Mr. Pitt is laboring under a misconception that's common in our culture that agnosticism is a completely different epistemic category than atheism.

That's not quite so. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God or gods. It comes in at least two varieties which I prefer to call "hard atheism" and "soft atheism." The hard atheist makes the bold and metaphysically indefensible claim that there is no God or gods. I say this is indefensible because it claims as truth something we can simply not know.

If there is a God presumably that is something that could be known, i.e. if God revealed Himself to us either in this life or the next, but if there is no God no one could ever discover the fact. So hard atheism is philosophically naive.

The soft atheist claims more modestly that God may exist but as yet he has seen insufficient evidence to warrant belief that He does. This is agnosticism, and it's a form of soft atheism because the agnostic lacks a belief in God but is, hypothetically at least, willing to entertain that God may exist.

When Pitt says there's not much point in thinking about whether God exists he's telling us that he lacks a belief in God but doesn't much care one way or the other. This is really a kind of soft atheism, probably very common in our secularized culture, that perhaps we could call short-sighted, or myopic, agnosticism.

RLC

Mark Krikorian writes at NRO's The Corner to fill us in on some of the new health care reform proposal's more unsavory provisions. Here's one:

Either shut down illegal immigration or shut down the welfare state. As we're seeing in California you have to do one or the other. If we don't it won't be long before Americans are sneaking across the border to Mexico to try to find work.

RLC

After listening to so many African-American talking heads on cable news offer thoughtless, knee jerk endorsements of Professor Gates' tantrum and the President's foolish decision to inject himself into the matter of Gates' arrest, it's refreshing to listen to these black cops speak in support of officer Crowley:

If liberal America wants to see what race relations could be like in America if we'd just start seeing each other as people and not as identity groups they should watch this video.

RLC

I watched the movie Taken starring Liam Neeson the other night and wondered what those who think that torture is absolutely wrong would say about Neeson's character's behavior. Neeson plays a retired CIA operative named Bryan Mills whose daughter is kidnapped in Paris by Albanian sex slave traders.

Mills sets out after his daughter and her kidnappers, leaving mayhem and carnage in his wake, in a pursuit that strains credulity but nevertheless wins the viewer's forgiveness because it's, well, interesting. Along the way Mills resorts to some rather unorthodox means of interrogation and it was here that I wondered about the anti-torture absolutists.

Let us, just for the sake of discussion, imagine that a man's daughter had really been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery, and the man found it necessary, in order to find and rescue her, to use methods which would give Eric Holder and Barack Obama an attack of the vapors. Would the anti-torture absolutist maintain that the man did the wrong thing?

Now if you are such an absolutist, before you answer the question you have to subject yourself to the movie, otherwise you might not appreciate the dilemma Bryan Mills faced. So, have at it. Let me know if you blame Mills for using torture or if you think he was justified, but only if you've seen the movie first.

RLC

Seen in Florida:

Unfortunately, if we get cap and trade and the Democrat version of health reform, you won't see many cars going to work.

RLC

Betsy McCoughey at the New York Post fills us in on the disturbing views of two of President Obama's close medical advisors. The first is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Here's what Ms. McCoughey tells us about Dr. Emanuel. Read it carefully and think about the kind of world these men would lead us to:

Evidently, convenience and comfort are amenities we should not expect in Dr. Emanuel's, and thus Barack Obama's, brave new world. Nor should we expect care for those beyond a certain age, the quality of their lives representing an expense the state shouldn't have to bear.

We've noted in the past that modern progressives are kissing cousins to 20th century totalitarian fascists. Drs. Emanuel and Blumenthal do nothing to dispel that notion. That President Obama is quietly surrounding himself with such men - Dr. John Holdren, his science czar, being another like-minded advisor - is not just disturbing, it's frightening.

RLC

The administration and its allies in the health care debate keep reminding us of the urgency of extending health insurance coverage to the 47 million people in this country who don't have it, but who are these people who are uninsured?

It turns out that most of them could be covered under existing plans, and many of the rest are illegal aliens and shouldn't be covered anyway.

Ramirez breaks it down for us:

See here for more data on the uninsured.

RLC

President Obama has admitted something (besides that he's a smoker) certain to win him the enmity of liberals everywhere. After all, it was just such an admission by George Bush that got him clobbered by the secular left, so we can expect that these folks'll be similarly dismayed and scornful of Mr. Obama:

When George Bush acknowledged his dependence upon prayer he was mercilessly ridiculed by some in the lefty media for thinking he had God's ear and that God might actually give him guidance. Surely, the sense of fairness and objectivity prized by such people will lead them to begin directing the same sort of scoffing and jeering at President Obama any day now.

Why are you laughing?

RLC

Susan Estrich is a liberal Democrat who has managed Democrat campaigns and served as an advisor to President Clinton and other Democrat politicians. She certainly has no political axe to grind so it's interesting that she would write this column, not because it brings a needed dose of common sense to the health care debate but because it makes President Obama seem kind of, well, irresponsible. Here's an excerpt:

Read the rest of her essay at the link.

RLC

Some people have been saying this along, but now there's solid evidence to back it up. Not everyone who is in a coma is completely unaware of what's happening to them. More significantly, some who are diagnosed as comatose are able to feel pain but unable to communicate that fact. New Scientist has the story. Here's part of it:

I think that's a considerable understatement. Remember the smug confidence bordering on arrogance of those who argued that Terry Schiavo could be starved and dehydrated to death without experiencing pain? I wonder what they're saying now.

RLC

Hot Air links us to an interview with actor Brad Pitt at BILD.com. Pitt is being interviewed on the occasion of a release of an upcoming movie and seemingly out of the blue he's asked the following:

BILD: Have you found happiness in life?

Brad Pitt (nodding): Hm - yes. I am on the path I want to be on."

BILD: Do you believe in God?

Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"

BILD: Is your soul spiritual?

Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.

No point thinking about it? What could be more important to think about? I'm reminded of a couple of lines from Samuel Johnson:

I guess when you're a movie star and you've made important films and dated important women you don't need to think about what it all amounts to so much. Blaise Pascal was intrigued by this uncurious approach to life and describes the strangeness of it in this ironical fashion:

It sounds like Pascal is describing Mr. Pitt, but perhaps his cognitive faculties suffered so much damage in Fight Club that his curiosity about things that really matter has atrophied.

RLC

The President seems intent on making himself look both small and obtuse in the matter of the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard. His comment was:

What do the problems facing the nation have to do with the arrest? Should the police stop doing their job just because the nation has problems? If all the problems were resolved would the arrest of professor Gates have then been in order? Was this an intelligent thing for the President to say?

Then White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, questioned about the flap as the president headed for two health care events in Cleveland, stressed that Obama "was not calling the officer stupid." He said Obama felt that "at a certain point the situation got far out of hand."

Well, Mr. Gibbs is splitting rhetorical hairs. The President of the United States said that the police, i.e. officer Crowley, acted stupidly. That's pretty much the same thing as calling him stupid, and it's certainly demeaning for an individual law enforcement official to be personally insulted on a nationally televised press conference by the most powerful man in the world.

Officer Crowley was insulted and President Obama was diminished. What on earth is the President of the United States doing calling a local policeman's actions stupid? Why did he feel that this was something, given all the problems the nation is facing, that he should comment upon at all? I can't imagine George Bush doing anything so graceless.

RLC

Why do so many contemporary atheists feel the need for religious services and rites? G. Jeffrey MacDonald of Religion News Service tells us about a new atheist fad:

There's more on the de-baptism "movement" at the link.

I wonder if one of the silly things Ms Gray believed as a child is that the process depicted in this video is the result of chance and blind forces hacking away for a few million years until they were able to produce muscle contraction:

I'm reminded of the quote from Francis Crick that biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. Crick realized that if people weren't careful and diligent when they considered the enormous improbablity of biological structures and processes they were seeing in their labs their common sense would overwhelm their commitment to materialism and then all would be lost. Maybe that quote could be incorporated into the de-baptism liturgy while de-baptizees are fluffing their brains with the hot air of atheism.

RLC

The other day we cited reports that the illegal referendum that Manuel Zelaya was trying to impose on Honduras had already been rigged. Now we have another report from today's Washington Times that charges Zelaya of having robbed the country's central bank of almost 3 million dollars:

The Obama administration and the rest of the left can continue to defend this guy if they want, but all it does is continue to deplete their moral credibility.

RLC

If anybody acted stupidly in this ridiculous affair it was the man who on national television labeled a police officer "stupid" while admitting that he didn't know the facts of the case.

A police officer gets a call from a neighbor that two men are trying to break into a nearby home. The officer responds and is yelled at by one of the men who turns out to be the homeowner. Because of the abusive reaction the man is placed under arrest for disorderly conduct. Now the officer is being called a racist not only by the homeowner but also implicitly by the president of the United States. That is simply inexcusable.

Evidently, it's racist in the minds of some to try to protect a man's home from a possible intruder if that intruder is a black man.

The homeowner, a prominent Harvard professor named Henry Louis Gates, is demanding an apology from the officer. The officer says he followed procedure, has nothing to apologize for, and none will be forthcoming. The ABC report linked to above certainly bears this out. If the report is accurate he shouldn't apologize, but Barack Obama surely owes an apology to the officer.

Fat chance that'll happen.

RLC

A recent article in Strategy Page explains how the Marines are adapting to the new rules of engagement in Afghanistan designed to limit civilian casualties:

The rules are appropriate. Curtailing civilian deaths is not only the moral thing to do it will also pay off in the long run by diminishing resentments among the people whose hearts we must win if we're to have any permanent success.

Even so, coalition casualties are rising, partly due to the new rules and partly due to the increased tempo of operations in Helmand Province. One sign that the media has recovered from the swoon it suffered at the thought of an Obama presidency will be when they start reminding us every day how many Americans have died in Afghanistan since Mr. Obama was inaugurated.

RLC

At the end of a post on Judge Sonia Sotomayor the other day I wondered if Democrats had forgotten the questiion that was on all of their lips when Clarence Thomas was nominated fro the Supreme Court, to wit "Is this the best qualified pick President George H. W. Bush could have made?"

Well, Richard Cohen, a liberal writer at the Washington Post, asks virtually that same question and comes up with an interesting answer. She's qualified, but hardly the best pick Obama could have made:

Cohen laments that President Obama declined to find a liberal to equal in quality of mind Antonin Scalia or several of the other conservatives on the Court:

In other words, in his attempt to play ethnic and gender politics President Obama has squandered an opportunity to appoint an exceptional jurist. Of course, it may simply be that there are no exceptional jurists to be found on the left, I don't know, but it says something about Obama's own frame of mind that intellectual excellence is to him secondary to political appeasement.

Parenthetically, I was amazed by a paragraph in Cohen's column in which he takes Sotomayor to task for her reluctance to condemn capital punishment. The surprise is not that he finds capital punishment an abomination, the surprise comes in the last line:

This last sentence is a bit of a stunner coming from a man who has in the past claimed to be resolutely pro-choice on abortion.

RLC

Last week I mentioned that contemporary progressives still have a certain nostalgia for the eugenic impulses of their 20th century forebears but are usually careful to keep their sympathies to themselves. Occasionally, though, someone says something, like Justice Ginsburg did the other day (see link), that causes eyebrows to rise.

I've been admonished for concluding too much from one person's slip, but it's not just one person who affords us glimpses into the progressive mindset.

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Houston to receive Planned Parenthood's highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award. Here's what First Things (subscription required) says about the event:

Now Margaret Sanger was both a eugenicist and a racist, a woman who saw abortion as a means of limiting the growth of the black population. That was a large part of the vision, perhaps the dominant part, that Mrs. Clinton so deeply admires.

I know some might be saying that just because Mrs. Clinton praised Sanger it doesn't follow that she embraces all of Ms. Sanger's dreams and hopes. Perhaps not, but given that this was the main force motivating Sanger's founding of Planned Parenthood it makes it a little difficult to think that Clinton did not have this in mind.

Moreover, some readers might recall that the left went into high dudgeon a few years back when on the occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday Senator Trent Lott praised him by saying he would have made a good president had he been elected when he ran for the office way back in 1948. Lott was just being kind, but since Thurmond was, in his early years, a segregationist the left demanded and got Lott's resignation as Senate Majority Leader. Praising a superannuated former segregationist, we were told, said something unsavory about Lott and, indeed, about Republicans in general.

Obviously, the same standard doesn't apply to Democrats like Ms Clinton who is "in awe" of a racist eugenicist. No one has called for her resignation, and hardly anyone has noted that her praise of Sanger's "vision" was arguably worse than Lott's compliment to an old man who had been in the Senate since before most Americans were born.

RLC

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania made a cold political calculation earlier this year and decided he could not defeat Rep. Pat Toomey in the GOP primary. So he bolted from the Republican party, with which he had been affiliated at least since being first elected to the Senate in 1980, and joined the Democrats. No doubt he thought this would win him enough Democrat votes to defeat Toomey in the general election in 2010, but apparently he miscalculated. Though holding a 20 point lead over Toomey in May, a new Quinnipiac poll shows the Senator today in a statistical tie with his nemesis.

Not only did Specter lose his seniority by joining the Democrats (though he evidently had been led to expect he would retain it), he looks like he may well lose his prestigious seat in the Senate as well. His only course of action is to support Obama's legislative agenda and hope that agenda will succeed. If he opposes it, which he might have done if he remained a Republican, he'll lose his party's backing altogether. If he supports it, and it fails either to be passed into law or winds up wrecking the economy, he'll lose the support of independents and moderate Dems. He has put himself in an unenviable position, but no tears are being shed for him in Pennsylvania where many people see him as an opportunist who's getting what he deserves.

RLC

Russ Douthat has a fine column on affirmative action in the New York Times. He writes that a good case could be made for the need for affirmative action in the decades after the post WWII civil rights struggles, but that there needs to be a statute of limitations:

After noting that by 2042 the United States will be a "majority minority" nation Douthat says:

For myself, I don't understand why affirmative action has continued this long, much less why it should still be around in 2028. Affirmative action was designed and justified as a means of racial reparations, a way to compensate those who had been disadvantaged by segregation. Now, going on three generations after segregation has ended, defenders of affirmative action say we still need it. Why? What evidence is there that racial discrimination is still a significant factor in American life? What social conditions, what metric, would the defenders of affirmative action accept as justification for the conclusion that affirmative action is no longer necessary?

The most frequently cited example of the need for affirmative action today is the paucity of minorities in certain fields, but racial discrimination isn't the only, or even the best, explanation for that lack. How do we distinguish between competing explanations? The argument that the shortage of qualified minorities is itself evidence of discrimination has been threadbare now for twenty years. It's time that we insisted that in this country, just as no one will be denied a job or college admission on the basis of race, neither will anyone be awarded one on the basis of race.

RLC

Lest anyone doubt what sort of people the Iranian authorities are The Jerusalem Post gives us a good idea via an an interview with a former Basiji member who was himself briefly imprisoned for having released protesters from detention without authorization:

So what did he do during his adolescence that causes him regret? Read on:

A nation that institutionalizes this sort of behavior and incorporates it into its laws is simply evil. There's no other word for it. The Iranian regime deserves universal reproach, but Western diplomats and media, steeped in multicultural relativism, have lost their ability to reproach anyone lest they be accused of cultural chauvinism.

RLC

I'm not saying this report is correct, mind you, but it certainly seems to be genuine:

Manuel Zelaya had, according to the article, already fabricated the results of the unconstitutional referendum he was trying to illegally foist on the Honduran people when he was deposed. Whether the report is correct or not, it really is distressing that our president and secretary of state have thrown their influence behind a man supported by the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega, and are pressuring the Hondurans to reinstall him in office. It is to our national shame that we find ourselves in such company.

Meanwhile, here's the latest column on the Honduran situation from the indispensable Mary Anastasia O'Grady at the Wall Street Journal.

RLC

This is getting a little old now, but it's still worth posting because it illustrates how people who claim to be free of racist assumptions are sometimes prone to the most patronizing behavior toward blacks. Senator Boxer thinks that because Mr. Alford is black that he should hold certain views about economic issues, and because he doesn't have those views he needs to be tutored by the kindly white lady who will deign to patiently instruct the poor benighted negro:

Senator Boxer is like a character out of a Flannery O'Connor short story. One can almost hear her pleading with equal measures of exasperation and condescension in her voice, "Mr. Alford, here's what others of your race think about this legislation, why don't you be a good boy and think like they do?"

This is how some people display their racial broadmindedness, I guess, by talking down to the uppity negro.

RLC

In the controversy between Darwinian materialism and intelligent design there are four main issues over which the battle is joined. These are the origin and structure of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of species or diversity, and the origin of human consciousness. It's interesting that despite materialist boasts of epistemic superiority they have a theory for only one of these (speciation). For each of the others the materialists have no testable, empirical, scientific explanations at all. Notwithstanding, we're constantly reminded by experts such as Judge Jones of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District case that Darwinian materialism is science and intelligent design (ID) is religion.

Even the one theory that the materialists do have, common descent, often proves to be a procrustean bed for the facts that scientists uncover in their daily work, but even so, that theory is really not at issue between IDers and Darwinians. What's at issue in the debate is not the scientific facts, but the theoretical significance of those facts. The materialist says that the universe, life, and consciousness each has a purely material explanation even if they haven't the haziest idea what it could be, and the IDer says that the scientific evidence that we have in each of these areas points most plausibly to intelligent agency.

Now comes a book by Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, that shows the utter inadequacy of materialist explanations for the origin of life. SIC may well prove to be a game-changer in the debate over whether the origin of life can be explained in purely physical terms. Surely if Judge Jones had read it he would have been hard pressed to arrive at the conclusions he did. SIC will make it very difficult for future critics of ID to get away with some of their traditional accusations and arguments.

In his book Meyer accomplishes a number of things: He demonstrates in convincing fashion the sheer implausibility of any materialist explanation for the DNA enigma, i.e. the origin in the genetic material of specified functional information. He methodically makes the case that of the possible explanations for the digital code inscribed on nucleic acid molecules - chance, physical law, a combination of chance and law, or intelligent purpose - the best is clearly intelligent provenience. He also takes on just about all of the common objections to ID, especially those which arose in the 2005 Dover trial, and one by one shows each of them to be lacking in any real force. The complaint that ID is religious, that it's not science, that it's a souped up version of creationism, that it's not testable, makes no predictions, and leads to no research are all addressed and thoroughly refuted.

His argument is so thorough and so devastating to materialism that many readers will find themselves wondering how anyone could still embrace it.

Meyer adopts an interesting format for his book. He weaves the science and philosophy together with his personal intellectual biography to trace how he came to hold the views he does.

The book is long (508 pages) and not every chapter will interest those who may not have much background in cell biology, but he makes every topic accessible even to the scientifically uninitiated. He unravels the argument throughout the book, but for me his discussion in the epilogue of how information is not only coded straight forwardly on the DNA molecule, but how the same nucleotide sequences can code for different proteins depending on a host of complex biochemical conditions, much like a word can have multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used, was of special interest. His explanation, too, of how information is stored not only in nucleic acids but also in structures in the cell, and indeed the very structure of the cell itself, was fascinating.

To get an idea of how astonishing this is imagine a page of text. The text itself has one meaning, but if it appears on a certain kind of paper it might take on additional meanings. Moreover, if you read, say, every third word yet another meaning would come to light, or if you read the text backwards still another meaning would be revealed. The information in the cell has this kind of complexity. Intelligent cryptologists can create this sort of code, but blind chance and physical forces have never been known to do so, nor, as a matter of probability, is there any but the most nominal chance that they could.

There've been a number of books that everyone interested in the intelligent design controversy should read. They're classics in the history of the attempt to legitimize intelligent agency as an explanatory cause of physical events. Some of these are: Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson, Evolution: a Theory in Crisis and Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton, Darwin's Black Box and Edge of Evolution by Michael Behe, The Design Inference and The Design Revolution by Bill Dembski, among others.

SIC makes such a powerful case and covers so much ground that I'll be surprised if it doesn't join this list in becoming a classic, not just in the literature of the debate over intelligent design, but also in the popular science literature as well.

RLC

One of the dangers of front-loading all of one's major legislative goals into the first six months of a presidency, as Barack Obama has done, is that if he fails to get cap and trade and health care reform, his agenda will pretty much grind to a halt. It'll be extremely difficult for him to recover his political momentum and do anything much after these signature items have gone down in flames. He'll be a lame duck with three years left to go in his first term.

That these items will fail to be enacted is much more likely if unemployment continues to rise into double digits, and people have the sense that the stimulus was a boondoggle. Confidence in the president and his prescriptions for the nation's problems will evaporate and it'll be very hard for him to muster support for anything else he wants to do.

This is why the president seeks to impress upon us a sense of urgency. It's crucial that congress rush these bills to a vote, not because they must be enacted soon - much of the health care legislation would not take effect until three years after the bill is signed - but because he knows that they will never get passed if the economy worsens further. He also knows that the more time people have to ponder what his legislation entails the more the opposition to it will mount.

The Catch-22 is that the President has to get these bills passed before the economy gets worse, but if he passes them it's almost certain that that in itself will make the economy worse.

RLC

The author of Angela's Ashes, one of the best books of the last twenty years, died Sunday of complications from skin cancer. Frank McCourt was 78 and his story of growing up poor in Ireland was read and loved by millions around the world. The book won a Pulitzer Prize when it came out a dozen or so years ago.

The Daily News has a story by Denis Hamil that gives us a glimpse of what Frank McCourt was like. If you read Angela's Ashes you'll want to read Hamil's column.

If you've never read Angela's Ashes I can't think of a better book to take to the beach.

RLC

It's the conviction of David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a religious research organization, and his co-author, Gabe Lyons, that Christianity has an image problem. Kinnaman and Lyons are two young men who set out to determine through polling and interviews exactly what young people (18-40) who stood outside the faith thought of Christianity and Christians.

They published their findings two years ago in an excellent book titled Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks of Christianity, and the results aren't flattering. Fairly or unfairly, justifiably or unjustifiably, pluralities of younger adults see Christians as hypocritical, insincere, homophobic, naive, too political, and judgmental.

Now this is not how Christians see themselves, of course, and so the news is hard to take. Nevertheless, whether there are good grounds for thinking this way of Christians or not, and the authors cite a lot of anecdotal evidence that certainly justifies at least some of these perceptions, this is how millions of "outsiders" do in fact see those who claim to be followers of one who was none of those things.

Though not without its irritations, this is a book that every Christian, certainly every Christian in leadership or ministry positions, really should read. Only by knowing what those outside the church have experienced and come to believe about Christianity can there be any chance of changing those beliefs.

Kinnaman and Lyons give a chapter to each of the perceptions listed above and explain how they arrive at their conclusions. For example, their data show that in the cohort of outsiders from 16 to 29 years of age 91% think Christians are (a lot or some) antihomosexual, 87% think Christians are judgmental, and 72% think they're out of touch.

Don't think, though, that the book is just page after page of statistics. The stats are just a small part of the information Kinnaman and Lyons provide. Much of the book is comprised of stories like that of a woman who sought help in dealing with her troubled son but received instead lectures from the women in the church about her status as an unmarried mother. She left.

Such stories are depressing, but Christians need to hear them. Only by seeing how others see us can we change those things about us which can be, and need to be, changed.

Buy two copies of Unchristian - one for you and one for your pastor. It can be ordered here.

RLC

Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent calls our attention to a Wall Street Journal article by Gautam Naik from last May. Naik was writing on the weird, Alice-in-Wonderland world of quantum physics where none of the laws of our everyday experience apply. He says:

In other words, the world of our everyday experience may not be at all the way the world really is. Our perceptions could well be illusions that result from the fact that we are a certain size and observe the world from a particular perspective. Ultimate reality could be very much different than what we imagine it to be.

Put another way, at a very fundamental level the universe is observer-dependent. The distinction between objective reality and subjective reality is smeared and hazy. The world turns out to be contingent in many ways, perhaps in every way, upon observing minds.

Quantum properties are not understood but they are nonetheless being exploited in a lot of technologies, some of which are discussed in the remainder of the article. It's fascinating stuff.

As I mentioned above, quantum mechanics suggests to some scientists that the reality we see is a kind of illusion. Christian theologians have been saying this for millenia, of course, and in fact, we discussed this on Viewpoint in a little more detail here. I wrote there, in part, that we might:

That scientists are beginning to discern a deeper, mind-based level of reality reminds me of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers:

Or, in the words of Sir James Jeans, "The world is beginning to look more like a grand idea than a great machine."

RLC

Betsy McCaughey's column at the New York Post opens with these disturbing graphs:

Unfortunately, it gets no better as the column continues. Especially troubling, in addition to the cost and the inconvenience, is McCaughey's assertion that part of the expense of the new program is to be defrayed by reducing medicare benefits to the elderly. Please read it all to gain a clearer picture of what the Democrats are trying to do to your health care. Also keep in mind that although congress wants to impose this on the rest of us, they will not be subject to it themselves.

Meanwhile, one Canadian's testimony doesn't mean everything, but it should count for something:

The Democrats under President Obama want to replace the best health care system in the world with a bureaucratic nightmare that organizationally looks like this:

Everyone who thinks this'll make health care choices simpler and easier to navigate raise your hand.

RLC

From Strategy Page:

Check out their plan at the link. Despite the fact that al Qaeda has experienced severe setbacks they're still convinced that Allah is on their side and will give them total world domination within ten years.

Exit question: If you were an al Qaeda foot soldier committed to the plan outlined at the link would you consider the election of Barack Obama and Democratic control of the Congress a sign of Allah's favor or his displeasure?

RLC

Richard Mouw wishes to take polite exception to a rather surprising claim by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church. In a brief essay at Christianity Today Mouw writes this:

One wonders why Jefferts Schori thinks heretical the idea that we are each accountable to God, and that we, as individuals, can gain eternal life. Upon what, exactly, does she base this strange notion? The Bible? Christian tradition? Maybe, like lots else that issues forth from the cogitations of our mainline bishops and theological poobahs, she just made it up.

RLC

McClatchy has a report by Dion Nussenbaum on investigations into the conduct of the Israeli military forces during their operation last winter in Gaza against Hamas. Much of it is troubling.

I have no sympathy for Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization committed to the destruction of the Israeli state and the murder of its citizens. I thought at the time that the Israelis should have continued the fight until they had utterly eliminated Hamas as a functioning organization. Even so, without impugning men who must make excruciating decisions in the pressure cooker of combat, I also want to affirm the necessity that wars fought by civilized people against barbarians still be fought by the precepts of Just War theory.

The problem is not that the Israeli government doesn't agree, but rather that the training of its officers needs to be improved so that every one of them agrees as well. In the case of the Gaza conflict, apparently, there were too many cases when it wasn't clear that mid-level officers understood what was acceptable and what was not.

Here are just two excerpts from Nissenbaum's report. There are more at the link:

That this testimony is true seems hard to deny since it's doubtful that dozens of soldiers would lie about these things. How widespread such abuses were is less clear. That they violated both Israeli law and war doctrine is certain. They reveal a lacuna in the training of Israeli troops that the government should remedy forthwith.

There are more accounts at the link along with Israeli Defense Forces denials of the accuracy of the testimony. Read them and decide for yourself and keep in mind that the Israelis are facing an enemy which couldn't care less whether its troops commit atrocities. Indeed, they encourage it.

RLC

Evidently, even leftist law professionals are disgusted with the prevarications of Sonia Sotomayor in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This quote is from a liberal law professor at Georgetown, Mike Seidman, after her second day of testimony:

Actually, she wouldn't sacrifice a position on the Court if she told the truth. The Democrats are crooning and gushing over her and have more than enough votes to confirm her no matter what she says, unless she blunders by saying something nice about George Bush or Dick Cheney.

It's the fact that she has nothing to lose by telling the truth that makes her unwillingness to do so all the more distressing to observers both left and right.

Quick Quiz: Liberals beat George Bush the elder over the head with one question in particular when he nominated Clarence Thomas to serve on the Supreme Court. Do you know what it was?

Answer: "Is Judge Thomas really the best qualified person that President Bush could have found to nominate to the Supreme Court, or did he nominate Thomas just to curry favor with African-Americans?"

I wonder why liberals have forgotten to raise that question this time around with another minority nominee.

Thanks to The Volokh Conspiracy for the Seidman quote.

RLC

No sooner do I post a meditation on how biologists might profit from a little philosophical training than along comes an article to illustrate the very point I was making.

First a little background. Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, a recently released book on the evidence for intelligent design found in the cells of living things, wrote a brief piece on ID for the Boston Globe. In it Meyer mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was sympathetic to design as an explanation for natural phenomena.

This affront to Mr. Jefferson's honor was evidently more than a young gentleman and science writer by the name of Ewen Callaway could bear. Rising to defend the reputation of the defamed Mr. Jefferson against Meyer's unconscionable calumny, Callaway wrote a rebuttal which is currently appearing at New Scientist.

Callaway's refutation of Meyer consists in deriding his claim that Jefferson approved of the design hypothesis by stating in no uncertain terms that Jefferson was staunch in his belief in the separation of church and state and would never have approved of teaching ID in public schools.

I know you're scratching your head wondering what teaching ID in schools has to do with being sympathetic to the notion of a cosmic designer, but that's what Mr. Callaway said. You can check it out for yourself at the link.

Meyer never mentioned anything about teaching ID in public schools, and in fact the organization he represents, The Discovery Institute, is decidedly cool to the idea, but that doesn't deter Mr. Callaway. See if you can follow the logic here:

Now, Callaway had led us to believe he would give us a fulminating rejoinder to Meyer's libel of Mr. Jefferson, but in the event he meekly admits that Meyer is right. This is a rather peculiar way to go about discrediting an opponent's argument, and it seems as if Callaway at some level senses his blunder. Seeking to recover the thread of his objection he goes on to inform us of what Meyer doesn't say about Jefferson:

So there. ID is religion, don't you know, and Jefferson would have had none of it in public schools if there were such things back then, therefore Jefferson was not sympathetic to purposeful design, and Meyer is a big boob for saying that he was. Or something like that. I don't have it all figured out yet.

But Callaway is not done pelting Meyer's Globe article with rhetorical wiffle balls:

Callaway oddly faults Meyer for failing to believe what no one has ever demonstrated to be even possible, that specified complexity - meaningful, functional information - can be produced by something other than a mind. Neither Callaway nor anyone else can say how the coded information on the DNA molecule could have arisen purely by natural, physical processes, but this fact is of no consequence when you just know that somehow it must have happened.

To say that the existence of the building blocks of DNA were present in the early earth, something Mr. Callaway can't possibly know, and that therefore it's a mere hop, skip and a jump to self-replicating, protein transcribing, cell regulating nucleic acid molecules is called "wave of the wand" theorizing. It's equivalent to saying that if a billion monkeys were afforded access to typewriters the complete works of Shakespeare would be inevitable. Given the myriad difficulties and improbabilities, why should anyone believe such a thing?

Callaway, like a desperate boxer who finds himself losing to a superior opponent in the final round, swings wildly at Meyer hoping for a knockout, but all he does is embarrass himself:

Well, so far it's Mr. Callaway who bears the trophy for lazy and wrongheaded. And also ignorant. If he were better informed he would be aware that the Cambridge-educated Dr. Meyer has just written a marvelously researched 508 page book on the very topic upon which Mr. Callaway is at such pains to demonstrate his ignorance. I wonder whether Mr. Callaway has made the effort to read Meyer's book or whether he finds it more agreeable and less intellectually taxing to simply go about waving the wand and launching ineffectual haymakers.

RLC

Bradford at Telic Thoughts discusses atheistic biologist Jerry Coyne's argument against the compatibility of science and religion. In the course of the post Bradford quotes Coyne saying this:

This is an incredibly silly thing for a scientist, especially an atheistic materialist, to say. Two words scientists should use with the utmost caution are "can't happen." I addressed the philosophical problems with Coyne's claim in an earlier series of posts and refer the interested reader to it.

For now, I simply wish to mention that whenever a scientist says something "can't happen" it reminds me of the story of the discovery of the chemical composition of the sun. Back in the 1850s Auguste Comte sought to put a limit on what man would be able to discover. He thought and thought and emerged from his ruminations with the seemingly unassailable claim that it would be forever impossible to learn what the sun was made of. That seemed plausible enough back in those days, but just two years after his death in 1857, Kirchoff and Bunsen used spectroscopic analysis, which reveals a kind of chemical fingerprint, to determine that the sun was made mostly of hydrogen. Indeed, another constituent, helium, was discovered on the sun before it was found on earth, and Comte's prediction was consigned to the ash heap of famous last words.

Anyway, even were we to play Coyne's game and agree that the laws of nature make certain things nomologically impossible, surely one of the things that "can't happen" is for mere chance and physical law to produce functional, specified information. It's never happened as far as we've ever been able to ascertain and no one has ever been able to figure out how it even could happen. Yet Coyne believes that exactly this miracle occurred when the first living cells emerged despite the fact that other atheistic scientists (e.g. Fred Hoyle) put the odds against it in excess of 10 to the 40,000 power to 1.

How anyone who can blithely believe that something this incomprehensibly improbable nevertheless happened and yet scoff at the claim that a virgin conceived or a man revivified is certainly beyond me.

RLC

House Democrats continue to make caricatures of themselves in their Ahab-like obsession with being able to hold aloft at least one Bush administration scalp before the Bushies all fade from the scene. In the news lately is the prospect of investigations aimed ultimately at planting their tomahawks firmly in the noggin of their chief bugaboo, Dick Cheney.

It seems that Cheney, as Vice-President, is being accused of having ordered the CIA to conceal certain secret operations from the relevant House oversight committee and now the members of the committee are miffed and vexed.

The funny part of this is that, according to Hot Air, the secret operation was revealed by the New York Times in 2002, the plan was never implemented which means that the Agency was under no obligation to tell Congress about it, and the former CIA Director denies having ever been told by Cheney to withhold information about this or any other operation.

Meanwhile, morale at the Agency deteriorates as does public approval of Nancy Pelosi and her congressional minions.

Like Wile E. Coyote growing ever more desperate to get his paws on the Road Runner, congressional coyotes keep having their hopes dashed as dynamite sticks blow up in their hands, cliffs keep being overrun, and railroad trains keep flattening them just as their goal seems within their grasp. But, like Wile E., they keep picking themselves up, brushing themselves off, and setting themselves up for the next train to run them over.

It's pretty funny. Maybe it'll be a Saturday morning cartoon show someday.

RLC

In the movie Leap of Faith a traveling evangelist played by Steve Martin preys upon and bilks innocent, unsophisticated rural Americans by exploiting their willingness to believe that he's capable of genuine miracles. They're duped by Martin's manipulation of their gullibility and blind faith. The movie's pretty funny, actually, but when this sort of thing happens in real life it's not so funny.

One instance of people's faith being exploited to cajole them out of their money is given to us in a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times in which Krugman preaches on the apocalypse prophesied in the gospel according to Al Gore:

Perhaps so, but its hard to understand why we should believe we're on the brink of the eschaton if compelling evidence for it is so thin that it cannot be convincingly confirmed and won't be seen for generations. It sounds like we're being asked by the Reverend Krugman to accept the catastrophic consequences of climate change on sheer, blind faith.

Former atheist philosopher Antony Flew once famously wrote that the problem with religious belief is that no evidence is ever allowed to count against it. If the weather is good it's proof of God's blessing. If the weather is bad it's proof of God's judgment. There's no way to falsify such beliefs.

Likewise with the theology of global warming. If the temperature shows an uptick then that's cited as proof that atmospheric carbon is causing the earth to warm and soon we'll all be inundated by rising seas. If the temperature drops, as it did in the 70s, that's proof that atmospheric carbon is causing the earth to cool and soon New York City will be covered by glaciers.

If we're going to allow the evangelists of global warming to fleece and bankrupt the nation in order to reduce carbon emissions and line their own pockets with the profits gleaned from carbon offsets and the like then Reverend Krugman and others who wish to put our economy on a crisis footing need to demonstrate six things:

I'm not saying that these cannot be demonstrated, but if they have been it would be nice if alarmists like the Reverend Krugman would share some of the evidence with us instead of crying that the sky is falling and telling us that we should just believe whatever we're told by the global warming priesthood, especially those who stand to make a boodle if legislation like cap and trade is passed.

RLC

Stephen Hayward at No Left Turns notes that when President Obama visited Ghana he told the Ghanian Parliament that:

Hayward then reminds us that the U.S. corporate income tax is at 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world, and likely to go up.

So what does the President think raising American taxes is going to do to investment in this country, and what was he telling the Ghanians? That they're not taxing business enough?

RLC

Progressivism has a long history, steeped in notions of racial superiority, of favoring eugenics and other totalitarian solutions to certain demographic problems. One of the founding purposes of Planned Parenthood, after all, was to make birth control and abortion widely available so as to limit the proliferation of undesirable elements, both racial and intellectual, in our society.

It's this yearning for racial refinement that is one of the links between the American progressives of the 1920s and the German Nazis of the 1930s and 40s. It's also a trait both groups share because of their common Darwinian heritage rooted in notions of survival of the fittest and evolutionary progress.

For the most part modern progressives keep mum about these proclivities, like closeted gays intent upon concealing from others their sexual predispositions, but every now and then the totalitarian inclination toward eugenics bubbles up like an inadvertent burp. We caught of bit of this in an earlier post about President Obama's new science czar and his extraordinary views, and we hear another embarrassing hiccup today from none other than a Supreme Court justice.

Jonah Goldberg provides us the details:

Now, as Goldberg points out, Ginsburg might simply be stating the rationale of others for pushing for legalized abortion in the early seventies and not endorsing that rationale herself, though had she been, say, Antonin Scalia or Sarah Palin, you can bet there would've been some very aggressive follow-up questioning to ascertain exactly what she meant.

But Ginsburg's personal views are not so much the point as is the fact that she reveals an attitude on the "progressive" left that would be greeted with howls of outrage did it exist on the right. Contemporary progressives, or at least some of them, are still very much in favor of culling out the undesirables and purifying the race(s), but they know it's impolitic to flout their vision before the public eye, so it's kept in a closet from which it occasionally peeks and affords us a glimpse.

Read the rest of Goldberg's essay to better see what I mean. Better yet, for your summer beach reading, pack up Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism and/or Richard Weikert's From Darwin to Hitler. They're excellent.

RLC

A piece at Discover caught my eye recently. It asks whether a more thorough background in philosophy would make scientists better at their vocation:

The essay was primarily directed at the practice of physics, about which I cannot speak, but I do think that biology, or at least theorizing about biology, has indeed suffered for want of philosophical training among its practitioners, especially those who participate in the controversy surrounding the matter of the origin and diversification of life. Philosophy teaches one to recognize inconsistencies and hidden assumptions, both of which are pretty common among biologists who engage in these debates. It also teaches one to recognize fallacies of reasoning, like circular arguments, and it helps us to understand the difference between a metaphysical hypothesis and an empirical one, a distinction which often eludes Darwinian critics of intelligent design. Moreover, a little philosophical background might help more polemicists appreciate the difference between historical science, theoretical science, philosophy of science, and laboratory science, four different disciplines which often get confused in these discussions.

If biologists were more conversant with the philosophical issues related to their discipline there might be much less rancor and discord in the controversies over how best to interpret the biological evidence we have at hand, and there might be considerably more clarity brought to the question whether that evidence is best explained by materialism or by intelligent agency.

RLC

Stuart Schwartz argues that the reason the elites, both liberal and conservative, can't stand Sarah Palin and are obsessed with destroying all vestiges of her political influence is that she takes her religious faith seriously. I imagine that that's largely true. I wrote a couple of years ago that it was his commitment to Christianity that lay at the root of much of the elite hostility to George Bush. It also accounts for a lot of the antipathy that Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are likely to encounter if they throw their hats in the ring for 2012.

The secular elites, especially those on the left but some on the right, as well, are deathly afraid of any politician who takes the Bible as an authority on how one should live. To actually think that one could talk to God, that God might guide one in making important decisions, that God cares about how we order our lives, that evil is a real moral category, that there are moral constraints on how we express our sexuality, that God actually played a significant role in the creation - is abhorrent to our intellectual and social betters whose religion, if they have one, is a tepid, lukewarm deism.

Sarah Palin, like George Bush, believes in a muscular Christianity. It guides her life and is a lightning rod for the contempt, derision and hatred of people who believe themselves too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Having been to Ivy League universities they scoff at the plebians who presume to think there is really any such thing as Truth, particularly religious truth. They embody the cynicism of historian Edward Gibbon who wrote of the ancient Romans that all religions for the masses were equally true, for the intellectuals equally false, and for the politicians equally useful.

Schwartz does a pretty good job of lampooning the haughty superciliousness of the pseudo-sophisticates of the political and chattering classes. Check it out.

RLC

You can tell much about a President's frame of mind by looking at the people he appoints to positions of influence and power. In the case of President Obama those appointments have been troubling, including as they do a series of tax cheats, radical pro-abortionists, and leftists of various stripes, but perhaps none is more disturbing Mr. Obama's appointment to the position of new science czar, John Holdren.

Hot Air directs our attention to this report at ZombieTime:

ZombieTime has direct quotes from Holdren's book and they're pretty disturbing, not just because this man, whose ideas are frighteningly similar to those of the Nazis, is in charge of science policy, but because his ideas may not be considered objectionable in the Obama White House.

Perhaps the administration was unaware of Holdren's views when they selected him for this post. That would cast doubt on their competency, but at least we can expect the President will do the right thing and terminate his appointment now that he knows.

If, however, the administration does not dissociate itself from this man after his views have been brought to public attention then we have very good reason to worry that the President does not find those views disagreeable, in which case we have very good reason to be very alarmed.

RLC

We often hear that there's too much hatred in America, and indeed there no doubt is, but much of what's sometimes called "hatred" really trivializes the word. In any case, whatever the state of hate in America, it's strictly minor league compared to what can be found elsewhere in the world, even in civilized countries like, say, France.

Consider this piece from NRO:

"Allah Akbar," indeed. If Allah is at all just Halimi's torturers will, in the world to come, yearn to be back in the French prisons.

There are haters in this country, to be sure, and doubtless there are some individuals capable of doing to other human beings what these savages did to Halimi, but thankfully it seems we still have a way to go before we've degenerated to the level of barbarity that some Muslims in France have achieved. Thankfully, such acts of pure evil are not yet in this country front page news.

RLC

The LA Times informs us of yet another assault on common sense by the liberal left. This time it centers around whether a pharmacist has the right not to carry abortifacients in his/her pharmacy:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air offers this opinion. Unfortunately, Morrissey's opinion is so sensible that the jurists who sit on the 9th Circuit were sure to reject it:

How would Judge Sotomayor rule on this case? We may have an opportunity to find out since it seems that the pharmacists are going to appeal it as far as they can. We wish them luck.

RLC

Like many other Americans you may have wondered why in the world the Obama administration released back to Iran five terrorist operatives who had been captured in Iraq. You may have wondered why we would freed people who were implicated in the deaths of over four hundred Americans and countless civilian Iraqis to a government that is hip-deep in fomenting death and destruction in Lebanon and Israel, which refuses any concessions on its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and which is fresh off the rigging of an election and the murders of its citizens. What possible basis could there be for this shameful act of abasement and appeasement?

Andrew McCarthy offers a pretty good analysis of this question at National Review Online. His piece is compelling and not very flattering to Mr. Obama. McCarthy doesn't use these words, but he gives the impression that if we were being led by people who have no particular love for this country, no particular pride in either our history or our traditions - if we were being led by people who see the U.S. as the source of all the world's problems - they wouldn't govern much differently than Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats are governing today.

During the sixties leftist students demanded that AmeriKKKa be brought low. Those students have now risen to positions of power and influence and find themselves ideally situated to bring about the destruction they dreamt of in their youth.

Letting those who kill American soldiers go free, saddling the nation with so much debt that we collapse under the burden, nationalizing as much of the private sector as they can get their hands on, repeatedly apologizing to the entire world for vague historical shortcomings, and refusing to protect our national borders are all very perplexing policies, but they're not accidents or misjudgments. They're completely consistent with the belief that capitalism is evil and that America is the cause of most of the world's problems.

Read McCarthy's piece. It's worth the time.

RLC

Liberal talk show host Randi Rhodes says she has knowledge about Al Franken that leads her to believe that he'll make an awful U.S. Senator, but she refused to broadcast this information during the election campaign, leaving it instead to Franken's Republican opponent, Norm Coleman, to disclose.

Now she comes out, after Franken has been certified for the Senate, and says that he's a very bad choice for the job. Can you imagine any liberal who had information about George Bush in 2004 that would have changed people's minds about voting for him and not shouting it from the housetops? They were so desperate for any dirt they could find on Bush that people like Dan Rather were making stuff up.

Now Rhodes expects us to think that she had some noble motive for not discrediting Al Franken when she had the chance? Isn't it more likely that she knew she'd incur the wrath of her fellow liberals if she diminished Franken's chances against Coleman? Isn't it more likely that rather than put her country first she put her popularity and career first?

Anyway, courtesy of Radio Equalizer, here's her statement on the ascendancy of Mr. Franken to the Senate:

This is a little bit like watching a house burn down and then, after the place is reduced to ashes, calling the fire company. Thanks for waiting until after the election to tell the people of Minnesota they made an absurd choice for senator, Randi. What good does it do to tell everyone now?

RLC

Mona Charen brings us up to speed on the goings on in Honduras and also why Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a serious no-goodnik:

He also fired those military people who would not violate the Supreme Court's order and distribute the ballots. Anyway, Charen has more helpful information on the sort of democracy Mr. Zelaya had in mind for Honduras at the link where she also describes the tyranny Hugo Chavez is imposing in Venezuela.

Meanwhile the Obama administration has cut off military aid to the new Honduran government and is demanding that Zelaya be reinstated. One can only shake one's head at where our new loyalties seem to lie.

RLC

Earlier this year we posted a five part response to Jerry Coyne's essay in The New Republic in which he argued that science and religion are incompatible. The core of our case was that Coyne's argument was essentially confused and irrational.

Now Martin Cothran at Evolution News and Views wittily, and perhaps more succinctly, makes the same point.

The Darwinian materialists really are at loose ends trying to make the case for a purely materialist worldview without admitting that their materialism is really a mere philosophical preference that no one should feel intellectually compelled to accept.

Check out either our response or Cothran's essay to get a sense of the confusion and embarrassing self-contradictions employed by those anxious to convince us that religious belief is epistemically illegitimate.

RLC

Ecological benefits of global warming keep coming to light even though the articles that mention them rarely draw the conclusion that, biologically speaking, global climate change is not only not new, it's also not necessarily a bad thing to have happen.

Here's another example from New Scientist:

Why scientists should "fear" that ice-free summers will be typical of Arctic summers within twenty years is not made clear by the article. It seems to me that the appearance of a nutrient-rich habitat for wildlife is something that biologists would rather welcome, but I suppose there are the politics to consider. Not only is there a risk of incurring their colleagues' censure if scientists wax too enthusiastic about the advantages wrought by climate change, but all the global warming Chicken Littles will be implicitly rebuked, and President Obama will never get his energy bills passed.

RLC

Those who say that racism is no longer a problem in this country are simply burying their head in the sand. They choose to ignore the evidence that racism in America is as virulent as ever.

For example, Drudge recently linked to a gut-wrenching story of a group of about fifty white kids attacking and beating a black man and his wife and two children, along with a couple of their friends, at a Fourth of July fireworks celebration in Akron, Ohio.

The police are investigating but have so far declined to call this a hate crime even though the young thugs were yelling "this is a white world" and "this is our world" as they beat their victims with kicks and punches.

Surely there's something rotten in a society that turns out young men so prone to hatred and violence. What are these kids' parents teaching them, or as is probably the case, did they actually learn their hatred and racism from their parents?

What more reason the police need to make this a hate crime is hard to say, and, in fact, the reluctance of the police to file that charge strongly suggests that there may be some bigotry among the Akron authorities as well. It seems that some races are more protected than others in this country.

All of that is quite true and it tells us something ugly about our culture. The only thing in the preceding that's not true is the racial identities of the perpetrators and victims in this report, which were reversed, but you probably suspected that.

RLC

I know that DEBKAfile doesn't enjoy a reputation for utter reliability so I offer the following with that caveat. Nevertheless, according to reports at DEBKAfilethere have been between 5000 to 6000 Iranians arrested since the massive protests of two weeks ago. Other sources put the figure at roughly half that. Even so, a number of those arrested have made televised "confessions" and appear to have been tortured.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man who seemed to have actually won the disputed election that precipitated the mass demonstrations, may be brought to trial according to the DEBKAfile post:

Whether Mousavi is actually executed or not, it's almost certain that many others will be. The current regime was born in mass executions of their enemies and can't afford to allow the protests to continue to challenge their legitimacy.

President Obama needs to rethink his unwillingness to use force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He has gotten no help at the G-8 summit in Italy from the Russians, who are up to their eyeballs in complicity with the Iranian weapons development program, or anyone else, and without Russian pressure there's little the West can do to stop Tehran without using military means.

When the executions start in Tehran there should be a total blockade of oil and other goods to Iran, and if that fails to stop the mullahs then there should be a reprise of shock and awe on the nuclear weapons facilities in the country. The Iranians are a nation of sophisticated, civilized people ruled by an elite of Islamic Neanderthals. The world cannot afford to allow the Neanderthals access to the most fearsome weapons in history.

RLC

One wonders what will transpire between the President and First Lady when she sees this photo of her husband, Mr. Sarkozy, and an unidentified passerby at a G-8 photo-op:

And you thought that this sort of thing ended when the Clintons left Washington.

UPDATE: ABC News has posted the entire video sequence here, and it appears to exculpate the president. The photo above merely catches him turning to assist the woman behind him down the steps.

At least the video absolves our president. France's president, not so much.

RLC

I have a quirk that manifests itself just about every time I go to the beach. As I sit there in my chair gazing out over the ocean I can't help imagining what a one hundred foot tsunami would look like as it rose up just off the coast. I picture with a shudder how much death, damage, and devastation such an unimaginably powerful wave would cause to the entire coastline. I think a lot of people might be starting to experience similar fantasies right now about our economy.

Whether you think the trend illustrated by the graph below is good or bad will depend upon your point of view, of course, but I wonder if it's not an indication that a significant number of people are emerging from their hope-and-change trance and starting to realize that the current administration's policies are generating an economic tsunami.

The wave crest of a tsunami may not be particularly high at first, but as it approaches the shore it suddenly rises to enormous heights and wipes out everything in its path. People standing on the beach of our economy are seeing the surf suddenly rush out to sea. The ocean is beginning to swell and rise to alarming proportions in the distance, and many, especially among political independents, are gathering up their children and preparing to flee.

The green line represents those who think the President is doing a good job. The red line represents those who think he's not:

When people consider the cumulative effect another "stimulus" bill, higher taxes, the cap and trade energy bill, nationalized health care, and astronomical deficits and debt will have on their personal finances they begin to feel genuine fear for their future and that of their children. I suspect the above trend lines reflect that growing fear.

The really bad news for White House political strategists is this: Eventually the media may tire of playing the Washington Generals to Barack Obama's Harlem Globetrotters, and when they do these numbers will get much, much worse for the President.

If the media starts reporting the consequences of our debt and extraordinary spending binges voters will start fleeing the beach in panicked thousands as the tsunami looms high over their heads, and then that red line will shoot right off the top of the chart.

RLC

Mark Galli at Christianity Today writes that it's been a tough couple of months for evangelical Christians:

All of this is true, but too many of Christianity's detractors draw from these sad truths precisely the wrong conclusion. They occasionally think they're making some devastating criticism of Christianity by pointing out that too many Christians are no better in their personal lives than those outside the faith. That's a charge that cannot and should not be denied, but the question it should prompt is: So what follows from that? Does it invalidate Christianity that Christians are flawed human beings like everyone else? Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) claim to be better people than those outside the Faith. They claim only to have a reason to think that some behavior is wrong and to have a motive to strive to improve it. Secular man has neither.

It has been noted that a church is like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The pews are filled with people wrestling with demons of one sort or another, and a single moment of weakness can toss any of them off the wagon and back into their own personal agonies. It happens to all of us amid the stresses and strains of work and family life. For the critic to point at us and say, "See, Christians are no better than anyone else so Christianity is false and has nothing to offer," is like pointing at an alcoholic fighting to stay sober who nevertheless succumbs and takes a drink, and saying, "See, AA members are no better than a drunk in the street, so AA is worthless."

Christianity is not something people are urged to consider because it makes its followers perfect. Christians urge others to consider the Gospel because they believe the Gospel is true; they believe that it offers grace and forgiveness to people who very much need it; it offers a basis for moral behavior in a world that has no grounds for saying that anyone is obligated to act one way rather than another; it holds up a mirror to our faces and makes us aware of our faults and flaws; it gives life meaning and hope that no secular worldview can offer; and it helps people to be better than they would otherwise have been. It does not promise that if you become a Christian you'll be a moral exemplar.

Every person, Christian or not, is wrestling with at least one "addiction" in their life. It could be alcohol or drugs, sex or power, anger or lying, unkindness or selfishness, money or pride, hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Everyone, Christian or non-Christian, has something in his or her life that, like the alcoholic, may be defeated for a time but from which he or she is never completely freed. Christian faith gives people the resources to help them wage the life-long struggle with that addiction, but, like AA, it doesn't deliver them from it. It offers them forgiveness and acceptance, not total deliverance, not in this life. Christ, Christians believe, helps us be better people than we would have been had we not been Christians.

It's very disappointing and sad to see anyone fail to remain "on the wagon," but it's a little odd of the critics to fault the wagon just because the people riding it are, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, human, all too human.

RLC

Here's a piece from Science News that may prove very helpful for people concerned about Alzheimers:

Five cups is a lot of coffee for some people. In fact that much caffeine would probably kill you, but at least you'd remember why you were dying.

Maybe it's time to invest in coffee stocks.

RLC

Dan Calabrese argues that 2009 is the year of vindication of neo-conservative ideals. In a way he's right. Here's how he opens his essay:

So what is neo-conservatism and how is it being vindicated in Iran? Read the rest of Calabrese's argument at the link.

RLC

Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg.com declares that California's economic nightmare will kill Obamanomics. Everything that's wrong with California is writ large in the federal government. When people see how that once great and prosperous state is turning itself into an economic basket case unable to pay its bills and without any light at the end of the fiscal tunnel, they'll finally, one hopes, come to see that Obama and his team have been almost criminally reckless in driving up our national debt and insuring economic hard times in this country for generations to come.

Here are some excerpts from Hassett's column:

Perhaps there are two things for which we may hope: First, that moderate Senate Democrats will join Republicans to stop the runaway train that is Obamanomics, and, second, that voters in 2010 and 2012 will realize that the man and the party they thought were wizards of competence are in fact quite the opposite. By 2010 we will be clinging to the edge of the cliff with one hand. It'll still be possible to pull ourselves back up to safety by undoing some of the president's reckless excesses. But if in the meantime either Cap and Trade or Obama's health care plan become law our children will grow up in a country very much poorer than the one in which our parents grew up.

RLC

Perhaps few events in recent years have defined the generation gap in our society more vividly than has the death of Michael Jackson. On the one hand are the boomers who enjoyed Jackson's music as he was growing up, but who were put off by his weirdness, his drug use, his self-mutilation, his crotch-groping, and his fondness for little boys.

On the other hand are the generation Xers who don't care about his weirdness, his drugs, his self-mutilation, and his fondness for little boys. All those things are rendered irrelevant to them by his ability to sing, dance and put on a great show. Having no gods and few heroes, a lot of younger people deify celebrities, and Jackson was nothing if not a celebrity. He was, in fact, an entertainment genius in an age when entertainment is all that gives meaning to so many lives. Consequently, his death has been mourned in many precincts as though it were a matter of cosmic importance.

It's sad that the emptiness and shallowness of modern life is such that when Jackson died many young people felt that a piece of them died with him. Like many gifted individuals he was a troubled wreck of a human being. His premature death is to be lamented, but he was not a god, he was not a role model, and he was not admirable, except for his talent as a performer. He was, in fact, a literal man-child for whom we should pray and feel pity. The encomiums and eulogies running 24/7 on our grief-stricken media notwithstanding, he was not someone who merited either shrines or adulation.

The significance of Jackson's life and death lies in their reinforcement of this lesson: Neither great fame, nor great wealth, nor great talent can bring happiness or meaning to life. Neither can identification with and idolization of those who have achieved these things.

RLC

No Taxation Without Reading the Legislation:

RLC

One of many wars being fought beneath the media radar is the war against the Colombian drug cartels. Evidently, that war is going fairly well judging by this report on Strategy Page:

Not only is the war going well but Colombians themselves are prospering despite the current economic climate:

Sounds like Columbia is both safer and more prosperous than most major cities in the U.S. It might be a nice place to which to flee from the economic devastation about to be visited upon our once prosperous land by people who think that the best way for a nation to heal our economic woes is to emulate third world countries by burying our woes under a mountain of taxes and debt.

RLC

You've probably heard the Darwinian explanation for the evolution of vision - how a few light-sensitive cells underwent some mutational changes which were then preserved by natural selection and after a wave of Mother Nature's wand, some pixie dust, and a couple hundred million years out came the mammalian eye.

Actually, the story is not nearly as simple as the Darwinians would have us believe and the complexity of it does not count in favor of naturalistic theories of the origin of vision.

Cornelius Hunter has some details over at Darwin's God.

Meanwhile, one of the major objections leveled by critics against the truth of intelligent design over the years has to do with an alleged puzzle related to the structure of the eye. It's been argued that the cluster of nerves situated in front of the retina, blocking light to a part of the retina and creating a blind spot where the nerves pass through the retina to join the optic nerve, is evidence that the eye is not designed intelligently. Why, it is asked, would an intelligent designer make the eye in such a way as to produce a blind spot? Why not tuck these tissues behind the retina so that nothing interferes with our vision? That's how a rational engineer would do it, or so we've been told.

It turns out, however, that the way these tiny structures are arranged is in fact a very clever solution to certain problems regarding the health and efficient functioning of the eye, and that when all the reasons for the arrangement are understood the eye emerges as a wonder of intelligent organization and design (See here for a less technical account of why the eye's anatomy is completely compatible with the theory that it was intelligently designed.).

Anyone today who uses the allegedly poor design of the retina as an argument against intelligent design is simply revealing that he doesn't really know much.

RLC

Over at National Review Online Guy Benson has dug up a series of candidate Obama's campaign ads critical of John McCain's proposal to tax employer provided insurance benefits as income. Obama's ads declared this to be an intolerable imposition that the taxpayers could not afford and should not be required to bear. Now it appears he very well might impose such a tax himself. Here's one of the ads:

Benson has other ads at the link. Mr. Obama is a deft practitioner of the old political two-step: Criticize your opponent during the campaign for planning to do the very thing you will do once he's out of the way. This is what qualifies one as a political genius nowadays, but there are other, perhaps more accurate, names for it.

RLC

Here's part of an interesting news release from the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service that raises some interesting questions about climate change and related environmental concerns:

This heartening news is no doubt largely the result of increased rainfall this spring which may well be a consequence of global climate change. If so, it's yet another example of how climate change is producing positive environmental and ecological benefits. The assumption in the media is that any change to our climate is going to be harmful, but as we've argued before there's no reason to think that that's true.

I remember, speaking of ecological matters, reading as a young man about the awful environmental damage that strip mining inflicted upon the earth. And so it did, I suppose, but damage is not always permanent. I had occasion last week to visit an area in Pennsylvania that was largely a reclaimed strip mine, and if this is what happens with old strip mines then I wish we had more of them. The area has been converted into a beautiful and extensive grassland that is habitat for species of birds that can be found almost nowhere else in the state except on these old mines.

I might also mention that much of the best wildlife habitat in the area in which I live is owned and managed either by the water company or by electrical utility companies who use part of it to house nuclear and coal generated power facilities. When some of this land was purchased back in the sixties and seventies I was deeply disappointed to see the farmland get gobbled up. Now I wish the utilities would gobble up more of it before the developers get it.

The same thing can be said of landfills. No one likes landfills near their home, but some of the best grassland habitat for birds and butterflies in my county sits atop an old landfill. It takes a lifetime to fill these up, but once they're full there's not much else they can be used for, and if the community makes wise decisions, they become oases for wildlife in the midst of a desert of suburban sprawl, and the natural habitat they provide will be enjoyed for generations to come.

The point I'm trying to make is that before we go running around trying to save the environment by destroying coal and other industries and throwing capitalism overboard in favor of socialism we should reflect for a moment that much of what we have in terms of natural treasures in this country we have because of the wealth generated by capitalism and the civic-mindedness of corporations that preserve or create natural lands for public enjoyment. If we want to see what ecological disaster looks like we need only look at those countries, like China, Russia and much of the third world, which impoverish themselves, and consequently their natural environment, by their embrace of socialism.

RLC

Kevin Williamson at NRO quotes from an Obama speech pre-stimulus:

Well, Williamson notes, we acted immediately. Millions more jobs were lost. National unemployment rates are approaching double digits. So now what?

Williamson quotes the New York Times' economic poobah Paul Krugman:

Well, I'm glad that's settled. A trillion dollars hasn't worked (Of course, the wiser heads were telling us it wouldn't work from the beginning) so the problem must be that we haven't yet dug ourselves deep enough into debt. Let's spend a couple trillion more that we don't have and see what that does for us.

And this guy won a Nobel Prize in economics. It just goes to show that in this amazing country anybody can get to the top.

Back when I learned to fly airplanes I was taught that when visibility is poor you must trust your instruments, not your senses. Trying to keep the plane straight and level based on what feels right will quickly cause you to become disoriented and spiral into the ground. Flying by what your body is telling you instead of by the objective data provided by your instruments is called flying by the seat of your pants, and that's what Krugman sounds like he's doing. Despite Mr. Krugman's intrepid willingness to go where no economist has gone before, the economic results of flying by the seat of your pants are pretty similar to the aerodynamic results.

RLC

Drudge links to a Times Online article which reveals that Saudi Arabia has given the Israelis permission to transit their air space to launch an attack on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. It's in the Saudis' interests to have these facilities destroyed and since President Obama doesn't seem too resolved to do much to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region, the Saudis are apparently content to let Israel do it.

The Obama administration, if Vice-president Biden can be relied upon to have been speaking for the president, seems to have given Israel a green light to do what it is loath to do itself.

Perhaps the Israelis will hold off for a while, however, since the instability in Tehran may yet cause that regime to topple and be replaced with one that'll have a more sensible position on nukes. But if it appears after three or four weeks that the regime is simply consolidating its power, the Israelis will probably feel they are being left with no choice but to launch a strike, or series of strikes, to destroy Iran's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.

RLC

Sarah Palin has resigned as Governor of Alaska. The reasons are as yet obscure, but if I may speculate I imagine that she's finally had enough of the indescribable crudity and cruelty of the "progressives" in our culture. She didn't give that as her motive for resigning, but it's not unreasonable to think that it factored into her decision.

A decent, honest, woman who sought to serve her state and her country, she became a target for those who, like cockroaches scuttling away from the light, are repelled by the values she lives by. Her family has been humiliated as one vile low-life after another climbed out of the septic tank to laugh at her mentally retarded son, to criticize Palin for birthing him, to joke about her daughter being raped, and to harass her with incessant and asinine ethics probes. Lest you think that I'm stretching things a bit take a look at what the diseased mind of someone named Erik Nelson put up at Huffington Post.

Why would any decent human being want to serve in public office in this country when good people are treated like the left has treated Palin and her family? Why doesn't the media demand that people stop this insanity? Why aren't Democrats insisting that those who are registered in their party and who vote for their candidates stop acting like a pack of cowardly, giggling hyenas unleashed on a helpless victim? Why doesn't our culture demand that the vulgarians on the left be held to the same standard of decency to which Republicans and conservatives would be held? Imagine for a moment that Republican bloggers were saying the same things about Michelle Obama and her daughters that are being said at Huffington Post, Daily Kos, or on the Letterman show about the Palin family. There would be blood in the streets.

It's a shame that Palin has decided to resign because it means that the haters, the sick people, win. They've hounded her from office. Even so, I don't blame her. To engage in politics in this country today means one has to suffer being bespattered with the sewage thrown at you daily by creatures who feel perfectly at home wallowing in the stuff. Until the left disowns these people our political environment will continue to coarsen and deteriorate, but it's doubtful that the left really wants to disown them or they would have done so long ago.

RLC

Today is Independence Day, a day which honors our nation's declaration of freedom from oppressive, meddling government. Lots of people will be picnicking and watching fireworks, but it would be good if everyone set aside a few minutes to read either the Declaration itself or perhaps the Bill of Rights appended to the Constitution a decade and a half later, or both. Wikipedia has a good summary of the history behind the Declaration and the people who signed it.

Like a church liturgy recited every Sunday, we've heard the main points of the founding documents so many times that we tend not to think about the significance of the words when we hear them again. Yet on this day we should take time to let them sink into our hearts and minds. Here, for example, is the best known passage in the Declaration:

Some of the men who undersigned these words paid dearly for it. They lost all they owned and in some cases, even lost their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Rush Limbaugh posts an outstanding essay (adapted, I believe, from a piece by Paul Harvey) which describes what the signers endured in order to secure our freedom. I urge you to read it to get a sense of the sacrifice these people made.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about freedom and individual liberty is this: In every generation there are those who seek to diminish liberty in order to promote what they think to be the collective good or to consolidate their own power. The struggle for freedom is not a once and done fight. It's an ongoing battle, like the contention between a rocky shore and the ceaseless pounding of the waves. The struggle may take different forms, the price to be paid might be greater or less depending on how far freedom's erosion has been allowed to advance before it's arrested and reversed, but it's the same struggle. It's the conflict between those who value being a free people and a state that inveigles us with grand promises of bread and circuses if we will but lay our freedom at their feet.

We live in a time when many citizens of this country have no memory of the cost of freedom and no particular love of the traditions and values which made this country great. Some of these persons have ascended to positions of political influence. For them the great beacons of the past are not our founding fathers but rather people like Karl Marx who argued vehemently for the abolition of individual rights and the establishment of a state where everyone was kept at the same level of economic and personal achievement. These individuals desire to establish a state in which those who get an education, work hard, stay married and sacrifice for their children can be exploited and pillaged in order to bail out those who choose not to order their lives this way, and that's what they've dedicated their lives to working for.

Individual freedom and liberty are under continual assault, even in the United States of America, and the Fourth of July offers us the perfect opportunity to reaffirm our vigilance and our commitment to protect our liberties and to maintain the values and traditions that have made this the greatest nation in the history of human civilization.

RLC

Charles Krauthammer skewers Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in the New Haven firefighters case (Ricci vs. DeStefano):

Krauthammer then goes on to predict the twilight of affirmative action:

As Krauthammer explains, it's hard to see why we still need affirmative action in an age when blacks hold the highest office in the land as well as the highest office in many of our major cities. Yet old ideas die hard on the left. Yesterday while on the road I was listening to a radio show out of Buffalo and heard a liberal guest named Brad Bannon opine that Ricci was poorly decided by judge Sotomayor and her colleagues, but that what New Haven should have done to ensure that blacks did well on the test is award them points at the start so that their final scores would be competitive. He was completely serious.

This is classic progressive thinking. It is at once manifestly unfair to whites and grossly insulting, and harmful, to blacks. It tells blacks that they shouldn't be expected to study hard for a promotion like everyone else. It tells them that expecting them to actually know something is an injustice. It tells them that they're too dumb, by virtue of being black (or Hispanic), to compete intellectually with whites and Asians so the city will give them a head start. I can't imagine being black and not being deeply insulted by this. It's exactly the sort of dopey racism-with-a-smile that many whites remember cringing at when they heard it from their parents and grandparents, and it still exists today among progressives like Ginsburg and Brad Bannon.

RLC

Lawrence Krauss has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that attempts, rather lamely, to show that science and theism are incompatible. Despite the philosophical dubiety of this view it's so widespread among materialist scientists today that Krauss' piece deserves some scrutiny.

He writes:

It really is quite embarrassing that a philosopher of some note would make such a silly argument. The difference between Santa Claus and God is that there is no evidence of the existence of Santa Claus, no rational argument that can be given in support of the proposition that Santa Claus exists, and lots of reasons to think that he does not exist, including the fact that we have the historical record of his genesis in folklore. Nor is there anything like the historical universality of belief in God to be explained in the case of Santa Claus. McGinn just trivializes the debate by making such a statement and Krauss does nothing to elevate the tone by sniggering at it.

But why would any scientist, even if he were a theist, assume that God would interfere with his experiments? Did Newton, or Galileo, or Faraday, or Boyle, or any of dozens of other Christian scientists make such an assumption? Krauss and Haldane are making the elementary mistake of confusing the possibility of divine interference with the probability of such interference. The fact that it's possible that God could intervene does not make it very likely that He would. The assumption that there will be no supernatural interference with one's experiments is based on the further assumption that what almost always has happened in the past will continue to happen and what has almost always happened, as far as we know, is that God has chosen not to interfere with scientific experiments.

Yes, but of course this is an illicit, indeed a ridiculous, assumption. From the fact that nature exhibits certain regularities which it is reasonable to assume will hold whenever Nature is put to a test it hardly follows that there is no God.

Krauss here pulls a little bait and switch. His argument is that science is incompatible with belief in the existence of God, but finding that a difficult case to make, he subtly changes the argument to a discussion of the incompatibility of science and religion.

Well, let's play along. Which primitive convictions does Harris have in mind, those of the Christian or those of the atheist? Perhaps he's referring to the very modern conviction that the incredible fine-tuning of the universe is the product of mind rather than the Iron-Age conviction, promoted by ancient Greeks and Romans like Leucippus and Lucretius, that it is the unimaginably improbable product of chance and matter. Perhaps he has in mind the very modern conviction that the emergence of information in the first living things is most likely the product of intelligent direction rather than the Iron-Age conviction that it's just a fluke of blind, purposeless nature. Or maybe he's confusing the contemporary view that human consciousness derives ultimately from a transcendent consciousness with the conviction of the ancients that it derives from inanimate stuff. Which of the Iron-Age convictions, still held by modern atheists, do Krauss and Harris have in mind here?

What his Catholic colleagues should have done is ask Mr. Krauss what principle of basic biology is violated by a miracle like the virgin birth? Does biology teach us that an unfertilized ovum can never develop into a zygote? Actually, it doesn't. Does biology say that it's impossible that a woman could conceive without benefit of a man? In fact, it does not and can not, and Mr. Krauss should know this elementary philosophical fact.

What biology and other sciences tell us is that nature operates in certain highly regular ways unless it's subject to some outside interference. A moving object, for example, will continue to move forever, in a straight line, unless acted upon by an outside force. The only way biologists could say that a virgin could never conceive is if they know a priori that there are no outside forces involved. In other words, miracles like the virgin birth are impossible only if we know there is no God, but if Krauss knows that there's no God, he's certainly not telling us how he knows it. Unless you count this odd piece of reasoning:

Krauss is arguing in a circle. He claims to refute the Christian's belief in God by saying that miracles are impossible, but he can only know they are impossible if he already knows there is no God: Because there is no God miracles are impossible, and because miracles are impossible there is no God. Indeed.

This is interesting. Global atheistic communism claimed to be built on reason and even though religion, specifically Islam, has had a terrible history in the last century, it recedes to insignificance compared to the atheistic ideologies based on reason. More people were butchered in the twentieth century in the name of a rational atheistic communism than died in all the wars motivated by religion in modern history.

I wouldn't want to live in a world built upon the dictates of religious leaders but would want even less to live in a world built on the dictates of political leaders who seek to promote a political philosophy built upon atheism and reason. Atheism and reason have led us to the deaths of twenty million Russians, forty million Chinese, six million Jews, five million Cambodians, and thirty million miscellaneous human beings just in the twentieth century alone. I think I'll pass, Mr. Krauss.

Reason is a wonderful gift, but to paraphrase Einstein "Reason without religion is blind. Religion without reason is lame."

RLC

Dennis Prager offers a powerful endorsement of the recently-released The Stoning of Soraya M. Here's the heart of his column:

As of now the film is restricted to http://www.thestoning.com/theaters/ major markets, but it should make its way to a theater near you sometime this summer. You can view the trailer here.

By the way, did anybody follow Amnesty International's reason for not seeing the movie? Why on earth would they not want people to see it? If this were a movie about the horrors of apartheid or some Jewish murder of a Palestinian I doubt that AI would have any problems with it at all, even if it were fictional. The only people who would seem to have a motive for discouraging viewers from seeing this film would be Muslim extremists and those who fear upsetting them.

Okay. Maybe I've answered my question.

RLC

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent posts this video of renowned theologian N.T. Wright discussing deism and Darwin. It's pretty good:

RLC

Matthew Mullins at Prosblogion, a blog given to questions and issues in the philosophy of religion, contemplates the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a Christian. He concludes that among the necessary conditions is this:

To translate this from philosopherese into English what Mullins is saying is that only Christians have eternal life, but surely this is false.

Unless one is prepared to argue that infants and mentally retarded individuals do not have eternal life then there must be lots of people who have salvation who are not Christians (assuming that being a Christian requires a willful assent to Christ). Nor is it hard to imagine the universe of eternally saved individuals being expanded further to include people like the heroes of the Old Testament. If one is a theological inclusivist one might also expand the universe still further, as C.S. Lewis does in The Great Divorce, to include all whose hearts are open to God even if they've never heard of Christ or, for reasons psychological and/or sociological, have never made a commitment to Him.

At any rate, whether one's theology goes that far or not, it still seems highly unlikely that the proposition quoted above is true since it excludes innocents who die in infancy or who never possess the mental capacity to understand what being a Christian entails.

There are some who would argue that whoever is saved is ipso facto a Christian. Lewis, for example, talks about people who are "anonymous" Christians, but this seems to me to empty the concept of Christian of most of its unique content. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that universalism were true - i.e. the view that everyone is ultimately saved is true. If that were the case then everyone would be a Christian, which seems, to me at least, exceedingly odd and would certainly seem odd to Muslims, Jews and atheists.

I think it makes more sense to simply think that eternal life might be available to others besides Christians.

RLC

Christianity Today has a poll up in which they ask readers to vote Yes or No on whether the Iraq war met the conditions of a Just War. As I write this it's 58% No and 36% Yes.

I wonder exactly which of the Just War criteria those who voted No think the Iraq war violated.

In fact, I wonder how many of the respondents even know what the criteria of a Just War are.

RLC

Frank Lombard, you may or may not have heard from the major media, is the associate director of Duke University's Center for Health Policy who, over the internet, recently offered his five year-old adopted son to pedophiles who wished to molest him. Lombard himself has admitted to molesting the boy and photographs have been found of his cruel perversions.

Lombard and his gay partner (who seems to have been unaware of Lombard's behavior) adopted the boy, a fact which may explain the media's reluctance to make much of the story, since it certainly wouldn't do much to advance the cause of gay adoption. Mike Adams points out that the child is black and goes on to write that:

I think it much more likely that if this case goes to trial it will make nary a ripple on the evening news. If white males are accused of raping a black female then that's worth 24/7 coverage, but if a gay white man rapes a black child, well, those things happen, unfortunately, and we really shouldn't try to draw any larger meaning from it. So let's all move on to more important matters like what Michael Jackson will be wearing at his viewing.

RLC

I've on occasion voiced my uneasiness with the on-air habits of radio and TV talkers who use rudeness as a substitute for dialogue. I'm put off by the shouting, name-calling, and talking over each other that some talkers, both left and right, seem to employ as standard procedure. Even so, despite my misgivings, I purchased a book written by one of the worst offenders (Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, by Mark Levin) which has been riding the New York Times best-seller list for a couple of months now.

I wasn't much impressed at first since it seemed in the beginning to be a little long on rhetoric and a little short on specifics, but as I worked my way into it I found myself becoming more and more intrigued. Having now finished it, I can say that it's as fine a book on what it means to be a Conservative as I've read. It may turn out to be for the first half of the twenty-first century what Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative was for the latter half of the twentieth century.

Levin's aim is to explain for the current generation what Conservatism is, to discuss what Conservatives tend to hold in common and to contrast Conservative principles with the beliefs held by those he calls "Statists." Levin eschews the term "liberal" because there's too much confusion surrounding the word. Classical liberals were anti-authoritarian, which is a better description of modern Conservatives than of modern liberals who tend to be enamored of the power of the state, a proclivity which makes them the antithesis of classical liberals.

At any rate, Levin explains that, contrary to popular belief, Conservatives do not oppose government: "The Conservative does not despise government, he despises tyranny. This is precisely why the Conservative reveres the Constitution and insists on adherence to it."

Neither do Conservatives oppose change. Indeed, they desire it since much of the status quo is the result of Statist policies inimical to liberty: "The Conservative seeks to preserve and improve the civil society, not engage in a mindless defense of the status quo inasmuch as the status quo may well be a condition created by the Statist and destructive of the civil society - such as the 1960s cultural degradations which are all too prevalent today. It is the Statist, who rejects even minor change if such change promotes the civil society, thereby challenging his authority."

He quotes C.S. Lewis who describes the danger posed by the Statist thus: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Beginning with chapter 3 Levin undertakes to clarify some important truths about the role of faith in the founding of the country, the crucial importance of fealty to the Constitution, and the importance of federalism and free markets. He also explains modern attempts by the Statist to undermine each of these.

Toward the end of the book he offers a compelling critique of the welfare state, enviro-statism, and lax immigration policies. He concludes with a chapter on the need for a strong national defense and, what some readers might find the most useful part of the book, a succinct statement of Conservative principles arranged in the format of a manifesto.

The book should be required reading for every student of political theory. It should also be read by everyone who wishes to understand the Conservative worldview and everyone on the left who thinks he knows what Conservatism is, but whose criticisms often reveal an unfortunate ignorance and lack of understanding.

RLC