The conservative blogosphere is elated and reinvigorated by the president's pick of Sam Alito for associate justice of the Supreme Court. Michelle Malkin has a summary of conservative opinions with lots of links from around the community.

Meanwhile, the Left is taking it bitterly, which is how they take pretty much everything Bush does. They see in the Alito pick the end of an era of liberal hegemony in the courts and the end of their ability to implement the liberal agenda via judicial fiat rather than through legislation. If the Left loses the Courts, and cannot regain the House or the Senate in 2006, their future is bleak indeed.

Democratic Senators have been a little more subdued in their response than have the Lefty bloggers, but their disappointment is manifest. For example Senator Schumer:

And here's Senator Reid:

No mention here by Senator Reid about qualifications, of course, only a lament that the President didn't let the minority pick his Justice for him and the threadbare complaint that Alito doesn't add a diversity of perspectives to the Court. The reasons for Senator Reid's dismay are equally reasons why the rest of us should take heart from this nomination. Even were we not encouraged by what we've read about Judge Alito elsewhere (See Michelle Malkin's site linked above), we'd have to think that anyone who so distresses Senator Reid and the fine folks at the Daily Kos must be good for America.

Gideon Strauss has an essay at Comment wherein he discerns four challenges facing contemporary Christianity. The four he identifies are those posed by contemporary liberalism, Islam, China, and the emergence of Christianity in the third world.

Here are some excerpts. First are his thoughts on the challenge posed by liberalism:

On the Islamic challenge:

Concerning China:

Finally, on third world Christianity:

Strauss offers much more in his article than has been excerpted here and much of what he says is very insightful. It would be good to read the whole thing.

Yesterday was Reformation Sunday in the Lutheran Church and my thoughts turned this weekend to the endpoint the present trajectory of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) seems to be taking us toward. Ideological or theological designators like liberal and conservative often obscure nuance and require qualification, but they are also often useful. The ELCA seems to have fallen into the embrace of theological and ideological liberalism, and many conservatives are just beginning to wake up to the fact that the Church of their youth has been hijacked by a leadership that is moving steadily away from the traditional affirmations of the Faith.

The liberals (or progressives, as they fancy themselves) argue that the Church is called upon to do social ministry, and they are simply responding to that call by waging a decades-long campaign against sexism, racism and imperialism and contending on behalf of gay marriage, abortion rights, and the poor. What Christian, they ask, would or could oppose such causes?

The difficulty is this: There are two ways of looking at our social mandates and responsibilities. Conservatives hold that whatever policies we advocate must be rooted in, and governed by, Scripture. Liberals believe that our policies and support should be shaped by sociological consensus, and if contemporary theory conflicts with the Bible or the theological traditions of the Church then so much the worse for the Bible and tradition.

Thus the Lutheran Church, or at least that part of it represented by the ELCA, struggles against sexism by publishing a new worship book that minimizes references to the masculine in hymns, creeds, and liturgy, and by supporting expansive abortion rights even though all previous social statements of the Church, including the present one, condemn abortion.

It opposes racism by endorsing liberal Democratic approaches to welfare, affirmative action, and entitlement. It will surprise no one if we hear calls for racial reparations arise during future national assemblies.

It condemns imperialism by demanding that Israel tear down the wall that it has erected to protect itself from Palestinian murderers and that the U.S. turn over the global war on terror to the U.N. so that it can be treated as a police matter.

It is, finally, exceedingly sympathetic to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered agenda despite the fact that all sexual norms found in Scripture would have to be abandoned in order to accommodate it. Notwithstanding the Biblical proscription of same sex intimacy, large sectors of the Church, including the leadership, favor the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of same sex relationships.

This is the direction of the contemporary ELCA, and this is why a growing number of Lutherans are praying for another Reformation (See here, for example). We need, they insist, a Martin Luther for the 21st century to rescue a Church whose membership is in free-fall and whose leadership seems committed to running this once great institution off the cliff of cultural syncretism.

It is a measure of the desperation of the Left that they are enormously excited about the indictment of a minor administration figure, of whom no one had ever previously heard, for lying to a grand jury in an attempt to cover up responsibility for behavior which, it turns out, wasn't even criminal.

Now that the indictment has been handed down, we're hearing dark suggestions, based chiefly upon the Left's eternal hopefulness, that somehow this will lead all the way to the top, and they will be able to exorcize from the body politic the Great Satan in the White House.

We doubt very much that the Left will get significant traction from the indictment of the heretofore anonymous "Scooter" Libby, although they will certainly try. They'll attempt anything at this point, so great is their obsession with destroying this president and their hatred of him for his ability to dash their hopes every time they're raised to incandescent levels of intensity.

It'll probably happen again this time, too.

Let's grab a glimpse of the future that the Islamists envision for our children:

Perhaps the authorities have no idea who the perpetrators might be. Let's try to help them narrow down the suspects. Let's ask where the perpetrators might most likely be found. Should the authorities look in a:

If you answered a, b, or c you get the Norman Y. Maneta award for dopey adherence to political correctness, named after our current Secretary of Transportation. The award is so named for Mr. Maneta's unswerving fidelity to such bedrock principles of left-wing ideology as that octagenarians in wheel chairs should be searched every bit as thoroughly for bombs before being permitted to board an airplane as sullen, twenty-something Arab males. To do otherwise, Mr. Maneta believes, is to betray an intolerable ethnic bias.

Heaven forgive us if we're guilty of thinking that we're far more likely to be blown out of the sky, or have our torsos relieved of our heads, by young Arab males than by elderly Anglo-Saxon women. It just reveals how ingrained our racism is that we can't seem to shake the thought that a young Muslim Arab is a far greater threat to our well-being than is a feeble great-grandmother.

I recently finished David McCullough's wonderful, if slightly mistitled, 1776. I say wonderful because once I got about a third of the way into it I didn't want to put it down. McCullough is a masterful writer and the story he tells is full of fascinating anecdotes and detail that seize the reader's attention and cause him to regret arriving at the last page of the book.

I say it is slightly mistitled because it's not really a story of the year 1776 so much as it is an account of the trials, travails, and tribulations of George Washington during those bleak twelve months.

McCullough tells a tale that one doesn't ordinarily read in popular accounts of Washington who is often portrayed as a man with near-perfect judgment and almost infinite wisdom. That his judgment was often excellent and that he was wise there is no doubt, but in the year 1776, the first year of the revolution, Washington made several serious mistakes and were it not for what McCullough refers to as miracles and the excessive caution of his adversary William Howe, the fledgling Continental army would probably have been destroyed at New York. Until the very end of the year the story of the war was a narrative of ignominious American retreats. As McCullough writes victories are not won by withdrawals no matter how well executed.

It is hard to imagine, although McCullough does a good job of describing it for us, the darkness of those months: the steady string of defeats, the abandonment by thousands of citizens who fled to the British, the demoralization and lack of training and discipline of the troops, the desertions, poor equipment, harsh living conditions, and the seeming indifference of the Continental Congress, and, not least, the utter despair that many, including Washington himself, must have felt. Yet, despite the fact that he didn't win a major engagement until late in the year when he caught the Hessians by surprise at Trenton, he never allowed himself to succumb to his forebodings and trepidations about the prospects for success, at least not for long. He learned from his errors, some of which were extremely costly in terms of lives lost, and he didn't permit the harshness of his critics nor the betrayals of friends to deter him. He truly was a great man.

As I was reading McCullough's narrative I thought of our current commander in chief. Like Washington, he has been pummeled, slandered, and ridiculed by his critics. He has faced dark days when success was anything but assured. He has had to bear up against a steady drumbeat of defeatism in the press. There must be times when he thinks that nobody cares about winning the war on terror but him, and yet he refuses to bend to the cavils of critics. Bush's situation is perhaps more like that of Lincoln than of Washington, but even so, some of the similarities with Washington are striking.

I recommend 1776 to anyone with an interest in American history and especially the history of the first year of the American revolution. There is much in it that we can apply to our own parlous times.

Lest anyone be uncertain concerning the aspirations of the radical Islamists, President Ahmadinejad of Iran dispels any misunderstanding. The following excerpts, made available by MEMRI, are from his recent speech at the World Without Zionism conference in Tehran. The conference was attended by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and hundreds of students:

Mr. Bush's assessment of Iran as part of an axis of evil looks more trenchant with every passing week. Imagine that some unstable lunatic like Ahmadinejad gets his hands on a nuclear weapon. Does anyone seriously think that a man like this, so full of hatred, will decline to use it? This speech lends all the more urgency to attempts to put an end to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. And if diplomacy fails, which it almost surely will, the world, or at least a part of it, must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to keep such weapons out of Iran's arsenal.

Click on the link for more on the speech.

The media have been busy this week gleefully writing George Bush's political epitaph (see here, for example), but as Mark Twain might have put it, the funeral celebration is a bit premature.

To be sure, Mr. Bush has had a rocky couple of months what with Katrina, problems in Iraq, the unravelling of the Miers nomination, today's indictment of the Vice President's Chief of Staff, and a number of lesser travails. All of this has brought the president's media antagonists to the political graveyard to dance a conga around the tombstones in eager anticipation of the interment of the Bush presidency.

Nevertheless, it's not difficult to imagine this administration gathering itself up and rebounding from the present difficulties. Indeed, President Bush is well-positioned to execute a fourth quarter rally that could still place him among the greatest presidents of modern American history. Here's why and how:

The economy is growing steadily. Note that the Democrats rarely refer to the economy anymore by way of criticizing the president. Yet our economic health is the most crucial issue, as the Dems insisted in 1992, in determining which party will prevail in an election. If the Democrats could use our economic condition against Bush they would be doing it, but they can't so they aren't. If the economy continues to grow - and with gas prices falling to less extortionist levels there's reason for optimism in this regard - the public will forget the troubles of the last two or three months like one forgets a dream upon waking.

Iraq seems to be progressing steadily toward a historically unprecedented Arab democracy. Despite the steady drizzle of left-wing criticism and negativity, Bush's strategy in Iraq might well ultimately succeed. It's still unclear if it will, of course, but if it does, history will hail his effort, and that of our military, as an astonishing political, strategic, and human rights achievement, perhaps the greatest that any president or world leader ever accomplished. Success in Iraq will reverberate and ramify throughout the entire region and around the globe for generations. It's very difficult to overstate the significance and importance of such a consummation.

With the withdrawal of Harriet Miers the president has been given an unusual second chance to appoint someone of the very finest timber to the Supreme Court. Miers may have been a good appointment, but there was cause for serious skepticism. Mr. Bush can now name someone about whom there is no doubt. Another conservative justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia, as we were promised in the campaign, and the legal course of this country could be altered for the good for the next thirty to fifty years. Such a nomination would also unify the president's base and make him much more politically formidable.

Assuming there are no further indictments, the Scooter Libby affair will scarcely register on the historical record. On the other hand, it could serve, as did Katrina, as a prod to rouse the administration from complacency. There are signs that this is already happening. We're beginning to hear noises about getting the budget and our borders under control. Success breeds success. If the administration recovers its legislative momentum it may even try again to reform social security. If by 2008 just some of these things are happening, or at least appear to be under way, George Bush, to the everlasting chagrin of the portside media, will be regarded as surpassing even Ronald Reagan and FDR.

The ghoulish excesses of the liberal media are as premature as they are inappropriate. Too much still hangs in the balance for them to be indulging their hopes of a failed presidency just yet.

No doubt you've heard the venerable Darwinian dogma that given enough time and enough monkeys banging away randomly on a typewriter keyboard one of them would eventually produce Hamlet purely by chance.

The claim is designed to illustrate that even though life on earth is unimaginably improbable on the naturalistic hypothesis, it's not impossible. Given enough time and enough molecular combinations even the improbable becomes probable, and the probable becomes actual.

Unfortunately for this argument, however, its persuasiveness does not survive an actual look at the math.

Bill Dembski directs us to a decade-old site where the math is actually worked out. It happens that even if we hypothesize 17 billion galaxies, each containing 17 billion habitable planets, each planet with 17 billion monkeys each typing away and producing one line per second for 17 billion years, the chances of the phrase "To be or not to be, that is the question" not being included in the results are:

In other words, even given parameters unimaginably more lenient than those which actually obtained in the real world, it's about 99.999999999995% sure that the monkeys would fail to produce just a single sentence of Hamlet by random pecking.

The Darwinian objects, however, that this extraordinary improbability assumes that the monkeys have to get the whole sequence right or else they have to start over as soon as they make a mistake. What if there is a mechanism, though, which conserves any letters that come up correctly so that if, say, a TO is typed by some monkey somewhere it's preserved until a BE is typed and then that's saved, etc? If so, the target sentence would appear in no time at all, relatively speaking. The rest of Hamlet would then eventually follow on in like fashion.

This is essentially the argument made by Richard Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker, and it's intended to send the doubter scurrying away in abject embarrassment at having had the temerity to challenge scientific orthodoxy. The problem with it, though, is that it must assume the very thing that Intelligent Design has been asserting ever since its inception. It assumes that there is some goal toward which life is striving. It assumes that somehow life knows to preserve combinations that "work" until they can be incorporated into the sequence of letters. It assumes that nature has the ability to see a goal and to strive toward it. In other words, it assumes that nature is somehow programmed to produce life.

Such a teleological aspect in nature is precisely what the Darwinian vigorously denies. There is no need to introduce purpose, he avers, since natural selection acting with no conscious purpose selects combinations on the basis of their survival value and thus acts as if it were intelligent. But again this answer won't work. The reason is that natural selection acts only on reproducing populations of organisms. What needs to be explained is how information far more complex than our target sentence (a strand of genetic material, for example) emerged before it developed the ability to replicate itself and thus be subject to the pressures of natural selection.

We suppose that technically speaking it could have happened, just as it's possible that a blind-folded man might select a single marked atom out of all the atoms of the universe just by luck, but it takes faith far greater than the size of a mustard seed to believe that it actually did happen in the few million years between the time the earth cooled sufficiently to allow bio-molecules to form and the appearance of the first living organisms. Of course, when one is a priori committed to the notion that only mechanistic, unintelligent forces were at work in the production of life, then one is constrained to accept the most outlandish and implausible of stories.

It took an intelligent writer to produce Hamlet. There is no basis for believing that any conceivable combination of chance, luck, and blind, impersonal force could accomplish it. Likewise, neither is there any basis for believing that blind, impersonal forces built DNA. The conviction that such mechanisms did indeed accidentally achieve this astonishing miracle is an article of faith that only true believers in the church of Materialism can convince themselves to embrace.

Pete Schramm, who is himself a lawyer, posts a joke at No Left Turns that some of you will think funny:

My apologies to those of my friends (maybe they're now former friends) who are lawyers.

Here's John Fund's take on the Miers' imbroglio:

Pace Mr. Fund We have a somewhat different take on Ms Miers' prospects. If she doesn't withdraw, her persistence will set the stage for some novel political irony. She will be broadly disliked for quite different reasons by both Democrats and Republicans, but most of them will reluctantly feel compelled to vote to confirm her. Miers will likely be given a pass by many Democrats who will give her every benefit of the doubt since she's probably the best nominee, from their point of view, they can hope to see. If she's rejected, whoever comes after her is going to be far stronger, more ideologically conservative, and much more impressive than she, and far more difficult to oppose.

Republicans, for their part, will be unenthusiastic about Miers but also reluctant to vote against their president's pick, and indeed most of the current opposition to her is coming from columnists and bloggers, not senators.

Unless she's a disaster in the hearings, which she may be, Ms Miers will probably be confirmed by a comfortable margin, unless defections by Republicans, unlikely as they are, bring her down. In other words, nobody in the Senate will want her as a SCOTUS justice, but almost everyone in the Senate will feel constrained to vote for her.

Congressional negotiators are currently haggling over an amendment to a military spending bill which would prohibit torture of anyone in American custody. This sounds good, but we're not enthusiastic.

The McCain amendment to the spending bill says this: "No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." The amendment passed the senate 90 to 9 a couple of days ago, but it shouldn't have.

President Bush has threatened to veto the legislation and we hope he does, not because we don't think people suspected of terrorism should be given some protections from abusive treatment, but because this bill is so vaguely worded that it has the potential to severely cripple us in the fight against those who wish to destroy us.

For example, what exactly constitutes "degrading treatment"? Is it imprisonment? Solitary confinement? Ridicule? Being yelled at? Unless the word "degrading" is clearly defined almost anything done to a detainee could be interpreted, and will be interpreted by ACLU lawyers, as degrading, and our courts and military will be bogged down for years trying to get clarification on what is permitted and what isn't.

The same criticism could be levelled at the use of words like "cruel" or "inhumane." Where is the line between cruel and not-cruel? Is giving detainees institutional food cruel? What about the use of fake menstrual blood, or the use of deception in general? Does cruelty depend upon motive or is it merely a function of the act itself? If an interrogator uses methods which might be deemed cruel because he has reason to believe that the detainee has information about a terrorist attempt to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, would that be prohibited? If so, why? These and other questions need to be answered before the president should affix his signature to such a bill.

This is one of those pieces of legislation that politicians vote for in order to look good by appearing to be doing good. They're no doubt hoping that Bush will save them from their fecklessness and veto this charade.

Readers interested in learning about how the attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad was thwarted should visit The Fourth Rail. As always, Bill Roggio has good analysis and helpful satellite photos of the area.

I know. It's not nice to laugh at people nor is it polite to call them stupid, but what else can you do when you read something like this:

As absurd as Ms Guevara proudly makes herself sound this is even worse:

Taken seriously is exactly what Mr. Hanson cannot be. We'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and think that perhaps he was writing a parody of liberalism or political correctness, but a visit to the full editorial doesn't add much weight to that hypothesis. He appears to be writing a parody, to be sure, but it is entirely unintentional.

If you're under ten years old here's an uproarious example of lefty humor for you. It'll have you rolling on the floor trembling in fits of laughter. How could one man be so funny, you'll want to know.

Go to the Drudge Report and click on the Al Franken video skit.

This is an ideological as well as an emotional maturity litmus test. If you're over ten and you laugh then you've self-identified as a leftist who has a long way to go before you're grown up.

Mike adams at Front Page Mag fills us in on the latest results from the Can't We All Just Get Along front. It seems that the good people of North Carolina are subsidizing calls for their own extermination. As you read the following article just imagine a white person saying about blacks what Dr. Kambon says about whites:

And while we're asking the Africana Studies Department (whatever that is) why they would hire a genocidal racist who promotes Hitlerian "final solutions", they might also be asked what sort of country they think this will be when Dr. Kambon's dream of exterminating all whites is realized. We wonder what Dr. Kambon's vision of a white-less America might be. Sudan, perhaps? Somalia? Liberia? Zimbabwe? New Orleans? If reading is part of Dr. Kambon's skill set, he might lay hold of a copy of Animal Farm to gain some insight into what happens when societies do the sort of thing he recommends. Unfortunately, the lessons of that book would doubtless find the mind of such a colossal dunce as Dr. Kambon impenetrable.

UPDATE: According to Brit Hume, Dr. Kambon is, ironically enough, an opponent of the death penalty.

For links to the sites to which Adams refers go to the link at the top of this post.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has released a book titled Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth about America's Top Schools. The book can be ordered free by following this link to NewsMax.com.

NewsMax itself has "delved into Choosing the Right College to find the best schools for conservatives - campuses where a core curriculum requires a rigorous exposure to the great thinkers who have shaped our political, religious and cultural heritage, and where the atmosphere for learning is nurtured by genuine intellectual freedom, tolerance and tradition."

The article discusses each of these schools and explains why they were selected.

George Will has been one of Harriet Miers' most eloquent critics and his current essay on the matter is perhaps his best. The whole argument is elegantly written and tightly reasoned but perhaps the highlight is the second half of the essay:

The line about it being easy to cobble together a senate majority on behalf of a concrete interest but "surpassingly difficult to get a majority anywhere to rise in defense of mere excellence" is a classic.

Meanwhile, Peter Schramm at No Left Turns offers his reasons for believing that Miers will not go through with the hearings:

Anecdotal, to be sure, but when staunch defenders of the President like No Left Turns, Michelle Malkin, and the Power Line guys are telling the Big Guy that he whiffed on this one the outcome looks very bleak indeed.

It's so unfortunate that this happened, particularly in light of the fact that it was so easily avoidable. The Miers nomination has done more to shake conservatives' confidence in the competence of the Bush administration than all their other putative misteps put together.

In case you haven't heard, matters seem to be moving along in Weare, NH, with plans to seize the property of Supreme Court Justice David Souter to convert it into a hotel (the Lost Liberty Hotel) consonant with the decision Kelo v. New London in which Justice Souter concurred and which allows municipalities to sieze property by eminent domain in order to give it to private companies for private use.

There will be an initiative on the March 14, 2006 Weare ballot in which voters can indicate to the Selectmen their desire to have the town government use eminent domain to seize 34 Cilley Hill Road (currently owned by Supreme Court Justice David Souter) for the purpose of a promoting economic development (a valid seizure according to Souter's vote in Kelo vs. City of New London).

Also, a list of over thirty interested developers has been narrowed to seven. They are seeking a developer who has experience building a similar type of structure and is enthusiastically supportive of the purpose of the project. The name of the developer is expected to be announced by mid-November.

They can use financial support so anyone who'd like to see this project come to fruition can go here to find out how they can contribute. It would be nice to see our judges and politicians forced to accept the same consequences of their rulings and laws that the rest of us must accept.

Why don't we have a vaccine for the avian flu? Why will it take so long to produce enough tamiflu to mitigate the symptoms of a potential flu pandemic? Is it that the drug companies are failing us? The Wall Street Journal explains:

Bureaucrats and politicians excel at two things: Wasting money on worthless projects and over-regulating businesses upon which our welfare depends. Other than these, the federal government, at least in its civilian sector, tends to be pretty incompetent.

Michelle Starr of the York Daily Record, which has done some fine work reporting on the Dover ID trial, has written an interesting article on the testability of ID's claims. She writes:

I think Eugenie Scott is technically correct that the emergence of a flagellum wouldn't definitively falsify the ID position because many ID theorists assert that the design is front-loaded, i.e. it's programmed into biology at the Big Bang, or at the creation of life, so that bacteria could well be intelligently designed such that they would respond to certain selection pressures by developing a flagellum. Nevertheless, it would seem that Darwinian scientists would want to carry out the test if for no other reason than scientific curiosity.

Moreover, if such a structure were seen to emerge with no significant tinkering from the experimenter, it would be, for all practical purposes, the death knell for ID. It would be the biological version of the O.J. Simpson verdict: Technically his guilt was not proven, but everyone knows that he was guilty of the crime.

Likewise, and this is one reason that Darwinians are unlikely to actually attempt this test, if the experiment were to fail to produce a flagellum, logically the result would be meaningless, but psychologically it would give a big boost to ID among the masses. The Darwinians know that the chances of a flagellum evolving are vanishingly slim, and the chances of giving their ID opponents a propaganda coup if no flagellum appears are significant. Consequently, the test won't get done, or if it is done the public will not hear about it unless a flagellum were indeed to materialize. It's just easier, and less dangerous, to accuse ID of being untestable than to actually try to test it.

This leads to another reason that Darwinians won't conduct the test, of course, which is that doing so has a very serious drawback for the argument that has been consistently employed by the anti-ID folks. Simply by carrying out the test the experimenter would be demonstrating that the Darwinians' claim that ID is not testable, and therefore not science, is false. What an interesting predicament. The Darwinians argue vehemently that ID is not a scientific theory, but they dare not try to actually prove it is false because in so doing they undercut their argument that it's not science.

Tongue-Tied informs us of a marvelous specimen of liberal hyper-sensitivity and hypocrisy all wrapped into one.

It appears that the Kansas City Chiefs football team recently enjoyed a win over the Washington Redskins, but the Kansas City Star referred to the losing side only as "the Washington team". The Star's various accounts of the Chiefs' victory Sunday over Washington never used the word "Redskins." The paper piously declared that, "The Star's policy is not to use Washington's team name because it is a racial slur."

Well, then, what about the Chiefs? The paper explained that, "the Chiefs were actually named for former Mayor H. Roe Bartle -- known as The Chief -- who was key in getting the team to come to Kansas City in the 1960s." The name has nothing to do with degrading ethnic insults.

Tongue-Tied is amazed: "A racial slur? I thought 'Redskins' conveyed an heroic image! Why else would a sports team have adopted it? I don't think they meant to portray themselves as primitive morons, do you? Or is it a slur to portray someone as heroic these days? I guess it is in certain loony Left circles."

As a reader of Tongue-Tied notes, the Kansas City Star's ridiculous rationale for refusing to say "Redskins" but having no problem with "Chiefs" is nonsense. If it were true that the name has nothing to do with Indi.., er, Native-Americans, why would the Chiefs' helmets have an arrowhead on them, and why would they be playing in Arrowhead Stadium?

Maybe Mayor Bartle, aka The Chief, also walked about with an arrow wrapped around his head.

The Fourth Rail's Bill Roggio addresses the criticism that the United States has made Iraq a training ground for foreign terrorists. The claim, according to Roggio, is doubtless correct but also trivial (Our word, not his):

In the course of explaining why the claim that Iraq is a terrorist training ground is of very little moment Roggio mentions that over half of the foreign terrorists who have come to Iraq to fight so far this year have been killed or captured:

There's much more at the link, including a graphic which breaks down the captured terrorists by nation from whence they came.

Freshman Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) recently introduced an amendment to the budget resolution which would have taken money from an incredible piece of pork, a 220 million dollar bridge in Alaska that connects the mainland to an island with a population of about fifty people, and used that money to rebuild a bridge in Louisianna that was damaged by Katrina. The Alaskan bridge, often referred to as the bridge to nowhere, is just a wallet-stuffer for Alaskan workers. The money could have reduced the amount that taxpayers will otherwise be handing over to Louisianna by almost a quarter of a billion dollars.

It's the kind of legislation on which Republicans campaign for office. It's the sort of thing we vote for Republicans to support. The Senate vote was Thursday. It was defeated 85 to 15. Only fifteen senators had enough character to vote on behalf of the American taxpayer and against a spectacular waste. The rest of them voted to squander our money on a bridge that will service no more than a few people a day.

The roll call on the vote can be found here.

The fifteen heroes are: Allard (R-CO), Allen (R-VA) [Our early favorite for '08], Bayh (D-IN), Burr (R-NC), Coburn (R-OK), Conrad (D-ND), DeMint (R-SC), DeWine (R-OH) [Partial redemption for joining the gang of 14], Feingold (D-WI), Graham (R-SC) [Partial redemption for joining the gang of 14], Kyl (R-AZ), Landrieu (D-LA) [We were surprised, too, until we remembered that Louisianna gets the money], Sessions (R-AL), Sununu (R-NH), and Vitter (R-LA). Eleven Republicans and four Democrats.

Noticebly missing from the list are such stalwart Republican opponents of governmental profligacy as John McCain, Rick Santorum (This is Santorum's second offense against principle. His first was endorsing Arlen Specter in his primary race against Pat Toomey), Bill Frist, and, well, the vast majority of the Republican caucus. One expects Democrats to vote for fleecing the public, but it's an outrage that people who advertise themselves as fiscal conservatives have done it. Santorum is in a tough race in '06 in Pennsylvania. He upset a lot of his base with his endorsement of Specter. This vote may have alienated many of them. It certainly has made me consider withholding my vote for the office of senator on election day. Too bad Toomey won't challenge Santorum in the primary.

To make matters worse this amendment was just one of several that Coburn introduced that would have stripped another $500,000 from a sculpture park in Washington, $200,000 from a proposed animal shelter in Rhode Island, and another $200,000 from a parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska, and redirect these monies to disaster relief. Those proposals also lost by similar margins.

The Grich has the pathetic reactions of porkmeisters Ted Stevens of Alaska and Patty Murray of Washington to Coburn's attempt to introduce sanity and integrity to the Senate.

Stevens threatened to resign if he didn't get his bridge. We urge the voters of Alaska to assist him in finding his way out the door.

Murray threatened to block the pet projects of any senator who voted against her sculpture park. May we recommend that the first sculpture will be a huge hog feeding at the public trough.

Andrew Sullivan lists the number of pork projects by year and shows the dramatic increase from 958 in 1996 to 13,997 in 2005. The fat has actually doubled since President Bush came into office.

Ironically, I received a call yesterday afternoon from the RNC asking for a donation. I told the caller, who was not just a hired telemarketer, that I won't be contributing another cent to the Republican party until they start acting like Republicans and start acting like a majority party. Why, I asked her, should we vote for Republicans if they're just going to morph into Democrats? She gave me a number to call to voice my concerns. I suspect that the number, like the bridge in Alaska, goes nowhere.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model discusses how Iraqis of his acquaintance are viewing the trial of Saddam Hussein:

Mohammed describes his friends' thoughts as they watched the trial on television:

When the day of reckoning comes for Saddam it should be broadcast around the world with the words scrawling continuously along the top of the picture - sic semper tyrannus! Such a scene might have a salutary effect on tyrants throughout the globe.

Why is there so much animosity on the Left for conservatives in general and George Bush in particular? Perhaps there are several reasons. One surely is that for many on the Left politics is an ersatz religion. They view opposition to their politics in the same way that some religious people view opposition to their religion. Any threat to one's deepest convictions is as dangerous as a threat to one's physical being. It is a causus belli.

Another reason is frustration amounting to bitterness. The movers and shakers on the contemporary Left came of age in the social and cultural rebellions of the 1960s. As the 60s morphed into the 70s many of those who were committed to pulling down the establishment realized that smoking dope, grooving on the Mommas and the Poppas, and looking scruffy would not, by themselves, accomplish much. So they cleaned up, entered the mainstream, and began their long march through the institutions. If they couldn't bring down the system from without, they'd do it from within. The revolution wouldn't be the sudden cataclysm they'd hoped for, but would instead be a gradual evolutionary process, like the frog which discovers too late that he's boiling in hot water. The brightest of the revolutionaries went into law, education, the arts, the media, the church, and politics. They advanced from entry level positions in the 70s, to mid-level positions in the 80s, and reached the zenith of their professions in the 90s. By this time, many of these fields were dominated by recast rebels who still held fast to the values, ideals, and dreams of their youth.

By the 90s social and cultural power was concentrated largely in the hands of those who wished to use it to transform the United States into the economically Marxist, socially libertine, militarily impotent nation they envisioned back in those hallucinogenic, halcyon days of the 60s. They were clearly succeeding. The culture was happy to throw off traditional moral norms and let it all hang out. Education had been transmogrified into a feel-good party for kids and sinecures for instructors, especially at the college level. The Church had largely abandoned traditional beliefs and doctrines, especially as these related to social matters like sexuality, and had thrown in its lot with the Zietgeist. The courts and the media were on board. Bill Clinton, the first president from the 60s generation, had been elected to the highest office in the land after the aberration of the Reagan years. Everything was ripe for the final stages of the transformation of America into a modern utopia. It seemed that success after all these decades of ideological toil was ineluctable. It would happen in their lifetime, as a result of their efforts, and the anticipation of it was doubtless intoxicating.

Then came 2000 and a Republican running on a Reaganite platform garnered fewer votes than their champion but was nevertheless ensconced in office by the Supreme Court. This was infuriating enough, auguring as it did another delay in their ultimate ascendency, but George Bush's retrograde first term witnessed a resurgence of enthusiasm for the American military, tax cuts, and conservatives being placed in high judgeships. Suddenly everything was threatened by this interloper from Texas. It was bad enough, too, that Rush Limbaugh was on the air, but now there was the Washington Times, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and the blogosphere and the feeling that all they had worked so hard for for so many years was coming undone.

Then came 2004 and an even more genuine left-wing candidate was also defeated by Bush who seemed now, despite numerous difficulties, to be in a position to have his way with the courts, the crucial linchpin in any success that the Left would have. The resentment boiled over in the aftermath of the election. Unable to mask their disappointment, resentment, and bitterness the Left launched a vicious assualt on the President and his supporters, especially Evangelicals, and has been determined ever since to do everything it can to punish and discredit Bush to limit the damage that he's done.

If he can be made to look weak, stupid, and venal, the thinking evidently goes, the Left will have a much better chance of persuading the electorate to repudiate all things Republican at the polls in 2006 and 2008. Thus nothing is out of bounds. There are no rules to limit what may be done. Spurious memos on Bush's National Guard service, phony indictments of Republican leaders, repeated allegations of deliberate deceptions by the administration to get us into war, discrediting the administration's ability to respond to disasters like Katrina - every slander on the character of the President and his appointees is in play.

The Left, having been denied its prize after having come so close to grasping it, is lashing out with vitriolic hatred at the people who have frustrated their designs, and demanding of its Democratic surrogates in Congress that there be total all-out war against the President and everything he stands for. Any Republican attempt to reach across the aisle in a quest for bi-partisan cooperation for the good of the country is to be rebuffed. Every Republican initiative is to be opposed, every Bush policy is to be condemned no matter what the cost. The Left is determined to gain its revenge and to recover its momentum by adopting the words of Malcolm X as their tacit slogan: "By whatever means necessary."

And that's why, and how, we've come to be where we are today.

There continues to be a great deal of confusion, much of it seemingly deliberate, over the nature of the Intelligent Design (ID) hypothesis as well as the nature of the basic assumptions of Darwinian evolution (DE) and creationism (C). This post is an attempt to clarify things a little.

Let's start with the commonly heard refrain that DE is science whereas ID is religion.

The fundamental claim of DE is that all of life has arisen solely as a result of blind, unguided, impersonal processes. ID is, in its essence, simply the denial or contrary of this claim. ID states that mechanistic processes are inadequate by themselves to account for what we find in the realm of living things and that one of the causal factors which must be invoked to fully account for life is intelligence. Whatever philosophical status the basic assertion of DE enjoys its contrary also enjoys, and vice versa. If the proposition that life is completely explicable in terms of blind, impersonal processes is a scientific assertion then so is it's denial. If the proposition that life bears the impress of intelligent purpose is religious then so is it's contrary.

ID is not C. Creationism is an attempt to vindicate the Genesis account and to reconcile it with science. It starts with the assumption that Genesis is true, and it will not accept any explanation that is incompatible with this assumption.

Similarly, DE starts with the assumption that only naturalistic forces can be employed to account for living things and will not accept any explanation which is incompatible with this assumption.

Both C and DE are inferences from an a priori metaphysical commitment and are more like each other in this regard than either is like ID.

ID starts with observations of living things and infers from the empirical data that intelligence must have played a role in the development of life. As such, ID is an observation-based hypothesis and is therefore more scientific, in this sense at least, than either of its competitors. It's inference that purpose and intentional design underlie life on earth is based not on a presupposition that there is a designer (though many ID theorists doubtless hold such a presupposition in their private lives), but rather upon several obvious facts about the world. Here are three:

1) The abundance of specified complexity (information) in the biosphere: Information is not generated by purposeless processes. A computer, for example, does not produce simulated organisms by blind chance. The computer must be programmed to follow an algorithm which is itself the product of intelligence. Likewise, DNA and proteins which carry far more information than does the average library, are not adequately explained by purposeless processes any more than are the books in the library.

2) The existence of ostensibly irreducibly complex structures and processes: If irreducible complexity exists in living things - and despite the claims of critics, no one has been able to put forward a convincing case that it does not - then this would be evidence of an intelligent agent at work. The nature of biochemical machines and pathways, cellular assembly lines and factories, and highly complex chemical cascades (like blood clotting) all point to purpose. The idea that these things could have arisen through random mutations and natural selection apart from any intentional engineering would be regarded as extremely implausible were it not necessitated by a prior commitment to materialistic explanations.

3) The telic nature of the cosmos: That life is telic (i.e. evinces purpose) is in dispute. That the cosmos is telic is much more difficult to gainsay. Cosmologists can invoke no mechanism like natural selection to explain the exquisite fine-tuning that is being discovered to exist throughout the warp and woof of the cosmos. If the cosmos as a whole bears witness to having been intricately engineered for a purpose, it is plausible to think that certain aspects of the cosmos, like the structures in living things, which appear to be designed for a purpose, actually are.

Indeed, we must keep in mind that the current debate is not about whether there is design in the biosphere. Everyone agrees that there is. The debate is over the source of that design. Is it nature blindly selecting for survival advantage, or is it an intelligence of some kind, a "World Soul", a Platonic demiurge, an idealist "Absolute", or the God of classical theism? ID offers no opinion.

It must be stressed that, strictly speaking, ID does not conflict with evolution (E), the theory of descent by modification. It conflicts only with DE, which insists that descent is a thoroughly naturalistic, mechanistic process. E simply asserts, however, that organisms share common ancestors. It does not require one to believe that the process of descent from these ancestral forms was purely mechanistic.

Thus there are among the top ranks of ID advocates a number of evolutionists of various stripe, and there are also some who are more creationist in their beliefs. ID is compatible with both, although either, or both, could be wrong and ID would be unaffected. What ID is not compatible with is DE.

ID is scarcely even related to C except insofar as both theories hold that an intelligence was involved in the emergence of life. To see the vast difference between them one need only realize that all of Genesis could be proven wrong but, although C would be thoroughly devastated, the theory of ID would be unscathed. ID is not dependent upon Genesis or any other religious or metaphysical book or doctrine for its content.

Contrary to the insistent claims of its critics, and the hopes of some of its advocates, ID is not religious. It requires no commitment to a god, it prescribes no worship nor doctrine. It has no clergy nor holy books. It simply holds that blind, unguided processes are inadequate by themselves to account for living things and that at some point, in some way, intelligence must have played a role. This is hardly a religious assertion, and unlike religious assertions, may even lend itself to testing. If it could be shown, for instance, that some mechanistic process does indeed produce information or an increase in information, if it could be plausibly and convincingly demonstrated that DNA or proteins could have arisen by chance through purely natural processes, then intelligent agency will have been shown to be a superfluous add-on, and ID will be decisively refuted.

Some may wish to use ID as a wedge to get religion into schools, but ID should be judged on its merits and not on the motives of some of its proponents. There are some who insist, after all, that DE be taught because they see it as a way of inculcating atheism into students. There are others who have used DE to justify social Darwinism and even genocide. It would be an error to judge DE on the basis of such misuses by its votaries, and it's equally wrong to judge ID by the misuses to which some of its adherents wish to put it.

There can be no harm, despite the hysteria of the ACLU and its allies in the scientific community, in informing students, when they are studying evolution, that although many scientists believe the process requires only mechanistic engines like mutation and natural selection, others disagree. It hurts no one to inform students that there are many scientists and philosophers who believe that whether evolution accurately describes how life came to be or not, the fundamental causes of life must have included intelligent purpose among them.

Everything that you thought was true about the state of the world is apparently false. If you don't believe it, read the Commission on Human Security Report titled War and Peace in the Twenty First Century. The report is filled with fascinating information. Did you know for instance that:

According to the Report each of the following examples of conventional wisdom is actually little more than myth:

The Report states that, "Not one of these claims is based on reliable data. All are suspect; some are demonstrably false. Yet they are widely believed because they reinforce popular assumptions. They flourish in the absence of official figures to contradict them, and conjure a picture of global security trends that is grossly distorted. And they often drive political agendas."

Then there is this astonishing fact:

The report gives the lion's share of the credit for the decline in violence to the end of both colonialism and the cold war, which is certainly a major factor, and to the efforts of the U.N., which is certainly a singularly ludicrous attribution. Nowhere in the report is there mention of the fact that since the 1980s, evil-doers have been put on notice that if they persist in doing their neighbors ill they may well receive a knock on the door from an American JDAM precision guided munition.

Such a prospect has probably done more to concentrate the minds of the world's villains than all of Kofi Anan's proclamations, programs, and thieveries put together. Yet it receives no mention. Nor have we seen this report in the MSM. Too much good news for the chronically dyspeptic gloom and doomers to assimilate, we suppose.

Thanks to Belmont Club for the tip.

ID folks frequently mention how complex living systems are, but many non-scientists really have no idea what they're talking about. One example of complexity is the biochemical pathways that are found in every cell of a higher animal's body. To get an idea of just what a scientist means by the word "complexity" check this out. As you look at it, bear in mind that this is what Darwinian evolutionists believe was produced by the action of blind, unguided, random processes, and it's what they don't want students to be told may be the product of an intelligent bio-engineer.

Click anywhere on the chart to magnify that section of it.

Thanks to Bill Dembski for the tip.

The highly esteemed theologian J.I. Packer forthrightly addresses in a Christianity Today article the question whether Christian theology allows that others besides Christians might be granted eternal life.

This is a very difficult question for Christians to discuss with devout members of other faiths because the orthodox answer seems heartless and parochial. Packer doesn't shrink from it, however, and states clearly that:

This is the mainstream evangelical position and is the heritage of two thousand years of orthodox Christian belief on the matter. Even so, I think it fair to say that everyone, including Dr. Packer, might hope that this traditional interpretation is incorrect. It breaks one's heart to think of the implications of its being right. Millions of wonderful people who deeply love God as they understand him are nevertheless lost forever if it is. Either they spend eternity suffering the torments of hell or they are completely annihilated, but in either case, Christians who are called by Christ to love the lost cannot contemplate that fate without hoping that it's not so, without hoping that God has some alternative plan for the millions of children and adults who have lived their lives without ever hearing the gospel or who have, for whatever reason, never been able to perceive its truth.

Yet whatever such a plan might be (C.S. Lewis addresses this very issue, albeit obliquely, in his wonderful short work The Great Divorce), it must be consonant with the Biblical witness on the matter, especially the doctrine that it is only because of the price that God himself paid on the cross that anyone at all can be saved. Salvation is possible for anyone who receives it only because of what Christ did, but whether it also depends upon a person's knowing what Christ did and knowing who Christ was is less clear.

Packer goes on to outline two alternatives to the orthodox view that Christians have put forward throughout the history of the church and finds them both inadequate:

We discount universalism for reasons we need not go into now, and we agree with Dr. Packer that if any non-Christians are saved it is not on the basis of sincerity, merit, or rituals. However, it may be that these do not exhaust all the possibilities. Most Christians, after all, believe that children and mentally handicapped persons who die without recognizing themselves as "guilty, defiled, and unworthy," and confessing and renouncing their sins, "asking mercy from whatever gods there may be," are nevertheless not condemned by their lack of understanding.

Many Christians also believe that people who lived before the Christian era are also held to a different standard and are not necessarily denied salvation even though they may never have had the faintest glimmer of who Christ would be. So, it seems reasonable to hope that it is at least possible that adults in the present age who've never heard the gospel or who, for reasons transcending the biblical "hardness of heart," find themselves unable to discern its truth, are judged on a quite different basis than those who have heard the gospel and who have no other reason for rejecting it than that they simply don't want it to be true.

The gospel tells us in many places that all those who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior will have eternal life, but it rarely suggests that only those who accept Christ will be saved. In those passages (like Jn.8:24, I Jn.2:22,23 and I Jn. 5:10) which do seem to imply this exclusivism it is possible to read the text as referring to those contemporaries who have been given so much evidence that Jesus was the Son of God that their persistent unbelief is without excuse.

Perhaps when each of us stands before God he will ask of us a single question. Perhaps he will ask not whether we have believed this or that point of doctrine, however important these may be, but rather he will ask of each person: "Do you love me?" It could be that this is for God the all-important issue, the overriding question. Our love is what he most earnestly desires. It could be, too, that we will not respond to this question in words, but rather that our whole life will serve as our reply.

On the other hand, it may well be that this is not the case at all and that Packer's interpretation of the Gospel's teaching is correct, but he, and every other Christian, should be fervently hoping that it isn't. We should all hope that there's a "wideness to God's mercy" and grace that judges us accountable for the love of God, or lack of it, that we hold in our heart and not for the knowledge of the scripture, or lack of it, which we hold in our head.

The Fourth Rail has a good visual that enables the viewer to track the progress made by coalition forces over the last year in its transition from "search and destroy" to "clear and hold missions." The visual illustrates pretty starkly that the number of towns being held by the coalition is expanding rapidly toward the Syrian border now that Iraqi combat troops are growing increasingly competent and available.

Of course, there may still be terrorist activity in towns that are under Iraqi military control, as there was recently in Ramadi, but these towns are no longer sanctuaries for terrorists. The bad guys know their range of operations is growing more and more restricted. They no doubt feel like a pig in the coils of a python. An apt simile, that.

Zakaria gives the impression that the current "clear and hold" tactics that coalition forces are employing along the Euphrates River and elsewhere in the Sunni triangle are a novel development. He makes it sound as if the administration could have been setting up local forces in cleared towns all along but were too obtuse to see the value of it and are just now getting around to revising their strategy. This is nonsense.

The fact is that it has been administration policy from early on to train Iraqi troops to handle precisely this sort of mission, but it has taken time to prepare the Iraqis for that task. Now, however, there are dozens of battalions ready to fight the Islamists and provide security in Iraqi towns and more troops are coming on line every month. As the troops are becoming available the policy is coming to fruition, but the policy isn't new. It's only that people who are loath to give the present administration any credit for anything wish us to think that somehow they have just come to see what everyone else has been seeing for months, i.e. that we need a new strategy.

We didn't need a new strategy, the Henny-Pennys and Chicken Littles among us notwithstanding. What we needed was patience and resolve to see the strategy we already had through to it's culmination. Bush had it and it's now clearly paying off.

In case you missed this story, Joanne Jacobs provides us with the link:

They may not be losing everything, but Ms Johnson and Mr. Lawson are certainly missing the point. The expense extravagance and licentiousness of these affairs is as ludicrous as it is obscene. For the school to continue sponsoring the event is to assume responsibility for the message it sends, i.e. that such behavior is morally acceptable. We're delighted that a high school principal had the steel to stand up to parents and students and refuse to let his school capitulate to the crass materialism and sensuality that the parents encourage their kids to indulge in.

The article doesn't say it, but we assume from the fact that the students pay tuition that Kellenberg is a private school. It will be interesting to see how many public school administrators this year, and in the years ahead, demonstrate the character and wisdom displayed by Mr. Hoagland.

Belmont Club's Wretchard and The Fourth Rail's Bill Roggio see the ratification of the Iraqi constitution as the beginning of a new phase in the war. according to these observers, the insurgency has diminished to the point where it's unable to do much more than snipe around the margins of the Iraqi juggernaut, and the administration, who's eyes have been turned toward Damascus for some time, now feels a little more latitude to turn up the threat of military action against the Syrians who have been making mischief in Iraq ever since the end of the invasion phase of the war.

Roggio says that:

Wretchard adds this thought:

Assad's meddling in both Lebanon and Iraq is going to have consequences, none of which will be pleasant for him.

We speculate, though, that the administration's primary target is not Syria and that American policy will be merely to cow the Syrians into submission. The country that should be concerned that our troops are being increasingly freed up in Iraq by the improvements in the Iraqi forces is Iran. The mullahs in Tehran must be wondering what is in store for them if they persist in developing nuclear weapons.

As long as American forces were tied down in Iraq the Iranians knew there was little chance of an American initiative against their nuclear program, but now that troops are becoming available for operations elsewhere, the operational sites at which this program is based suddenly find themselves in much greater jeopardy. The Iranians have American blood on their hands and they should be gravely concerned about that.

The MSM, ever intent upon displaying its own shallowness, spiralled into paroxysms of glee the other day over the apparently staged meeting that President Bush had with some Iraq war vets. One would think from listening to Andrea Mitchell and others breathlessly describing the nefarious "coaching" of the soldiers as they prepared for their encounter with the President that a scandal of unprecedented proportions was in the offing. As usual, though, there was much less there than the media had hyped and hoped.

One soldier who was at the interview with the President expresses his dismay at the media's hyperventilations here.

The Left is determined to destroy, or at least discredit, this administration by any means necessary, but every time they get their hopes up that the White House has finally stumbled into the pig poop those infernal bumblers emerge from the mire as clean as spring water and smelling like peppermint. Meanwhile, the desperate lefties in the media, like the incredible shrinking man of the 1950's sci-fi movie, keep making themselves smaller and more insignificant. It must be as frustrating for them as it is amusing for the rest of us.

A case in point is MSNBC's Chris Matthews who has Karl Rove all but swinging from the gallows on his Hardball show. Matthews is so convinced that somebody from the administration, either Rove or Lewis Libby, is going to be indicted for the Valerie Plame business and he's so eager to see it happen, that should these men walk free, Matthews' friends will have to place him under a suicide watch.

If perchance the District Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, who's investigating this affair closes out his grand jury investigation without handing down any indictments of top White House officials, I hope I'm able to see Matthews' show that night. It'll be most illuminating to listen to Matthews explain how these people are as guilty as Lucifer, and everybody knows it, dammit, but that there just wasn't enough evidence to indict. It'll be great fun.

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup telephone survey of 1,005 people on Sept. 8-11 produced some interesting results:

The most interesting thing to us about this poll is the fact that only 12% of the people surveyed accepted some form of materialistic evolution. The vast majority were either creationists or theistic evolutionists. Seventy six percent of those polled have thought about the matter somewhat or a lot, and 66% say that it makes some difference to them which view is correct.

This does not, of course, have any bearing on which view is correct, but it does suggest how far out of the mainstream naturalistic views of life are in this country.

Even Richard Cohen, the solidly left columnist at the Washington Post thinks the brouhaha over who outed Valerie Plame is a tempest of Lilliputian proportions. Cohen actually calls for the District Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, to just call the whole thing off:

Needless to say, the rest of the left is seriously miffed by Cohen's apostacy, but then they're so filled with hatred for Bush they'd crawl a mile over broken glass to get a high ranking Republican indicted. Whether the indictment has merit or not doesn't matter. They're not interested in justice, they're interested in destroying political enemies, and every effort must be made, in their view, to bring about that noble end.

Bill Dembski directs us to this 38 minute video which uses computer simulation to illustrate some of the reasons why most people, other than the true believers, are skeptical of the putative powers of blind nature to produce living things.

The resolution is a little fuzzy, but it's worth a look.

John Fund tells us how the Miers nomination came about. The core of his column is these paragraphs:

The conservative displeasure with the Harriet Miers selection shows no signs of abating. No one expects George Bush to pull her nomination, but there's a lot of money being wagered that she'll withdraw of her own volition. It's hard enough to face the judiciary committee when half of the Senators are in your corner, but it'll be an especially difficult ordeal for Harriet Miers because the best she can hope for is that a couple of Senators on an otherwise hostile panel might be lukewarm.

As the above announcement indicates, Viewpoint is going to be down for some server maintenance this weekend. Bill has discovered the reason our blog has been intermittently unavailable over the last month or so, and he's going to be correcting the problem tomorrow. We expect to be down starting Friday afternoon for an indefinite period. We may be back by Friday night or maybe not until Sunday. Check back with us when you get the chance.

I wish to take the opportunity of this post to thank all of our readers for your interest in what we're doing. It's gratifying to know that people are reading us and finding us worth their time. If you come across one of our posts that warrants it, please link us to your friends.

One of the chief opponents of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools nevertheless encourages teachers to teach religion in science lessons in elementary schools. Steve Peterman at Telic Thoughts reports that:

Eugenie Scott is the president of the National Council on Science Education and has frequently written against teaching ID in public schools because because ID is religion and religion doesn't belong in science classes, especially in classes of young students. Yet in the article linked above she endorses doing precisely what she wants to prohibit others from doing. Indeed, she recommends that teachers use religion to teach evolution to elementary students.

It's too bad that some newspaper reporter doesn't ask her to explain herself, but it's not likely that any of them will.

A Stephen Gordon of Utah submits a letter to the 11/2005 Discover magazine:

Well. Let's trot out a roster of those uneducated idiots: Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kant, Locke, Dostoyevsky, Galileo, Newton, Brahe, Boyle, Aggassiz, Faraday - we could go on, but you get the point. Perhaps Mr. Gordon would scoff and say that these are all pre-twentieth century thinkers, and that it was easier to believe back in their day than it is in ours. We might ask him, if we dare, why that is so. What do we know today that makes belief in God impossible for any but an idiot or an ignoramus? We should not hold our breath waiting for an answer to that one.

In any event, it doesn't matter whether or not Mr. Gordon has an answer for us since the basic assumption that only the mentally defective or uneducated can believe in God in the modern era is quite at variance with the facts. Let's take a look at just a few of those whose intellects are of the first rank and who also believe that God exists (and may even believe some of those other things Mr. Gordon contemptuously dismisses as well): Pope John Paul, George Marsden, Mark Noll, William Lane Craig, Karl Barth, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, William Dembski, Os Guiness, Richard Swinburne, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, J.R.R. Tolkein, Carl Henry, William Buckley, John Stott, Reinhold Neibhur, Alistair MacIntyre, Antonin Scalia, Richard Neuhaus, John Polkinghorne et multi, multi plus.

Among the scientists so esteemed by Mr. Gordon, as many of them believe today as believed a century ago, and the number of believing scientists is about the same as the number of their skeptical colleagues (see here, for instance).

Mr. Gordon may not be familiar with these names, but then one probably needs a modicum of education to be acquainted with them. Perhaps Mr. Gordon is indeed conversant with many of them but thinks them mere pygmies in comparison with his own intellectual gifts, and they may be. It's hard to say because, although I've heard of these Christian intellectuals and read their work, Mr. Gordon has till now escaped my notice, doubtless to my detriment. Consequently, I'm unaware of his scholarly credentials which must surely be impressive.

Former Vice President Al Gore said Wednesday he had no intention of ever running for president again, but he said the United States would be "a different country" if he had won the 2000 election.

Of the truth of this statement we have no doubt. One difference almost surely would be that under a President Gore we'd still be haggling with the U.N. to bring pressure to bear on Mullah Omar of the Afghan Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to the International Criminal Court.

The Detroit Free Press runs an excellent column by Brian Fahling which persuasively makes the case that Intelligent Design and Creationism are philosophically disparate paradigms and that Darwinian evolution is much more like Creationism than is Intelligent Design. This claim may surprise some, but Fahling provides a cogent explanation as to why it is so.

This article should be required reading for anyone who insists on using the disingenuous construction, "intelligent design creationism." The two frameworks share very little in common. Indeed, the essay should be required reading for anyone who sides with the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case underway in Harrisburg, PA.

The heart of Fahling's argument is this:

The only flaw in Fahling's piece is when he writes this:

Everything Fahling says here is true except that evolution does not require what Fahling claims that it does. One can be an evolutionist and still believe God exists. Ken Miller of Brown University is a very prolific writer on behalf of evolution and is a practicing Catholic. Michael Behe is also a Catholic, and he believes that God somehow pre-programmed evolution to produce the forms, processes and structures of living things.

It is the case, however, that Darwinian evolution requires an a priori commitment to the principle that whatever God's status may be he was not involved in the development and radiation of living things. This is, in fact, a religious a priori commitment, of course, so Fahling's larger point is still valid that Creationism and Darwinian evolution are more religiously and philosophically like each other than either is like Intelligent Design.

Fahling adds that:

In this respect ID is philosophically unlike either of the other two paradigms and, most importantly, is more scientific than either of the other two. We wonder if this fact will be emphasized in the Dover trial.

Paul Mirengoff at the Weekly Standard makes the case for confirming Harriet Miers:

We agree. If Miers turns out to align consistently with Scalia and Thomas on the big cases then whether she's the finest constitutional scholar available becomes less important. After all, Republican presidents have given us a lot of highly intellectual justices who waltzed to the left once they were seated on the Court. Earl Warren, Harry Blackmun, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter come to mind. Given a choice between a fine legal scholar and a reliably conservative (i.e. originalist) vote we'll happily take the latter.

Sadly, though, we could have had both.

Tom DeLay's lawyer, acting on the adage that the best defense is a good offense, has subpoened Texas District Attorney Ronnie Earle's records. Mr. Earle, like most bullies, is unaccustomed to having his victims fight back. Even so, DeLay's attorney, Dick DeGuerin, believes there has been a serious breach of professional ethics on the part of Mr. Earle and intends to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct. This is shaping up to be a real donneybrook.

The lawyers at PowerLine have some good background on this story.

In a fine article at Evangelical Outpost Joe Carter cites the Texas cheerleader "booty shaking" legislation to make the point that conservatism isn't really so much about small government as it is about healing sick societies. The heart of his post is this passage:

His analysis of what it is conservatives seek to accomplish is interesting. It's true that, as a general rule, bloated governments are symptomatic of a sick society. Consider for example the great harm done to the poor in this country by addicting them to the vast welfare state that subsidized and perpetuated all manner of social dysfunction from the sixties to the nineties. It doesn't follow, however, that there should never be instances, e.g. disaster relief, conservation of historical sites or biologically significant lands, or homeland security, when government takes on a larger role in society. Nevertheless, it requires great care and discernment to assess where and in which way government should be granted power to grow and act, and the way is fraught with many perils.

Carter suggests that it may perhaps be counterproductive for conservatives to argue adamantly that government should be kept as small and unintrusive as it can be, consistent with its role in national defense. After all, conservatives want the government to be intrusive when it's a matter of regulating pornography or sleazy television programming. By what principle do we call on government to protect us from the assaults of the concupiscent juveniles who write television scripts but insist that government stay out of other areas of our lives?

So the question, especially in light of President Bush's exercise of "compassionate conservatism" and his indulgence of deficit spending, is whether conservatives should rethink their traditional view of government. Mr. Bush has certainly given us occasion to begin that reassessment.

The fear that people like me have in saying all this, though, is that once we allow our ideological tether to slacken we risk losing the security and consistency afforded by a well-anchored set of guiding principles. Even worse, we risk, heaven forbid, becoming moderates.

Laura Bush is a lovely woman, but she's not helping to soothe the rift between her husband and his staunchest supporters over the last few years by accusing those supporters of being sexist because of their opposition to Harriet Miers' candidacy for the Supreme Court:

Mrs. Bush's statement was thoughtless. The critics of the Miers nomination are not opposed to having a woman on the court and indeed would love to see Priscilla Owen, Janice Brown, Edith Jones, or Alice Batchelder nominated. Their objection to Miers is rooted in the fact that she's an unknown at a time when there are at least a dozen exceptional candidates whose judicial philosophy and acumen have been demonstrated for all to see. The president has asked us to trust him, and conservatives want to do so, but they also want the best qualified people appointed to the court that Mr. Bush can find, and the White House has given us no reason to think that Ms Miers belongs on that list.

Unlike his conservative critics, perhaps, the president is not overly impressed by scholarly credentials. That is not to say that these are not important to him, but rather to say that they're not of primary importance. He's a man who places more weight on an individual's personal character and virtues and believes that Ms Miers' possession of such assests more than compensates for any shortage of judicial experience or expertise she might suffer. Unfortunately, assessments of character don't lend themselves to quantification and they strike many as vague and subjective, so the administration is unable to mount a compelling rationale for its selection. That's why Bush has to ask that we simply trust him.

The critics respond by noting that there are plenty of candidates out there from which the president could have chosen who have both character and an impressive paper trail, and they are dismayed that he declined to pick from that group. Nor are they shy about giving voice to their disappointment. Unlike the critics, though, we think it to no good purpose to be too critical of the president's nominee until the hearings.

If she's impressive the criticism will appear foolish, if she's a dud then there will be time to call for her defeat on the Senate floor - although defeating her will surely be an uphill battle. If she ultimately turns out to be David Souter in heels then conservatives may justly join with liberals in decrying George Bush's historical legacy and the magnificent opportunity he squandered despite his campaign assurances to the contrary.

See Captain's Quarters for some thoughtful analysis of Mrs. Bush's comments and the Miers nomination.

According to an article in the Independent Online Pakistanis criticize the U.S. and Britain for a niggardly response to the disaster created by the recent earthquake:

This just shows what ingrates Americans are. After Pakistan rushed so much aid to our Gulf coast in the wake of Katrina you would think we'd be more forthcoming. Just because Pakistan looks the other way as hatred of America and Americans is offered up as regular fare in madrassas and mosques is no reason why we shouldn't have had relief supplies on the way even before the earthquake hit.

We should do what we can, of course, but it certainly diminshes one's desire to sacrifice for another when the other demands that you do it and then criticizes you for not doing it on his time schedule and not giving right away what he thinks you ought to give. We're tempted to say to such as Mr. Hussain that maybe he should just hit up his fellow Muslims for the relief his countrymen need. They're much more generous than Americans, and we're sure that they'll flood the country with all the help Mr. Hussain could ask for.

Douglas Kern has an article at Tech Central Station titled Why Intelligent Design is Going to Win. He writes:

He then goes on to posit five claims in support of his thesis:

The text of the article gives supporting arguments for each of the above five assertions. It's pretty interesting.

We'd like to suggest a sixth reason: ID will win because it's obvious to everyone who isn't blinded by a materialist bias that life is such an unlikely phenomenon in any universe even minutely different from our own that the sense that our world is quite probably the product of purposeful intent is overwhelming.

Once it seeps into the public consciousness and discourse that the universe is the result of intentional engineering rather than blind, purposeless forces the correlative idea that the obvious design in the biosphere is also a consequence of intelligent agency will become much more easily accepted.

Indeed, when the public becomes aware that Intelligent Design is a kind of philosophical Grand Unifying Theory, uniting the earth, space, and biological sciences under the teleological umbrella, it will gain a purchase on the public imagination that will could make it virtually irresistable.

The Washington Post describes a recently intercepted letter from Ayman Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the brutal leader of al Qaida in Iraq:

The report elicits a couple of thoughts: First, it vindicates the war, if not the means by which the war has been fought. The Islamists see Iraq as central to their efforts to establish Islamic rule throughout the world.

Second, the Sheehanites who are calling for an immediate pullout are extremely irresponsible, or worse. All withdrawal would accomplish would be to widen the theater of operations for the Islamists and every government in the Middle East which did not bend to their will would quickly fall. Once the U.S. no longer forces the Islamists to concentrate their energies in Iraq, the scourge of Islamo-fascism will spread across the region and eventually across the world.

Their jihad is not about poverty or oppression, it's about religion and it's about hatred for every person or nation which resists the goal of a world-wide caliphate. They are fanatical and will not be appeased by U.N. resolutions or economic bribes. They will not rest until every Israeli is dead and Talibanic governments prevail throughout the ancient Islamic world from Indonesia to Spain and the rest of the globe lives in servile dhimmitude.

We have to win in Iraq. Unless we choose unilaterally to quit the fight, the GWOT is not going to have a quick, clean denouement. The conflict will probably endure throughout much of our children's lifetimes. This is unpleasant to contemplate, but the only realistic alternative is surrender and the knife sawing at our children's and grandchildren's throats.

Michelle Malkin has the necessary links to get up to speed on the travesty that is the New Orleans police force. First, many officers were AWOL in the runup and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then others were apparently involved in looting businesses and homes, then the police superintendent suddenly up and quit, and now there is a taped beating of a 64 year old inebriate which appears completely unwarranted.

If the mayor of this city were a white Republican the media would be screaming at the top of its lungs for his resignation. As it is, New Orleans' Mayor Nagin seems to own one of those courtesy cards that entitles the bearer to special privileges, including immunity from liberal media criticism.

In an article alluded to an earlier post (Beneath Even Debating?) the TimesOnline specifies those claims of the Bible which the Catholic bishops of England have decided are untrue and those which are true. It's a very interesting list, raising the question of what criteria the bishops' decisions were based upon.

Here's the list:

UNTRUE:

Genesis ii, 21-22: So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

Genesis iii, 16: God said to the woman [after she was beguiled by the serpent]: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

Matthew xxvii, 25: The words of the crowd: "His blood be on us and on our children."

Revelation xix,20: And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshipped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with brimstone."

TRUE:

Exodus iii, 14: God reveals himself to Moses as: "I am who I am."

Leviticus xxvi,12: "I will be your God, and you shall be my people."

Exodus xx,1-17: The Ten Commandments

Matthew v,7: The Sermon on the Mount

Mark viii,29: Peter declares Jesus to be the Christ

Luke i: The Virgin Birth

John xx,28: Proof of bodily resurrection

We wonder how the bishops decided that the Genesis passages which were adjudged untrue were, in fact, not true. It would also be worth knowing what the bishops mean when they say that the passage is not true. Do they mean that it is not true in any sense or do they simply mean that it's not literally true? The column seems to suggest the latter, but it's not clear.

The passage from Matthew seems to offend simply because it has been used to rationalize anti-semitism which the bishops apparently think is reason enough to declare it false. If so, they're resorting to emotional rather than scholarly reasons for making their judgment. The Revelation passage is apparently deemed false because it seems too fantastic, but then why do the Virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Christ pass the test?

Perhaps the sages of the Church had good reasons for their choices, but they seem to have decided on the basis of their own sense of credulity, almost as though they were playing a game of theological eenie, meenie. We hope not.

Andrew Sullivan cites this article in the TimesOnLine UK on a statement by Catholic Bishops in England regarding the literal truth of the Bible. The writer, Ruth Gledhill, states that:

Gledhill is identified as the religion writer for the Times Online so she should know better. That she would write such a sentence is evidence that either she's incompetent or she's willfully trying to deceive her readers.

Let's deconstruct her claim:

1) It is true that some Christians would like to have a literal reading of Genesis taught in public schools but no one has seriously tried to accomplish this since Louisiana's attempts were defeated by the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard in the late 1980s.

2) The belief that Genesis is literally, and thus scientifically, true is creationism. It is not Intelligent Design. ID takes no formal position on any of the questions raised by the Genesis account. Genesis could be shown to be completely wrong in every particular and Intelligent Design would be unaffected.

3) Intelligent Design is not a theory "of how the world began." It says nothing about how the world originated. The theory of Intelligent Design makes only two claims: First, it claims that blind, unguided, impersonal forces and processes are not adequate by themselves to account either for the exquisite fine-tuning of the cosmos in every aspect of its structure, nor the high level of information found in the biosphere. Second, it claims that any adequate explanation of both the pervasive fine-tuning of the cosmos and the high information content of living things must somehow include intelligent agency.

Sullivan shows that he doesn't understand what's going on in the current debate any better than does Glendhill when he offers this comment:

This is a classic straw man fallacy. Sullivan wants the reader to believe that what's at stake in efforts like that currently being fought out in the courts in Kitzmiller v. Dover is whether students will be taught that "the world was literally created in six days a few thousand years ago." This, of course, is not at all what is at issue despite the attempts of the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller case to create that impression.

What is being contended in the Dover case is whether a school board should have the right to insist that when biology teachers instruct students that life is the product solely of blind, unguided, impersonal processes that they also point out that not all scientists nor philosophers think that to be true. Some of them, perhaps many of them, think that intelligence must somehow have been involved.

It would be interesting to see Mr. Sullivan or the Catholic bishops demonstrate that any of this is "demonstrably and empirically untrue."

Every now and then we get an e-mail like this that makes us feel that we're doing something worthwhile:

Thank you, Micah.

I had occasion the other night to spend the evening with a very bright group of people (my presence in the group was something of an anomaly) discussing issues related to the Intelligent Design controversy. One participant, a Darwinian and geneticist, objected to a question from another participant by replying that she doesn't talk about design in biology because to do so is unscientific.

It would have been rude to have interrupted the conversation, which didn't really involve me, but I was tempted. I wanted to say that there's nothing unscientific about noting design in living things; almost every biologist does it (except her, apparently), and the fact that living things are designed all the way down to the molecular level is not denied by anyone and is not in dispute. What's in dispute is the cause of the design.

Darwinians insist that the design evident to anyone who has ever studied sixth grade life science is the product solely of blind, unguided processes like mutation and natural selection. Intelligent Design theorists, on the other hand, wish to affirm that blind processes alone are inadequate mechanisms for engineering the degree of complexity and information we see in the biosphere. They argue that some degree of intelligent input is required to satisfactorily explain it.

Evolutionists must really be running scared if they're so afraid of handing their opponents a rhetorical advantage that they refuse to acknowledge the obvious fact that the natural world is full of designed structures and systems. Materialistic evolutionists seem to be nervous about using the word design because they don't wish to encourage the general public to think along those lines. The concern may be that the public might draw the conclusion that, given a choice between explaining complex design in terms of coincidence and blind luck and explaining it in terms of intention and purpose, the former suffers grievously in the comparison.

Speaking of ID, the reader might be interested in this column by Jeff Jacoby on why Intelligent Design is a legitimate topic for discusion in science classes. He gets it.

E.J. Dionne writing at Tech Central Station, detects a whiff of hypocrisy among those conservatives who thought it outrageous that senate liberals were hinting that John Roberts' religion might disqualify him from a seat on the Supreme Court but who are encouraging support for Harriet Miers on the basis that she's an evangelical Christian.

Dionne approvingly cites Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters blog:

The answer to this last question is "Why would it not?" That a particular trait should not be allowed to count against someone is no reason to believe that the trait shouldn't count in his or her favor. A candidate for the presidency, for example, should not be disqualified because he holds religious beliefs similar to those held by a large swath of Americans, but he certainly may be seen as a more suitable candidate because he does. Similarly, a woman should not be disqualified on the basis of her gender from serving in public office, but her gender may help make her an attractive candidate for such an office.

This seems like such simple logic that although we're not surprised that it escaped Dionne, we are surprised that Morrissey doesn't see it.

The only question that should be raised by the religious beliefs of a candidate for the Supreme Court is whether those beliefs will prejudice his or her reading of the constitution. That she is a devout Christian suggests to many people that the answer Miers would give to that question is "no." Her faith imposes upon her an obligation to maintain the highest standards of judicial integrity and to live by the oath she will take to uphold the constitution. Knowing that she feels so obligated, both to her conscience and to her God, should be a source of comfort to those who must decide upon her suitability to serve.

Academic freedom at the University of Idaho is in serious peril. The totalitarian thought police have ascended all the way to the office of the presidency and anyone who abridges the accepted orthodoxies will be disciplined.

Were this not so serious it would be funny. University professors are free to do and say virtually anything in their classrooms no matter how irrelevant to the curriculum as long as it is either anti-American, anti-Christian, or pro-gay. Whether it's salacious, lubricious, banal, or just plain stupid doesn't matter - it's speech consonant, we are told, with the university's responsibility to challenge students to question the "smelly little orthodoxies" of our time. But if a professor decides to challenge his students to consider the possibility that Darwin had things wrong, he'll be out on his ear. Evidently, some dogmas are more sacred than others.

A former teacher named Aaron Belz lays out his vision for improving schools in the U.S. Having taught in a pretty good public high school myself for thirty five years I found much of what he says to be worthwhile and, on the other hand, much to be completely impractical. Despite the latter, Belz writes an interesting essay though his five concluding suggestions for improving schools seem much too idealistic:

I don't like to be put in the role of naysayer, but I'm afraid these suggestions would prove either too expensive, unworkable, or otherwise ineffective. As an alternative, I would like to offer eleven suggestions of my own for improving public schools. If we were really serious about having the best educational system possible here's what we would do:

1. Allow students to graduate after their tenth grade year with the option of staying on through twelfth grade if their grades and behavior qualify them for the extra two years. Most students in the bottom 10% to 15% of their class learn almost nothing between ninth and twelfth grades. These students are often alienated and behaviorally difficult and they frequently create an atmosphere in the classroom that diminishes the chances their classmates will learn and which demoralizes teachers. Give them the opportunity, if they meet certain standards, to get a provisional diploma after tenth grade and let them get out of school and into the work force. Little good comes from having them hang around.

2. Raise the driving age to 18. Nothing diverts a student from the books like a car (unless its a girl/boy friend). Raising the driving age will be an inconvenience for parents who will have to provide more of the transportation, but keeping kids at home rather than having them out wasting gas is worth the trouble.

3. Prohibit students under 18 from holding a job during the school year. Most students who work are trying to pay the insurance on their car and buy gas. The jobs they hold are often not the sort which build skills that can be translated into future benefit. Their work often doesn't even bring them into contact with people outside their peer group. Every hour flipping burgers or bussing tables is an hour away from home and homework.

4. Institute dress codes and enforce them. There is no good argument against them and lots of good arguments in their favor. Conservatives ridiculed Clinton for proposing that school's require student uniforms, but that was one of his best ideas. Quality of dress sets the tone for one's attitude about his/her role. Students wearing ties behave differently than when they're dressed more casually. We insist on buying our athletes the sharpest looking uniforms we can afford because we know that classy dress elevates one's performance and instills pride. That's why most coaches have their athletes dress up to travel to away games. But we let our students dress like exotic dancers or refugees from some natural disaster when in the classroom, and then we wonder why they don't take more pride in their school work. The argument that dress codes rob a student of his "individuality" is silly. Sports superstars like Michael Jordan and others had no trouble establishing their "individuality" while wearing the same uniform their teammates did.

5. Permanently expel students who are disruptive, disrespectful, malicious, violent, or chronically in trouble. Such students are a cancer in the student body and just one such individual in the classroom greatly alters the learning atmosphere in that room. Their presence is corrupting and demoralizing. Yet we refuse to remove them because the law says that taxpayers have to provide for their education if they're not in school. This is a ridiculous law and should be rescinded.

6. Encourage academic/intellectual elitism (as opposed to snobbery) just like we encourage athletic elitism. The idea that elitism is bad is nonsense. What's bad is snobbery based on economic status. Elitism based on achievement or values, the sense of pride in one's accomplishments and convictions because they're right and better than those of people who disdain them is a good thing and needs to be stimulated.

7. Hire teachers who are scholars. Not all teachers can or need be scholars, but no one who is not should be teaching the top 50% of students in an academic discipline.

8. Let teachers determine the curriculum or at least give them a dominant role in the decision-making. Administrators are managers, they're not educators, and few of them have much experience as teachers. Many administrators never read anything other than Sports Illustrated magazine or mass market novels. They're mostly good men and women, but they don't see themselves as particularly interested in developing their own intellects, and it's hard to cultivate and nourish student minds if you have no idea based on your own experience what such a task entails. Administrators should handle discipline, organization, and public relations and stay out of the academic affairs of the school to the extent that that is possible.

9. Don't let anything take precedence over academics in the school day. One of the biggest pet peeves of teachers I've known is that in many schools everything and anything trumps the classroom. Kids in the school in which I taught were forever getting out of class for pointless field trips, theater or band practices, and a myriad of other silly reasons. Yet a teacher could never take a student out of one of these other activities in order to insist he be in class. My school sent the subliminal message to kids that the least important thing they do in their day is attend class. When the culture of the school instills that attitude in students, even if inadvertently, a teacher's job becomes much harder than it needs to be.

10. Put a limit on how many students will occupy a building. When student populations reach a certain size they become too impersonal. Impersonal schools may be able to churn out students who are academically competent, but they cannot easily teach the virtues students need to learn to be whole persons and citizens.

11. Segregate middle and high schools by sex. Having young men in the midst of testosterone hyperdrive share close spaces with young ladies awash in a pheromonic miasma is no way to keep either of them focused on the eight parts of speech. When young men share classrooms with young women their behavior is often distorted, their attentions are diverted, and their focus is disrupted. Education would be easier and more effective if such distractions were minimized.

Of course, none of these suggestions will ever be implemented as long as taxpayers are content with mediocre education. If, however, legislators ever decide to make American public schools truly excellent, if they ever become interested in genuine educational reform, adopting any of these measures would be a big step in the right direction. And most of them would hardly cost a cent.

Howard Dean is always good for laughs at his own expense. The other night on Chris Matthews' Hardball Dean, in talking about whether the White House would release documents that might contain information that would give insight into Harriet Miers' suitability to serve on the Supreme Court, said:

We doubt that "Hide the Salami" was the precise construction for which Dr. Dean was groping. In our recollection, "Hide the Salami" has very little to do with matters involving the White House, or at least it hasn't since President Clinton left office.

Howard Dean seems intent on confirming the widespread opinion that he's a buffoon. One wonders whether anyone takes seriously anything he says.

Here's Richard Russell's latest take on the state of things. Must reading in my opinion.

There you have it folks.

WSC

Bush once again has the Democrats discombobulated. They are almost forced to support his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court despite her pro-life opinions and strong evangelical faith. They know so little about her that they can still plausibly hope that she might not be as "bad" as Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia. Should she fail to be confirmed, however, whoever is nominated in her place is most likely going to be a Thomas/Scalia clone, and it will be much harder to defeat a second nominee. Miers is about the closest thing to what the Dems want that they're likely to get, and they'll almost have to see her confirmed or face a far tougher fight over a more obviously qualified substitute.

If Miers really is a conservative and an intelligent strict constructionist, and if that's truly what the President wanted on the Court, then he is indeed a wizard at political strategy. He gets (ex hypothesi) a qualified originalist on the Bench by forcing the Dems to vote for her and without having to fight them for their vote.

Hugh Hewitt linked to someone today who recalls the words of Sun Tzu:

I think Sun Tzu would admire the Miers gambit.

The LA Times tells us that media reports of chaos and anarchy in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina were highly exaggerated and largely incorrect. Indeed, it was these reports which caused relief teams to delay going into the city.

We'd do well to keep this in mind when we read the next dispatches from the MSM about how Iraq is descending into chaos and civil war.

Philosopher David Chalmers notes that there has been a shift among philosophers of mind in the last decade from a strict materialistic reductionism (or physicalism) toward the view that mind cannot be reduced to matter (dualism), that mind and matter are essentially disparate entities. Dualists, by Chalmers' estimation, are still in the minority, but their numbers are growing. This is a fascinating development after a century and a half of philosophers and neurobiologists trying to show that mind is nothing more than a word we use to describe the function of the brain.

Materialism seems to be under assault everywhere. Marxist economic materialism has long been discredited, of course, and within the last fifteen years materialist conceptions of the cosmos have become increasingly untenable in light of discoveries being made by cosmologists about the fine-tuning of the fundamental forces, laws, and constants which govern the universe. Similarly, Intelligent Design is challenging materialism in the realm of biology, and now many philosophers are concluding that consciousness is something other than just chemical reactions in the brain.

Next thing you know philosophers will be resurrecting the concept of soul. It reminds me of the closing words of Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers. Jastrow notes that scientists have struggled, like men climbing a mountain, for every foothold and handhold that would help them reach the pinnacle - an understanding how our universe works. Every scrap of knowledge came at a great cost in effort and labor. Finally, after centuries of working their way toward the summit, they heave themselves over the last ledge only to find a bunch of theologians who've been sitting at the top all along.

No Left Turns' Julie Ponzi makes the point that if conservatives are unhappy with Bush's pick for the Supreme Court they shouldn't blame Bush they should blame the Quisling Republicans in the Senate:

Quite so. Bush chooses to avoid a fight because he's not sure he can win it if he has to rely on RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) like Chafee, Snowe, Specter, Collins, as well as weak knees like Voinovich and DeWine. We, too, wish he would have selected a known quantity and that we'd have the fight the Democrats keep pushing us into, but we can't join with those conservatives who are essentially proclaiming that they just don't trust Bush to make a wise selection to the Court. For perhaps sound reasons he's chosen someone he believes he knows well, and there is some reason to expect that Ms Miers will vote with the Court's conservatives. Whether she has as solid an understanding of the constitution as an Antonin Scalia is much more uncertain but will no doubt become more clear at the hearings.

We understand conservative frustration and disappointment, but we think that people like William Kristol and George Will, who have excoriated the President for his selection of Ms. Miers, might well wind up looking foolish in the backlight of their harsh words. We'll see.

From the New York Times comes this shocking revelation about Harriet Miers:

Even as you read this, urgent letters from People For the American Way and other left-liberal organizations are being delivered to blue state homes all across the country calling on concerned liberals to rise up in outrage that Bush would nominate a Christian to the Supreme Court. How dare he treat the wall of church and state with such disdain? Christian women should be in church serving pot-luck suppers. They don't belong on the Supreme Court where who knows what mischief they'll stir up. There's no telling how much harm the nation could suffer by giving that kind of power to someone whose convictions are informed by the gospel.

This is going to be an ugly fight. We can't wait.

The first case the Supreme Court is hearing this session is whether Oregon's assisted suicide law should be allowed to stand. The Bush administration opposes it on the grounds that the federal government has final authority on how controlled substances can be used and since federal legislation prohibits the use of drugs to help people end their lives, state laws allowing doctors to prescribe lethal doses of these substances should be struck down.

There are several questions raised by this case: Is it wise to have doctors assisting people in killing themselves? If doctors should not do this why do we have doctors assist the state in executing condemned prisoners? Will allowing the state to help people die erode the value we place on life? These are all important questions, but I'm not sure that they're relevant to the Supreme Court's ultimate decision. The narrow issue is whether it is unconstitutional for the state of Oregon to allow doctors to prescribe lethal dosages of drugs when federal law forbids it. The wider issue is whether the states have the right under the constitution to permit their citizens to take their own lives under certain circumstances.

It seems that there is really only one way a conservative can consistently answer this latter question and that is to say that the states should indeed have that right. This is ultimately a state's rights matter, just like conservatives say abortion should be. It would be very difficult to argue, as conservatives do, that whether their citizens should have the right to kill their unborn children should be left to the voters of each state to decide, but that whether their citizens will have the right to kill themselves must not be left to the voters of the states.

This is not to say that laws permitting self-euthanasia, or assisted self-euthanasia, are wise or moral. It's simply to say that the decision as to whether such practices should be legally condoned should be left to the citizens of the state in the same manner conservatives believe laws on abortion should be. How it can be argued that euthanasia is a matter for the federal government to control but that Roe v. Wade should be overturned and abortion laws thrown back into the lap of state legislatures is not very clear, at least not to me.

There's an interesting article in the New York Times on the great clash between the magisteria of religion and science at the first Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion.

Whatever the arguments may be for rejecting evidence of intentional design in the biosphere, it seems that one must be not only unable but a forteriori unwilling, to see the evidence that the cosmos itself is the product of purpose and intelligence. Even if only half of what Michael Denton says in Nature's Destiny or Stephen Barr writes in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is true, the evidence for a telic universe is simply astounding.

The atheist, I suppose, can always fall back on the old chestnut that no amount of evidence is sufficient to constitute proof that the universe was created by a mind and that it is incumbent upon the one who asserts the existence of something to prove that the entity exists.

What this ignores, however, is the fact that proof is person-relative. What constitutes proof for one who is willing to be persuaded will not constitute proof for the man who is unwilling to be moved by it. There is, as Pascal said, enough evidence to convince any man who is not dead set against it, and Denton and Barr have written books which bring that evidence into bold relief. There is indeed sufficient evidence to convince all but the most obdurate that something besides randomness and coincidence were at work in the crafting of this universe.

The writer of the Times article, George Johnson, states that "If the God hypothesis [i.e. the Designer hypothesis] is meaningful, it should be subject to a test. But the theistic gloss Dr. Polkinghorne and others give to science is immune to this kind of scrutiny. It has, by design, no observable consequences."

Whether this is true for Polkinghorne's work or not we cannot say, but it is hardly true for the work of others. Denton, for example offers this test:

If any fundamental force or physical law or chemical property were found which could have been other than what it is and not make the existence of higher life forms impossible then the teleological interpretation of the world would be discredited. If higher forms of life were to be discovered elsewhere in the universe thriving in environments significantly different from our own, there would be no grounds for maintaining the opinion that our world is uniquely suited for life. The argument from cosmic design rests on the conviction that our world is so exquisitely fine-tuned for life that if it were structured just a little bit differently than it is life would be impossible. If that conviction were to be falsified the argument from cosmic design would lose its force.

Having said that, it should be pointed out that the criterion of testability as a measure of meaningfulness is a two-edged sword. If an assertion must be testable to be scientifically meaningful then what are we to make of the Darwinist claim that life arose and evolved to its present state through purely mechanistic, blind, and unguided processes acting over long periods of time? The task of contriving a test of this assertion would baffle the finest minds in science, yet it's considered by all hands to be a perfectly meaningful claim.

There are many similar claims in science that defy testing, but which are considered meaningful propositions. If we are to dismiss the claim that the universe is the product of intentional design because of an alleged inability to be tested then we're going to have to also throw out a great deal of evolutionary biology and modern physics.

Yesterday we posted an account of the toughness and courage of American soldiers and Marines. Today we direct you to this story which illustrates another side of the American soldier.

Despite the Left's steady focus on the mistreatment of prisoners that occured over a year ago at the hands of a relative few sadists, the average American G.I. is more like these guys in "Deuce Four" than they are like Lynde England.

The Judith Miller story is more than a little odd (See here for a complete account of the affair). Miller, you will recall went to prison rather than reveal her sources for a story - which she never wrote - on the matter of how Valerie Plame's identity as a covert operative for the CIA came to be made public.

The source she was ostensibly protecting was Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby, but Libby told her over a year ago that she had his permission to testify about any conversations she had had with him.

He then wrote a letter last month repeating his permission to reveal anything she wanted to the grand jury investigating the matter. Even so, she chose to remain in jail for another ten days before agreeing to testify.

Why? PowerLine has the details of the story and offers these three possibile answers to the question:

Whatever the answer her behavior is strange, and it will be interesting to see what she has to say to the grand jury. Our hunch is that this investigation is going nowhere, at least nowhere that the enemies of Karl Rove would like to see it go. All of the excitement that rippled through the MSM last spring and summer as they eagerly anticipated seeing Rove brought low and maybe even led out of his office in leg irons, has evaporated away like a morning mist. Just another case of a great deal of left-wing sound and fury signifying nothing. Next up, Tom DeLay.

Here's a brief story about the kind of men who are fighting against Islamic extremists in Iraq so that our families are safer from them here:

Brave, tough men. It's little wonder the enemy has never won a single combat engagement with our troops in Iraq. Nor is it any wonder that the enemy prefers to attack women and children rather than take on Marines like these.

Conservatives are split on George Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court. The American Center for Law and Justice calls Miers an "excellent" choice. But others are less pleased. A group called Public Advocate has released a statement which states that:

Viewpoint joins Kristol in being disappointed that Bush didn't pick a proven conservative from among the eight or nine candidates that have outstanding judicial records, and we're concerned, too, that Meirs has no real record from which her views can be gleaned. Most of all, we're concerned that her nomination seems to have delighted Senator Chuck Schumer.

Conservatives fear that the specter of David Souter hangs ominously over both John Roberts and Harriet Miers since, like Souter, they both purport to be conservatives but also like Souter, we have no way of assessing the depth of their commitment to an originalist reading of the constitution. Souter has turned out terribly, and the trepidation among conservatives is due to the possibility that Roberts and, even more, Miers, may turn out likewise.

Perhaps. But the difference in the present case is that George Bush is committed, we hope, to putting constitutional originalists on the court. He also knows Miers very well. Unlike his father who didn't know anything about Souter, W. knows Miers' philosophy. Presumably, her convictions mesh with those of the President. If we believe his own judicial convictions and instincts to be correct then it is probably unwise to condemn him for his selection at this point in time. Conservatives have been disappointed by George Bush on more than one occasion, but in picking judges he's been impeccable and has, in our view, earned the benefit of the doubt. One is justified in withholding it only if one thinks that Bush is unprincipled enough to go back on his word that he wants conservative judges on the court. Whatever one thinks of Bush, however, "unprincipled" is hardly a fair description of his conduct in office over the last five years.

We think that much of the disgust and frustration expressed by conservatives over the Meirs pick derives from a desire for a resolution of the power struggle going on in the Senate. Conservatives want Republicans to apply the coup de grace to the floundering Dems who act as if they are still the majority party. Republicans, unfortunately, too often act as if they're still in the minority and seem loath to use the prerogatives bestowed by their majority status. This frustrates conservatives who want Bush to nominate a Scalia/ Thomas type justice and then dare the Democrats to filibuster.

In other words, conservatives are spoiling for a slugfest, but Bush prefers to beat the Democrats with finesse rather than brute force. That's what he did with Roberts and what he'll probably do with Meirs. He has taken something of a gamble, to be sure, but if both picks turn out to be more conservative than Sandra Day O'Connor then Bush will have succeeded in his goal of moving the court to the right without shedding much blood. Conservatives want him to fight like Joe Frazier, but he prefers to dance like Muhammed Ali. If he's confident of the conservatism of his selections then it's hard to fault him for his tactics.

The President has enough enemies on the Left. He doesn't need criticism from the Right unless we're sure he deserves it. On this matter we're not yet sure that he does.

ConfirmThem.com thinks the next SCOTUS nominee will be either Michael Luttig or Karen Williams. Here's an article on Williams. We'll probably find out tomorrow who the nominee will be.

The Fourth Rail describes in a series of posts what's going on along the Syrian border with Operation Iron Fist. Go here then scroll down to the post titled Operation Iron Fist in Qaim. This post has a map which shows the locations of the towns mentioned in subsequent entries. After reading this one, work your way back up to the most recent posts. It's interesting reading and it gives a perspective on what the American strategy is there that is at odds with what the media has been saying.

A friend writes to express dismay with the testimony at the Dover ID trial in Harrisburg, PA:

He's quite right, of course. There's a lot of outrageous stuff being said in this courtroom. Two especially irritating examples leap to mind. One is that the plaintiffs are going to great lengths to discredit Intelligent Design by showing that the people who were instrumental in getting the ID statement read in Dover classrooms are very outspoken about their religious convictions. This may be relevant in showing that the introduction of ID into classrooms was driven by sectarian considerations, but even if board members went too far in voicing their religious views that is simply irrelevant to whether or not ID is a legitimate topic for a science classroom.

Scientists from Darwin to Dawkins have not been reticent about their atheism and how it derives from their evolutionary views. Yet no one in the media or in the courtroom seems to think that this disqualifies evolution as a legitimate topic for a science class, nor should they. But if it is acceptable for atheistic scientists to talk about how Darwinism "makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist," and so on, why is it disqualifying for a Christian to voice an alternative opinion? If it is perfectly acceptable to teach students that evolution is the product of a "blind, unguided natural process," which is essentially a religious rather than a scientific claim, why is it not acceptable to tell students that not everyone believes this to be so?

The second frustrating thing about the case is the repeated attempts to hitch ID to creationism so that by discrediting creationism ID is discredited as well. Intelligent Design is not creationism, at least not as that term has come to be used in the current debate, but a supine national media, anxious to believe the worst of the rubes who embrace ID, decline to undertake the journalistic labor necessary to investigate the philosophical legitimacy of the linkage. They'd much prefer to write smug, supercilious columns poking fun at the Dover school board members than to actually do their jobs and give the public pertinent information about what creationism and Intelligent Design actually are.

So my reply to my friend is yes, what's being said is outrageous and frustrating, but then there's some comfort in realizing that for the plaintiffs to succeed, their witnesses have to distort the truth and the media have to be complicit in the deception. If one has to lose, it's much better to lose because the other side had to misrepresent one's position than to lose because the other side had a better argument. There's consolation in the fact that, if this is the best the other side can do, ID is in very good shape indeed.

We hope that this is not what's passing for scholarship in the social sciences nowadays:

I wasn't aware of it, but apparently those pious Christians fervently worshipping in their churches on Sunday morning and poring over copies of The Purpose Driven Life are also leading secret lives of murder, mayhem, and sexual promiscuity the rest of the week. I also never realized that devout Christians lead the world in suicide. Looks can be be very deceiving, apparently, and we will henceforth be reluctant to sit in the front of the church lest one of those homocidal maniacs in the pews behind us suddenly pulls out a gun and starts filling the sanctuary with bullets.

On the other hand, has there ever been an academic study more counter-intuitive, more self-serving, or more simple-minded than this one? Mr. Paul commits the fallacy of assuming that because there's a correlation between high dysfunctionality and high levels of religiosity that therefore religion is not beneficial to national social health. It's a bit like arguing that because the U.S. has a high incidence of cancer and also has high numbers of doctors that therefore doctors are not really beneficial to our nation's well-being.

In order to prove his bizarre conclusion Meyer would have to show that the set of dysfunctional people is identical to the set of religious people, but this he does not do. It is far more likely that the two sets scarcely even overlap in this country, in which case the results of his study are meaningless.

He also misses the mark when he conjures up an alleged widely-held fear that "a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster" in order to show that the putative fear is refuted by his study. The problem with a non-theistic citizenry, however, is not that it must experience societal disaster, but rather that it is far more likely to. A citizenry that lacks a transcendent ground for moral values, human dignity and human worth, must eventually either acknowledge that these things really don't exist at all or invent some fiction in which to ground them.

Either way, such a society will gradually become increasingly more cynical, skeptical, and nihilistic. Government may keep the wheels on the wagon with legal duct tape for a couple of generations as the religious bolts that fasten them to the axles work their way loose, but it's quite likely that when the bolts have all fallen out, the wheels will spin off too. That it hasn't happened yet in some European countries (Though see here) means only that the masses have yet to realize the full implications of their abandonment of the transcendent.

Indeed, in those European nations where authorities have sought to work out the full logic of their atheism and where they have possessed the power to impose their will on the masses - nations like the Stalinist U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany, for example - societal disaster is precisely what we have seen.

Mr. Paul strikes us as an atheist who aspires to prove that atheism is beneficial to society. If so, his work is still ahead of him, because this silly study certainly gives no one any reason to think that he's made his point.

For a technical critique of Paul's work by a statistician go here.

Howard Fineman writes about the Democrats' despair over their dismal political prospects. They recognize that not only does their stable of candidates lack the star power of the Republican lineup, their "idea people" are singularly void of any ideas. They lack, as a party, a unifying ideal for them to rally behind and to stand stoutly for. The only imagination they display is the sort seen in the fellow in the Capital One commercials who thinks up ever more clever variations on the word no.

No to more refineries, no to more drilling, no to social security reform, no to tax cuts, no to Bush's judges, no to the war on terror, no to tort reform, no to civility in our political discourse, no to anything George Bush wants to do for the United States and the American people.

Although Fineman doesn't say it the fact of the matter is that most of the ideas that seem to resonate with voters right now are conservative ideas. The Democrats have defined themselves as an anti-party. Their only distinctive is that they are opposed to Bush and all his works. Because there is nothing for which they can be said to stand they give the impression that their only motive for seeking elective office is the acquisition of power. Power must be an end in itself for the Dems because they haven't a clue what they would do with it if it ever fell back into their laps except use it to punish political opponents.

A platform based on lust for power and sweet revenge may rouse the fringes into a frenzy, but it's not likely to inspire the rank and file to turn out for Democratic candidates. The Democrats seem soulless and forlorn because, quite simply, they are.

Much of the commentary, even from conservatives, about William Bennett's alleged faux pas misses the mark. Ed Morissey at Captain's Quarters is an example:

This is all beside the point. The reason why Bennett used the construction "black baby" is clear to anyone who understands the context of the remark. He was commenting on a study that appears in a book called Freakonomics in which the authors show a correlation between the onset of large-scale abortion on demand in this country in 1973 and lower crime rates beginning about 18 to 20 years later. The authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, argue that the correlation exists because crime is largely a poor minority phenomenon and so is abortion.

In other words, the authors argue that because there have been millions fewer black babies born in the last thirty years, crime has gone down (Their thesis may be right or wrong. It's a mistake, however, to think that they were advocating abortion as a means of reducing crime, much less abortion of black babies. They were simply noting a correlation).

Bennett was nevertheless objecting to the notion that abortion should be seen as a legitimate means of reducing crime rates. With the Levitt/Dubner book in mind, he was in effect insisting that aborting babies, even those in the high-crime demographic, even if crime could be profoundly curtailed by so doing, is a reprehensible social policy.

That's all Bennett was saying. Whatever it might be that's wrong with what he said we confess that it eludes us.