Shack Sounds Off

The most dangerous bias

2010-12-17T15:02:00.002-06:00

I've said it before. I say it in the column just to the right of this post. And I'll no doubt continue saying it as long as I continue to do this blog (however sporadic that may be): The single most dangerous bias in the entirety of what passes for journalism today is the belief that you're unbiased.

It's dangerous because it's false. It's dangerous because it's never been true. And it's dangerous because it leads unfailingly to the assumption that those who disagree with your "objective" opinions are not just mistaken or misguided, but deliberately lying, with nefarious aims, and so forth.

Hence my deep skepticism of "objective" journalism in general, and "fact-checking" in particular. I have no confidence that any of these groups are aware of or make allowances for their own biases. On the contrary, I fully expect that on any issue that is not a cut-and-dried matter of number crunching, they will adopt partisan points of view (almost always Democratic, given their profession) as the absolute truth, and "fact-check" accordingly.

Case in point: PolitiFact's "lie of the year." Obamacare, they assure us, is not a government takeover of health care. The government is ordering everyone to buy health insurance under pain of tax/financial penalty, the government is telling everyone what kind of health insurance they can and cannot get, and both supporters and opponents of the plan say it is the first and biggest step on an inevitable road to single-payer health care in this country.

But don't worry, PolitiFact assures us. It's not a government takeover, and those who say otherwise are "lying."

See Don Surber for a more thorough disassembly of this blatantly partisan, overtly biased "fact-checking."

--Shack

"We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few don't get richer."

2010-09-23T05:02:00.002-05:00

That's the highlight of the latest from Victor Davis Hanson, summing up in one sentence everything that's wrong with the Obama administration's economic approach.

It really does come down to the basic assumptions of the left.

--Shack

Beating a dead horse

2010-08-17T20:48:00.003-05:00

This has played out many, many times before over the course of the debate on ObamaCare. And the same thing happens every time: Supporters simply don't want to hear it, so they ignore it.

Still, it plays out again. The latest to try in vain to point out the precedent of the debacle in Canada is Sally Pipes:

[I]t's instructive to consider the Canadian story. It begins in 1946, when Tommy Douglas, the socialist premier of Saskatchewan, secured legislative approval of government-funded hospital insurance for all residents of the province. The federal government followed suit in 1957, funding hospital insurance for the entire country.
Douglas led the way again in 1961, when Saskatchewan became the first province to fund full medical insurance for all its residents. In response, some 700 doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike for 23 days, charging that the Douglas plan opened the door to government control of health care. Several thousand citizens joined them, staging an orderly protest against the new "medicare" scheme outside the legislative building in the provincial capital.

The protests eventually died down, and by 1966, the Canadian government had passed legislation providing money to provinces that followed Saskatchewan's lead. Two years later, they all had.

Proponents of the reforms touted them as a happy medium between the British system, where the government owned and operated hospitals, and the American system, where healthcare services were largely left to the private market. Canada's federal government provided funding to the provinces, which the provinces used to deliver care.

This happy medium soon crumbled. With health care now effectively "free" -- that is, paid for by other taxpayers -- Canadians began visiting the doctor twice as much. Exploding demand drove up costs. To keep spending under control, the federal government simply reduced how much it sent to provinces to run the system. Provinces in turn cut payments to doctors and covered fewer services and cutting-edge treatments.

At first, doctors responded by billing patients directly for amounts greater than the government reimbursements. But in 1984, the federal government outlawed such practices -- thereby banning private delivery of services covered under the Canada Health Act. At this point, the Canadian government effectively controlled health care in the country.

The Canadian experience offers a preview of what Obamacare has in store for the United States.

Will this convince ObamaCare supporters? No. They think that this is a great thing to have happen, and until it actually does, they will not be convinced otherwise.

Unfortunately.

--Shack

Spot-on, and yet completely clueless

2010-07-30T03:26:00.003-05:00

Paul Krugman, writing in Friday's New York Times:

Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?

How about that? Even someone as "out there" as Krugman has finally figured out that Obama's foreign policy is completely bass-ackwards!

These questions were inspired by the ongoing suspense over whether President Obama will do the obviously right thing and nominate Elizabeth Warren to lead the new consumer financial protection agency.

...

...

You know what?

Forget I said anything.

--Shack

Even liberals have limits

2010-04-27T14:53:00.002-05:00

When it comes to common sense, at least.

Over at the Huffington Post, Lynn Paramore put together a collection of 9 "myths," which were "exposed" by various professors of economics.

A sampling:

Myth #2: Fixing Social Security and Medicare will require "tough choices."
Reality: Social Security and Medicare are not facing a financial crisis.

Myth #3: We are passing on debt to our grandchildren.
Reality: Payments on Treasury securities are a matter of data entry, not a financial burden.

Myth #6: Deficits and government borrowing takes away savings.
Reality: Deficits add to income and savings.

And so forth. The whole piece is so ridiculous that even the readers at the Huffington Post are calling it the BS that it is--comments on the post are almost unanimous in their negativity.

It's as if the readership has been collectively possessed by Paul Ryan. And regardless of what I think of their positions on other issues, it's a welcome sight.

--Shack

The problem with Friedman's "Earth Race"

2009-12-20T22:21:00.002-06:00

My position on global warming (assuming it exists, as I will for the rest of this post) is no secret: Agreements to reduce carbon emissions are worthless; the only solution that holds any hope at all is new technology.

So you might think that I am in agreement with Thomas Friedman, whose column in today's New York Times calls for an "Earth Race":

[T]he goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.
In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth.
Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”
Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.

And you would be wrong.

The first problem is with the comparison of the "Earth Race" to the space race. In the space race, the two nations competing against one another--the US and the USSR--were already competing against one another, with the world more or less divided between them. Because of that, the technological benefits offered were almost meaningless: the real benefit sought was the prestige that came with trumping their only rival.

There's nothing like that in the "Earth Race." There's no one for the US to seek to trump, because for the last 20 years, we've been alone on top of the world. (Even now, the closest thing we have to a "rival" is Al Qaeda, which isn't a nation at all.)

So, with that in mind, we come to the second problem: Just what are we racing for? Friedman helpfully pointed it out before:

Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.

That's the prize--the chance to make our potential customers in this regard self-sufficient, and thus render our own economic role in the process obsolete.

And Friedman really thinks China and Europe and Japan are going to kick down the doors to get in on this?

But even that's not the biggest problem with the concept of the "Earth Race." That honor goes to Friedman's proposal for getting the ball rolling: "a long-term price on carbon," clearly operating on the concept of necessity being the mother of invention.

Where do we even start with this? To begin with, it's unilateral, so its most likely effect will be to cripple those very US businesses that need to invest in R&D (unless equivalent tariffs are also imposed...in which case, we're dealing with a full-blown trade war, instead).

But it's also a function of the erroneous belief that all that's needed to solve the problem is a little bit of willpower and a lot of money. The hard truth is this: The technology needed to solve the global warming problem does not yet exist. It's not just a matter of improving existing technologies. It's simply not economically feasible for developing countries to use them--not when the alternative is coal, available in abundant supply, at $.03/kWh.

When it comes to finding that new technology, some scientist or researcher still has to come up with the brilliant idea, or make the key breakthrough--and throwing money at them won't make them make the breakthrough any sooner. It takes time.

Friedman's "Earth Race" isn't a race against other countries. It's a race against time.

It's jumping off a cliff, and then racing to see if you'll manage to sprout wings before you hit the bottom.

--Shack

People: Problem vs. Solution, Hope vs. Despair

2009-12-15T02:04:00.003-06:00

RealClearPolitics was unusually astute in pairing off two op-eds on the Copenhagen summit. Both address the issue of global warming (both from the point of view of a believer). Both further focus on the nature of humanity, as it relates to what both regard as a crisis.

The conclusions the two reach, though, could not be more different.

First, writing in the Guardian, George Monbiot:

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.
The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.
...
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits.

Monbiot, it's easy to see, is on the side of the "restrainers." (Later in the essay, in fact, he goes on to advocate a complete moratorium on prospecting for new reserves of fossil fuels, which is essentially a call for complete economic suicide.)

Anne Applebaum, on the other hand, is most emphatically not:

The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: that human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide. And if we take that assumption seriously, a whole lot of other things look different, too. Weapons of mass destruction should perhaps be reconsidered, along with the flu virus: By reducing the population, they might also reduce emissions. Perhaps they should be encouraged?

Coupling all that with a firm conviction that the end of the world is nigh, you can see how homework is rendered pointless. As for hopes for the future and faith in humanity -- forget about it. But while we're at it, we might as well forget about reinventing our energy sources, too.

For while it's true that humans are often greedy, stupid and destructive, it's also true that we got to where we are at least partly thanks to human creativity, ingenuity and talent. Electricity is a miracle, an invention that has brought light and life to millions. Modern communication and transportation systems are no less extraordinary, helping to create economic growth in places where poverty and misery were the norm for centuries.

All of them depend on fossil fuels, but they don't have to: A profound change in the nature of human energy consumption is possible -- thanks to the entrepreneurship that created the Internet, the compassion that lies behind the advances in modern medicine and the scientific reasoning that sent men into space. As for nihilism and hatred of humankind, it teaches us nothing, except to give up. And we shouldn't be passing that on to our children either.

I have long argued that the only possible way out of this problem--if it is indeed a problem--is to go forward. It's good to see that at least a few people are following the only sane approach to combating global warming, rather than heeding China's calls for a global suicide pact.

--Shack

Rep. Kennedy's bishop calls him on the carpet

2009-11-11T22:35:00.003-06:00

I wish that the bishops for a previous generation of Kennedies had done the same:

But let’s get down to a more practical question; let’s approach it this way: What does it mean, really, to be a Catholic? After all, being a Catholic has to mean something, right?
Well, in simple terms – and here I refer only to those more visible, structural elements of Church membership – being a Catholic means that you’re part of a faith community that possesses a clearly defined authority and doctrine, obligations and expectations. It means that you believe and accept the teachings of the Church, especially on essential matters of faith and morals; that you belong to a local Catholic community, a parish; that you attend Mass on Sundays and receive the sacraments regularly; that you support the Church, personally, publicly, spiritually and financially.
Congressman, I’m not sure whether or not you fulfill the basic requirements of being a Catholic, so let me ask: Do you accept the teachings of the Church on essential matters of faith and morals, including our stance on abortion? Do you belong to a local Catholic community, a parish? Do you attend Mass on Sundays and receive the sacraments regularly? Do you support the Church, personally, publicly, spiritually and financially?
In your letter you say that you “embrace your faith.” Terrific. But if you don’t fulfill the basic requirements of membership, what is it exactly that makes you a Catholic? Your baptism as an infant? Your family ties? Your cultural heritage?
Your letter also says that your faith “acknowledges the existence of an imperfect humanity.” Absolutely true. But in confronting your rejection of the Church’s teaching, we’re not dealing just with “an imperfect humanity” – as we do when we wrestle with sins such as anger, pride, greed, impurity or dishonesty. We all struggle with those things, and often fail.
Your rejection of the Church’s teaching on abortion falls into a different category – it’s a deliberate and obstinate act of the will; a conscious decision that you’ve re-affirmed on many occasions. Sorry, you can’t chalk it up to an “imperfect humanity.” Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church.

This is exactly what the bishops should have been saying to the pro-choice Catholics in this country for the last thirty years.

It's probably too late to really make a difference, but still--I'm glad someone's finally doing it.

--Shack

(HT: InsideCatholic)

One more thought on the Nobel Prize

2009-10-09T15:23:00.002-05:00

This one from Peter Beinart:

The Nobel Prize Committee should be in the business of conferring celebrity on unknown human-rights and peace activists toiling in the most god-forsaken parts of the world; the people who really need the attention (and even the money). It should be in the business of angering powerful tyrants by giving their victims a moment in the sun. Choosing Barack Obama, who practically orbits the sun already, accomplishes the exact opposite of that.

--Shack

A brief thought...

2009-10-09T14:29:00.002-05:00

...on brand-new Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, and the thought process of the committee that gave him the award:

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace."
-Jeremiah 6:14

--Shack

War on Terror-(Insert suffix here)

2009-10-04T16:16:00.002-05:00

Thomas Friedman's column in today's New York Times is primarily about Friedman's belated recognition of the one worthwhile contribution Rudy Giuliani made to the last presidential campaign: that Bush's widely-derided "War on Terror" was, in fact, "the Terrorists' War on Us."

The end, though, takes a look at what really is the only long-term workable solution to the issue...assuming there is a solution:

[I]n the short run, winning this war requires effective police/intelligence action, to kill or capture the jihadists. I call that “the war on terrorists.” In the long run, though, winning requires partnering with Arab and Muslim societies to help them build thriving countries, integrated with the world economy, where young people don’t grow up in a soil poisoned by religious extremists and choked by petro-dictators so they can never realize their aspirations. I call this “the war on terrorism.” It takes a long time.
Our operation in Afghanistan after 9/11 was, for me, only about “the war on terrorists.” It was about getting bin Laden. Iraq was “the war on terrorism” — trying to build a decent, pluralistic, consensual government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Despite all we’ve paid, the outcome in Iraq remains uncertain. But it was at least encouraging to see last week’s decision by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to run in the next election with a nonsectarian, multireligious coalition — a rare thing in the Arab world.
So, what President Obama is actually considering in Afghanistan is shifting from a “war on terrorists” there to a “war on terrorism,” including nation-building. I still have serious doubts that we have a real Afghan government partner for that. But if Mr. Obama decides to send more troops, the most important thing is not the number. It is his commitment to see it through. If he seems ambivalent, no one there will stand with us and we’ll have no chance. If he seems committed, maybe — maybe — we’ll find enough allies. Remember, the bad guys are totally committed — and they are not tired.

I say "assuming there is a solution" because I have my doubts about the passage I put in bold in the first paragraph. It's an open question how much of the "religious extremists" are, in fact, mainstream Islam; the answer you get seems to depend on who you ask--not on the basis of any actual evidence, but on the basis of what they've already decided the "right thing to do" should be. Commentators, right and left, pick whatever interpretation of Islam best fits their predetermined world view.

If mainstream Islam is moderate Islam, then this course of action has a chance. If not, then the Middle East will see this course of action--correctly--as the United States seeking to undermine and sabotage its religion.

That will almost certainly lead to war...but in that case, war is inevitable, no matter what the US does.

--Shack

A thought on protests

2009-08-22T15:44:00.004-05:00

Something that's occurred to me recently, in thinking about the recent posturing by supporters of Obamacare--things like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer calling protests against the plan(s) "Un-American," or the even more ridiculous spectacle of one Congressman calling another's opposition to the plan(s) "an act of treason"--is how similar all this is to what took place during the Bush administration.

We had the fierce protests--if anything, even more over-the-top than what we have now. We had the President's supporters firing back, accusing the protesters of all kinds of nefarious political motives...and yes, we had some supporters throwing around words like "Un-American" and "treason."

However, it seems to me that there is one very big difference.

The Bush policies that so enraged the left were matters of foreign policy. They were matters where, quite apart from the debate over how these matters should be conducted (or whether they should be conducted at all) the shrillness of public protests, once past a certain level, had the effect of undermining and sabotaging the United States on the global stage--in arenas where our soldiers were in harm's way.

The Obama policies that have sent the right over the edge, by contrast, are matters of domestic policy. There is no worry about undermining or sabotaging the United States here, because no matter how over-the-top the protests become, there is no foreign enemy to be aided and comforted by the lack of a unified front.

The Obamacare protests, far from "Un-American," are precisely what the framers of the First Amendment had in mind--citizens non-violently gathering to petition the government for a redress of grievances, in matters directly affecting them.

It is American democracy in its purest form.

--Shack

On the "right" to health care

2009-08-10T11:54:00.003-05:00

Terrific summation of the fundamental philosophical problem behind the drive to Obamacare--about the most succinct I've seen anywhere--can be found in the comments section of this essay. The eighth comment down:

As people in the software business often say, there's a difference between free speech and free beer. No one is being denied freedom to health care in the free speech sense: I try to use my own resources to get health care and someone blocks me. But health care, unlike speech (or the rights to worship or assemble) is like free beer: someone else has to provide it. So it's really saying we have a right to other people's money to pay for our health care.

In two centuries, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the right to free speech means I have the right to take even 50 cents from my neighbor to buy a stamp and an envelope to send a letter to the editor. If I can't afford to write a letter, I'll just have to live with preaching on the street corner, while the Murdocks and Turners of the world project their free speech to millions. And that's been fine. Throwing around the word "right" in this case without addressing the fact that we're talking about a very different kind of right seems dishonest.

Nothing more to say.

--Shack

Chutzpah

2009-08-06T12:02:00.002-05:00

Even with the massive brouhaha over health care the past several weeks, I haven't had much inclination to blog on the issue.

My take on health care is simple and utterly pessimistic: No matter which side prevails here, the system is irreparably broken. Either the premiums I pay for my health insurance will go through the roof, or the taxes I pay for premiums for government health insurance--both for my own, if I enroll, and for others', regardless--will go through the roof (or the deficit will go through the roof...though that will happen, regardless).

Whether it's the insurance companies or the government in charge, if they want to have any hope of solvency they'll have no choice but to ration care and, in the case of those who most desperately need insurance (read: pre-existing conditions) deny or drop coverage altogether.

(Well, solvency's not something the government is particularly concerned about, which is a problem in and of itself...but let's set that aside for the moment.)

For me, the equation goes something like this: If we have government health care, we will have taxpayer-funded abortions. It's inevitable, as FactCheck.org admits without actually admitting:

While Planned Parenthood would appear to be a qualified health clinic providing certain health services to women, there is nothing in the amendment’s wording to indicate that abortion would be a covered procedure. That would be up to the HHS Secretary.

(That would be HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, for those keeping score at home.)

So, I'm opposed to any and all incarnations of Obamacare...for what little that's worth.

Public opposition means nothing. As I've said before, Obama will almost certainly be a one-term president...but in that one term, he will set the stage for a permanent Democratic majority. This will get done--the numbers game on Capitol Hill guarantees it--and once it does, it doesn't matter if Republicans get back into power. They will no more be able to repeal the programs Obama sets in motion than they were able to repeal LBJ's Great Society.

In watching this train wreck, though, there are the occasionally amusing moments, like the one at the now-infamous town hall meeting between Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter (D R D) on one side, and an angry crowd on the other (which may or may not have been a case of "astroturfing"--in either case, it's irrelevant to the point of this post).

Cal Thomas highlights:

In a joint appearance with Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Democrat, Mrs. Sebelius responded to shouts and catcalls from a skeptical audience at the Constitution Center in heavily Democratic Philadelphia. She said Mr. Specter shouldn't be criticized because the Senate's version of the bill has not yet been written. This takes hubris to a new level. It is one thing for a member of Congress to vote on legislation he hasn't read; it is quite another for government officials to ask for support of a bill that has not been written, at least in the Senate.

What can I say? It's a stunning display of gall and carelessness--and it's perfectly in keeping with the character of the Obama administration.

--Shack

Doing the pro-choice movement a favor

2009-06-23T22:51:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to hold the newly-disclosed views of Richard Nixon against the pro-choice movement as a whole:

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”

Nixon was just a politician, after all, and a Republican, at that--it's not like he was the founder of Planned Parenthood, or anything.

--Shack

Brief pro-life thoughts on the Tiller murder

2009-06-02T06:17:00.002-05:00

From a moral perspective, it was an outrage.

From a public relations perspective, it was a disaster.

From a movement perspective, it was counterproductive, at best.

From a historical perspective, John Brown wasn't all that successful, either.

From any perspective, it was a travesty.

--Shack

Pro-life = "Torture"

2009-05-29T23:57:00.002-05:00

C-FAM reports:

The United Nations (UN) committee charged with monitoring compliance with the Convention Against Torture has declared that Nicaragua’s full protection of fetal life violates the country's obligations under the Convention. This is the first time this committee has reviewed Nicaragua since that government outlawed abortion for any reason three years ago.

Do I really need to say anything else here?

--Shack

Priorities and consequences

2009-05-24T20:09:00.002-05:00

Over at What's Wrong with the World, Lydia McGrew ponders:

It is often said by conservatives, and rightly, that ideology is a great danger. The ideologue gets hold of one truth and makes it into the only truth, the only thing that matters. He sacrifices all else to that one thing. That one ideal might be equality, beauty, health, or love, but when one makes second things first, the second things always turn vicious, and horrors follow.

But there is another point, compatible with that point, that must be made too: When second things are made first, they destroy themselves. The ideologue does not even know what is best for the ideal he professes.

Take love, for instance...

It's been said times without number that the sexual revolution wasn't really about love. But there were people who thought it was. If you had told them that the revolution they were founding would ultimately destroy love, even romantic love, even sexual love, they would not have listened. They would not have believed. Yet it was true, as numerous broken-hearted, broken-bodied men and women, men and women who have tried sex without honor can attest.

And now, in this our day, health is another god, another second thing made first. In the name of health we harvest the dead, we destroy embryos, our scientists promise us cures of all diseases if only we will dispense with ethical limitations on research. They are wrong, of course, and much of the promise is hype. But beyond that, we are in the process of losing all sense of what actually constitutes health. Doctors are under pressure to cooperate in the destruction of unborn infants as part of their profession. How is that serving health? Suicide on demand, for any reason whatsoever, assisted by doctors, is all the rage. What does that have to do with the medical profession's job of helping people to be healthy? Yet restless people whose relatives have had trouble finding people to cooperate in their suicide would actually like writing suicide prescriptions to be mandatory upon doctors. Bodily mutilation of healthy limbs is being considered as a "treatment." This is not serving bodily health and integrity.

In other words, the utilitarian attempt to elevate health as a good above innocent human life and above all ethical restraints has turned out to be profoundly anti-human and, consequently, is undermining the medical profession and the very notion of health itself.

The same thing is happening in the environmentalist movement.

--Shack

Playing politics with religion...

2009-05-23T04:55:00.004-05:00

...in the view of some, at least.

Hilaria Neveus reports:

MEDIOLANUM, May 20, 390 (Ille Curator) - The Catholic bishop of Mediolanum has been accused of "political grandstanding" by some bishops and representatives of other Christian denominations, after he expelled the Western Emperor, Theodosius, from his cathedral on Friday - apparently a response to the recent alleged killing of 7,000 in Thessalonica.

Eunomius of Cyzicus, a leader in the Arian school of Christianity, and bishop Palladius of Ratiaria have distanced themselves from Archbishop Ambrose, saying he has engaged in an unnecessary public clash at the cathedral that was ill-befitting his position as a Church leader. Palladius said that refusing to allow the Emperor to enter except as a barefoot penitent was an "extreme and unpastoral" approach, that it had been "hasty" and was tantamount to "using the Holy Eucharist as a political weapon."
Bishop Palladius said, "If the emperor had come to my cathedral, I would have greeted him with compassion, not condemnation. I would consider it my duty to dialogue with him first before making any dramatic public confrontations.

"I feel it is our business as bishops to teach and I do not believe that the Holy Eucharist should be wielded as a political weapon."

Archbishop Burke must be so proud.

(For those who didn't get the joke, here's another account of the incident.)

--Shack

(H/T: What Does The Prayer Really Say?)

From the clueless wing of the Court

2009-04-12T00:56:00.005-05:00

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offers up to the New York Times this stirring, albeit disastrously flawed, defense of citing foreign case law:

Justice Ginsburg said the controversy was based on the misunderstanding that citing a foreign precedent means the court considers itself bound by foreign law as opposed to merely being influenced by such power as its reasoning holds.
“Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?” she asked.

You mean aside from the fact that the judge, unlike the professor writing the law review article, is working from and issuing opinions based on a different country's constitution and statutes?

Ginsburg goes on:

She added that the failure to engage foreign decisions had resulted in diminished influence for the United States Supreme Court.
The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is “probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.” There is one reason for that, she said: “You will not be listened to if you don’t listen to others.”

Uh-huh. And the US Supreme Court should have influence abroad...why, exactly?

Its job is to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States. Any foreign influence should be coming from the laws the Court is interpreting, not the Court itself.

Last, but certainly not least, there was this little gem:

American hostility to the consideration of foreign law, she said, “is a passing phase.” She predicted that “we will go back to where we were in the early 19th century when there was no question that it was appropriate to refer to decisions of other courts.”

She cannot be serious. Please tell me Ginsburg is not serious, here.

In the early 19th century--in the early 1800s--the "decisions of other courts" she's talking about were English common law. These were the legal codes of the United States' direct predecessor, adopted as the building blocks of American law.

If Ginsburg can't see the difference between citing English common law back then and citing the rulings of foreign judges in interpreting the Constitution today, then the Court is in even sorrier shape than I could have imagined.

And just think--on the liberal spectrum, Ginsburg is considered a moderate.

--Shack

"Deregulation"

2009-03-11T03:56:00.003-05:00

Thomas Woods, Jr., author of Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, spoke recently with InsideCatholic's Brian Saint-Paul.

The whole interview is well worth the read, but I found this bit particularly interesting:

So you're saying that the "breakneck deregulation" we've heard so much about is largely a myth?

Most of the alleged deregulation people complain about is completely phony. Suppose you have a government monopoly like the post office and say, "Ok, we're going to deregulate the Post Office. From now on, the Post Office can charge $100 for a stamp." That's not really deregulation. Full deregulation would say, "We're going to deregulate the mail business so that no-one is prevented from entering it by regulatory barriers." Now that would be real deregulation. Try selling $100 stamps in that arrangement and see how that goes for you.

What we've had in recent years is phony deregulation. Banks are allowed to engage in riskier behavior than they were before, but the government will continue to guarantee their deposits with deposit insurance. How is that deregulation? In effect, you can do riskier things but the public is still on the hook for your errors. Real deregulation would say that you can do risky things, but you're on your own. We haven't had that. We've had the worst of all possible worlds.

It's been my experience in looking at issues like abortion and global warming that you're on the right track when your reasoning leads to conclusions that neither side is particularly happy about--and based on this interview, I'm getting a feeling that Woods is on the right track. (The "phony deregulation" he describes above is, by and large, a product of the Bush administration--and elsewhere in the interview, he systematically dismembers the popular right-wing claim that the Community Reinvestment Act is primarily to blame for the collapse.)

I wasn't aware of Woods' book before, but it's definitely on my reading list now.

--Shack

Fatigue

2009-03-05T03:58:00.002-06:00

I haven't posted much here recently.

There have been things that I think should be said, but other people have already done a pretty good job of saying those things (see my blogroll for a few of them).

More than that, though, I'm just tired--especially when it comes to the actions of the Obama administration.

The people who didn't vote for him are appalled. They see that his actions are leading to disaster.

The people who DID vote for him are thrilled--they think that his actions are just what the country needs, and it's quite clear that nothing anyone says will convince them otherwise.

So the ballooning deficit is going to happen. The economically crippling carbon cap-and-trade is going to happen. FOCA is going to happen (if not all at once, then piecemeal, under the radar--the same way the Fairness Doctrine is going to happen). A re-empowering of the unions--whose achievement of the "middle class lifestyle" in the '50s and '60s owed a heck of a lot more to the rest of the world being in ruins from WW II, leaving the American economy predominant, than to anything they did--and subsequent hamstringing of US businesses in the global market is going to happen. Double-digit inflation is going to happen. And much, much more.

It's all going to happen, and the naive fools who voted for Barack Obama are not going to be convinced we're headed for a disaster until that disaster has already come to pass.

Given that, when I see something I might comment on, my first impulse is to ask why I should bother playing Cassandra.

It's going to be a long four years.

--Shack

That "pro-choice" electorate

2009-02-03T14:15:00.002-06:00

You take your silver linings where you find them.

President Obama, as widely expected, rescinded the Mexico City policy, which had cut off federal funding for overseas groups providing abortions. Pro-life groups, as widely expected, strongly denounced the move.

Gallup notes something that wasn't as widely expected, though.

Pollsters found that, of seven early actions by the Obama administration, the ending of the Mexico City policy was by far the least popular. It garnered an overall approval rating of only 35%--59% among Democrats, 8% among Republicans, and 33% among independents.

Only one-third of the swing vote approved of what is, without question, one of the mildest pro-choice steps our new President could possibly take.

The pro-life movement faces an uphill battle in the wake of the '08 elections, without question.

However, the hill may not be quite as steep as some (myself included) had feared.

--Shack

(H/T: Drudge)

Clarity is important

2009-01-26T22:48:00.002-06:00

This little news brief has spurred quite a bit of conversation here and there:

As special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell heads off to the region to begin work on negotiating a cease fire between Israel and the Palestinians, President Obama has sat for his first formal TV interview with the Arabic cable TV network Al-Arabiya, ABC News has learned.

Now, I'm not being deliberately obtuse here, but I've read the thing about fifty times, and I'm still not clear--is the driving point that this is President Obama's first formal interview with Al-Arabiya, or that this is Obama's first formal interview as President?

Given the state of things in the Middle East, either would be newsworthy...which makes me wish Mr. Tapper had taken a bit more care with his words.

--Shack

Imagine the potential

2009-01-22T13:46:00.002-06:00

(H/T: WorldNetDaily, via Death Roe Survivors)

1,251,921

2009-01-22T13:17:00.002-06:00

I originally posted this last year on this date. Given the severity of the issue--and, especially, the nature of the new administration in Washington--I think posting this (with minor revisions to reflect the passing of time) will be an annual tradition on this blog.

------------------------------------------

Today marks the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The 36th anniversary of the Supreme Court's determination that a right to privacy trumps a right to life through the first three months of pregnancy.

It is also the 36th anniversary of Doe v. Bolton, Roe's companion case. The 36th anniversary of the Supreme Court's determination that even after the first three months--indeed, all the way up to the very end of the pregnancy--an unborn child may be slaughtered under the most utterly flimsy of pretenses: the widest possible definition of the mother's "health," as determined by the only doctor who need be involved in the decision...the abortionist.

I am vehemently pro-life. It is, in my eyes, the most important domestic issue--the most important human rights issue--facing this country today. I have long been involved in the fight against abortion on various levels.

I am also a man.

And, as such--as I have been told repeatedly, vehemently, often in terms I would prefer not to use on this blog--I have no right to have any say on this issue. I am not a woman; I cannot get pregnant; I can't even claim the prerogative of a father (even though that prerogative is itself routinely denigrated and denied).

Therefore, I am told, it is none of my business.

I beg to differ.

There's a link to the right of this post. It reads, "My Axe." Clicking on that link will take you to a site called Death Roe Survivors. It is a site by and for the lucky ones.

The ones born after 1973.

The ones who could have been snuffed out in the womb without any legal repercussions--but were not.

The ones who are here only by the grace of their mothers, who chose to carry them to term.

I am one of the lucky ones.

I was born in 1979.

According to the CDC, there were 1,251,921 abortions in the United States that year.

1,251,921 unlucky ones.

1,251,921 of my immediate peers.

I repeat: 1,251,921 OF MY IMMEDIATE PEERS.

Taken together with live birth statistics, a little over 26% of pregnancies that year (excluding those that ended in miscarriage) ended in abortion.

My generation has been decimated. A little more than one in four of MY OWN PEOPLE were sacrificed in the bloody name of "Choice," their very HUMANITY denied. Had my mother decided differently, I would have been one of them.

None of my business? No right to interfere?

I have EVERY right to interfere. A wrong has been done to me and mine that can never be fully repaid, that continues to be visited on each succeeding generation after us.

All I can do is see that it comes to an end. That it MUST come to an end. I owe it to all those who weren't as fortunate as I was.

On this 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, I have 1,251,921 reminders of why I continue to fight.

--Shack

Alive

2008-12-03T22:40:00.002-06:00

Just a brief update, to let my 2.5 readers know I'm still alive.

I haven't had much inclination to blog lately. It's part election fatigue, part personal issues that I really don't feel a need to get into here, and part overall dissatisfaction with the way I've been doing this--I consider myself a debater, but this blog has become, by and large, a forwarding station for political column excerpts. That needs to change.

So, seeing as I've already been gone almost a month, I figure I might as well take a break for the rest of the year while I revise my approach.

I'll be back come January. Hopefully, at that point I'll be sounding off again, rather than just echoing.

--Shack

The bishops flinch

2008-11-10T02:27:00.006-06:00

The Catholic vote this past election was a mess, as usual. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship was twisted and abused to excuse voting for a rabidly pro-choice presidential candidate, to the point that a few bishops actually felt compelled to do their jobs for once and set their parishoners straight.

This (the bishops doing their jobs) being a radical new concept, it engendered confusion among the faithful, and the USCCB decided in September to take action. They would finally address the problem of pro-choice Catholics, come to a firm answer, and speak the answer to their flock with one voice.

Sure, they were going to wait until after the election to actually do something about it--but they were finally going to do something about it!

-Two months later-

...Um, hey. About that "finally addressing the problem" thing?

Yeah.

They chickened out. Big time.

Why am I not surprised?

--Shack

(H/T: Catholic Culture)

A tiny sliver of hope on the Fairness Doctrine

2008-11-05T20:12:00.003-06:00

It's not much, but Carl Cannon, in his post-mortem on the election, puts forth the first plausible case I've seen for Barack Obama to not acquiesce to the demands of his base and reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine:

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” legendary California Democrat (and Reagan adversary) Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh was fond of saying. Well, nobody in Sacramento politics, including Reagan himself, ever saw anything like the Obama fundraising machine of 2008. This is a campaign that raised more than $600 million—more than it needed, more than it could spend—which allowed it to campaign and to air ads in every part of Ohio, to run high-dollar get-out-the-vote drives in traditionally Republican states, to stage first-class outdoor events catering to hundreds of thousands of people, to emerge flush even in the wake of the most expensive primary campaign in history, to eschew federal matching money (breaking a campaign promise in the process), to outspend McCain in every swing state, and to buy half-hour infomercials on the major networks in prime time less than a week before the election.

Democrats, Obama included, have threatened to restore the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” a dubious governmental regulation that supposedly supplied equal access to the nation’s airwaves. Bringing it back would be an appalling government intrustion into the marketplace of ideas, but now that Obama has won, I suspect the president-elect will recalibrate his stance on that—just as he did on accepting federal campaign finance limitations when it became clear he could shatter all existing fundraising records. Why do I say that? Because if a “Fairness Doctrine” had been in place, the networks would have had to provide McCain equal time on television—even though he didn’t have the money to pay for it. Obama had a huge advantage, which he exploited ruthlessly and effectively.

Not much, as I said--but it's the first time I've seen an argument that it would be in Obama's best interest not to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine.

And that's about the only way it doesn't get reinstituted.

--Shack

Election post-mortem

2008-11-05T17:23:00.002-06:00

About the only good news out of last night was that Democrats didn't get the filibuster-proof Senate they were looking for...I think. That should (hopefully) keep nightmare scenarios like the Freedom of Choice Act at bay for at least the next two years.

Other than that, though, the night was pretty much an unmitigated disaster.

In a concession speech filled with high-minded calls for Republicans to unilaterally disarm and bend over, John McCain did manage one moment of blunt honesty:

"The failure is mine."

Was it ever.

In a political environment that should have been insurmountable--but wasn't--McCain shot himself in the head. The moments where it was clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that he just did not get it were there in abundance, but it went far beyond that.

"Incoherence" was the watchword of this campaign. It started with the man at the top, and infected pretty much everyone--yes, everyone--on down the line.

There was never a consistent message. Brand new themes (Celebrity, The One, Experience, Judgment, Maverick, Liberal, Socialist, etc.) were picked up almost every week and discarded nearly as quickly.

Ten thousand attacks were ten thousand mosquito bites; never in the same place, never for very long, and as a result never doing much damage...if any at all.

If there is a defining moment for the futility of McCain's attacks, it was during the third debate, where he simply repeated the phrase "spread the wealth" over and over. He never linked it to Obama's policies. He never linked it to the real-life consequences of the philosophy behind it. He never even seemed to have any real grasp of why it was such a blunder for Obama in the first place.

He simply repeated the phrase, again and again, as if it were a mantra that would somehow magically unleash the voters' inner selves and cause them to transcend to a Republican plane of consciousness. (I readily recall McCain acting in much the same way when he brought up William Ayers and Obama's record on earmarks.)

The same thing happened during the financial crisis, and that pretty much sealed McCain's fate. He pinballed from trumpeting the soundness of the economy to denouncing Wall Street greed to publicly leaving the campaign trail (only to backtrack a few days later) to...well, to "spread the wealth."

Meanwhile, Obama and his allies were consistently hammering home the Big Lie that the Bush Administration and deregulation were to blame for the crisis. They told it loud enough, they told it often enough--and people believed it.

Even the one bright spot in the campaign--the national introduction of Sarah Palin--ended up a disaster. I'm not talking here about the politically manufactured scandals; I'm talking about her inability--one I strongly suspect was inherited/adapted from McCain--to respond to a direct question with anything other than a rambling, pre-emptive stump speech only theoretically related to what she was supposed to be answering.

For all the good her brilliant speeches at her unveiling and the RNC did her, her later performances undid that progress...and then some. Palin's reputation has been destroyed. She is the new Dan Quayle. Her political career on the national stage is effectively over; one of the GOP's brightest rising stars has been extinguished.

Where do we go from here? Nowhere fast.

Looking to the future, it's a near-certainty that we'll see the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, leading to the squelching of talk radio (and the economic ruin of the stations that signed personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to long, pricey contracts--an object lesson for the radio companies, in case some future Republican administration should ever rescind the Doctrine again) and leaving conservatives without any mass media presence whatsoever. Card check will revitalize the unions, key Democratic supporters.

FOCA is not likely (pray to God) to get past a Republican filibuster--but if it does, on top of everything else, that's effectively the end of the pro-life movement as a political force. The GOP's most dependable and committed group of supporters goes up in smoke.

Obama may well be a one-term president. But in that one term, he will very likely set the stage for Democratic domination for at least the next generation...assuming the country lasts that long.

--Shack

A Farewell to Poker

2008-11-05T16:53:00.005-06:00

I had a fairly lengthy post-mortem of the election almost ready to go when my computer crashed, forcing me to start over from scratch. I'll hopefully have that up soon.

In the meantime, though, I note that Texas Hold 'Em Blogger, one of the more...unrestrained...members of the right-wing blogosphere, has been deleted.

It is unclear whether the "authors" noted in the deletion message refers to Peter--who on two different post-election entries displayed an upside-down American flag--or to Wordpress admins.

In either case, though, I doubt the blog will return.

The immortal words of Davy Crockett would seem to sum up Peter's reaction best:

"You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."

--Shack

Planned Parenthood: Pro-Infanticide

2008-11-01T01:01:00.003-05:00

Students for Life of America went undercover, and got the kind of brazen inhumanity we should be used to getting from Planned Parenthood by now:

The money quote:

"It's an actual delivery, but it wouldn't be able to survive on its own--so eventually, the baby does die."

Infanticide by exposure, ladies and gentlemen. Planned Parenthood's routine "safety net," so to speak, in case the abortion results in a live birth--which the PP rep freely admits "does happen."

SFLA is calling on Congress to investigate Planned Parenthood.

Given the track record of the likely President-elect and his followers, smart money is on Congress investigating SFLA, instead.

--Shack

(H/T: Catholic News Agency, via InsideCatholic.com)

The Economist to America: Go to Vegas

2008-10-31T04:49:00.002-05:00

And I don't mean that as a euphemism for somewhere a bit hotter. The Economist, in quite possibly the single most idiotic endorsement of this presidential campaign, recommends that the United States "take a chance"--that's a direct quote--and elect Barack Obama.

The paper readily admits Obama's shortcomings. In short:

Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

Why? Well, at the end of the endorsement, they finally get around to answering that...kind of:

In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent.

In short: We shouldn't worry about his ambiguous beliefs, his microscopic resume, or the hypothetical nature of his backbone in the face of a Democratic Congress because...

...he campaigns pretty.

That's it.

Certainly, it matters how well Obama came through the presidential campaign. It's a trial by fire, the most rigorous of its kind (even without the media doing its job) and that's how it should be--a test of the candidate's mettle, his fitness on a personal level to be President. It's an essential benchmark to be cleared.

But it's just the bare minimum. It's expected. It's a qualifier that should be used only to disqualify a candidate who fails to meet it. It is not a reason, in and of itself, to vote for one candidate over another.

But that's precisely what The Economist advises.

In the most important presidential election in recent memory, their recommendation to the American people is a blind leap of faith.

--Shack

The judicial president

2008-10-28T06:16:00.003-05:00

This, from today's Wall Street Journal, is flat-out scary. There's no other way to put it.

One of the great unappreciated stories of the past eight years is how thoroughly Senate Democrats thwarted efforts by President Bush to appoint judges to the lower federal courts.

Consider the most important lower federal court in the country: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his two terms as president, Ronald Reagan appointed eight judges, an average of one a year, to this court. They included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, Larry Silberman, Stephen Williams, James Buckley, Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle. In his two terms, George W. Bush was able to name only four: John Roberts, Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas Griffith and Brett Kavanaugh.

Although two seats on this court are vacant, Bush nominee Peter Keisler has been denied even a committee vote for two years. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will almost certainly fill those two vacant seats, the seats of two older Clinton appointees who will retire, and most likely the seats of four older Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees who may retire as well.

The net result is that the legal left will once again have a majority on the nation's most important regulatory court of appeals.

The balance will shift as well on almost all of the 12 other federal appeals courts. Nine of the 13 will probably swing to the left if Mr. Obama is elected (not counting the Ninth Circuit, which the left solidly controls today). Circuit majorities are likely at stake in this presidential election for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal. That includes the federal appeals courts for New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and virtually every other major center of finance in the country.

On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change.

Combine that with a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority, and you get liberal hegemony via judicial fiat for at least the next generation...if not for my lifetime (and I have yet to turn 30).

--Shack

Powell endorses Obama

2008-10-20T04:56:00.003-05:00

Was anyone surprised by this? Seriously--was anyone surprised by this?

He says it's not about race, and I find it very easy to believe him. From a policy standpoint, Colin Powell has always been of the Schwarzenegger/Giuliani mold--i.e. liberal on social issues--and that came through loud and clear as he explained himself:

As a key reason, Powell said: "I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration."

That's the long and short of it right there.

--Shack

The Iron Butterfly?

2008-10-19T13:20:00.003-05:00

An interesting article by Bob Greene on the CNN Political Ticker, highlighting a possible case of political chaos theory: One man's decision not to enter politics may have led to another man later being on the doorstep of the White House.

Recall: In 2004, Republican nominee Jack Ryan was forced to pull out of the Illinois race for the US Senate. The GOP replaced Ryan with carpetbagger Alan Keyes, and Barack Obama eventually won the election.

However, Keyes wasn't the party's first choice to take over the nomination.

That distinction belongs to former Chicago Bears coach "Iron" Mike Ditka, a self-described "staunch conservative."

Greene recounts:

A lot of people in Illinois thought Ditka had a pretty good chance to win, had he accepted the invitation to run. Remember: four years ago, Obama was a relative unknown. He was back in the state senate after having been defeated badly in a 2000 primary in which he sought to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ditka, on the other hand, was one of the most famous– and in many, many places, beloved– people in the state of Illinois. He was controversial, yes, but that’s what his admirers liked about him. He was instantly recognizable in every corner of the state– he would have drawn enormous crowds to rallies. Mike Ditka, the icon, against Barack Obama, the novice?

“I am who I am,” Ditka told me. “People know that.”

Had Ditka run and won, there isn’t a way in the world that Obama would have been in the race for the White House now. And history would have been completely rewritten.

In short--sometimes, a butterfly not flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, as well.

--Shack

(H/T: Grandpa John's, via Dr. Sanity)

Breaking news: Bishops do their job, for a change

2008-10-18T00:34:00.007-05:00

There have already been more statements regarding abortion from the country's Catholic bishops during this election campaign than at any other time I can recall.

Now, finally, a few of them are doing what they ALL should have been doing for the past thirty years--that is to say, their job.

In Texas, Bishops Kevin Farrell and Kevin Vann issued a joint statement taking aim at the abuse of "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship" to excuse voting for Obama. It was mailed to Catholic families in the Fort Worth area and read during Mass at parishes in Dallas.

The response was immediate. The Dallas Morning News reported that a number of people walked out of Mass in response, and Americans United for ~~Insulation~~ Separation of Church and State made threatening noises about federal tax laws.

I hate to think what their response is going to be to the following broadside from St. Louis Bishop Robert Hermann, reproduced here in its entirety (emphases mine):

Save our children! More than anything else, this election is about saving our children or killing our children. This life issue is the overriding issue facing each of us in this coming election. All other issues, including the economy, have to take second place to the issue of life.

Save our children! Many people in Germany supported Hitler for economic reasons even though, as his programs advanced, he put to death millions of Jewish people. He ended up wrecking the economy together with the country of Germany.

How are we different if we vote for proabortion candidates for office? How can we help change our political and legal situation to protect innocent children and support a culture of life?

Save our children! When I speak to some socalled good Catholics, I am shocked that they are quite ready to vote for a pro-abortion candidate under almost any circumstance. I find this hard to understand. We have heard the word "abortion" so often that perhaps we no longer associate procured abortion with the killing of children, yet that is what it is. The term itself can be misleading. The dictionary tells us that it comes from a Latin word that means "to disappear or to miscarry." Sometimes abortions simply happen because of natural causes. That is why this word abortion, for many people, apparently does not really connote the destruction of children. When a human agent induces an abortion, that human agent is taking the life of one of our children.

Save our children! How can a so-called good Catholic vote for a candidate that supports laws that take the life of innocent children, when there is an alternative? If there were two candidates who supported abortion, but not equally, we would have the obligation to mitigate the evil by voting for the less-permissive candidate.

Save our children! How can a so-called good Catholic vote for a candidate that supports laws that justify the killing of a child that survived a botched abortion? How can such a so-called good Catholic receive the Holy Eucharist?

In Chapter 10 of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he states: "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the Blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? ... You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and also the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons."

Save our children! Have some of our so-called good Catholics become so hardened against the Gospel of Life that they believe that other issues outweigh the Gospel of Life? Have some of our so-called good Catholics put politics ahead of the Fifth Commandment, in which God states: "Thou shalt not kill"? Do some of our so-called good Catholics, who may go to Mass every Sunday and receive the Holy Eucharist, really believe that voting for a pro-abortion candidate, when there is a clear alternative and therefore no justifiable reason for so doing, is really not voting to have children killed? This election is all about saving our children!

Save our children! I have no doubt that there may be some so-called good Catholics who are reading this column and who may be really angry about now. I ask the question "Why would such a person be angry?" If we do good deeds, then our conscience is at peace. If we do evil deeds, then our conscience bothers us. It is my hope that this column will lead some of our so-called good Catholics to study the Catholic Catechism.

Save our children! Some of our so-called good Catholics may have hardened their hearts against the real understanding of induced abortions, that they can no longer see that this involves the destruction of our children. "If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts!"

Save our children! Supporting induced abortions is not the greatest sin in the world. A greater sin is the refusal to repent of such a serious crime or the denial that this involves the killing of innocent children.

Save our children! I have used this terminology again and again penetrate the defenses of anyone who in the past may have put personal, economic or political interests above the issue of saving our children. The right to life is our most fundamental right, and to defend this right on behalf of the most vulnerable is a great privilege and is worth giving one’s life for. Policemen and firemen always risk their lives to save human life. Why should we not risk our own reputation to save our children?

Save our children!You can see by now that I do not believe that this column by itself will change hearts. The issue of abortion involves serious sin, and to overcome serious patterns of sin requires grace. If you are still with me, may I suggest that you join me and many others in praying the daily Rosary from now until election day for the sake of life. Why not pray the family Rosary every night between now and the general election. The Rosary brought down the Iron Curtain. It can also help us turn around the culture of death to a culture of life.

Save our so-called good Catholics who ignore Catholic moral principles when applied to our political life. Pray the family Rosary daily. Pray the family Rosary for our so-called good Catholics who could use your love and your charity. Pray for our so-called good Catholics who ignore serious Catholic moral teachings and still receive Holy Communion. Love them by praying the family Rosary for them. Don’t debate with them. Intercede for them. Praying for them is more fun than fighting with them.

Save our children and save our so-called good Catholics who have abandoned Church teachings in favor of personal gain. Pray the Rosary. Pray it every day. Get the whole family to pray the Rosary daily. Prayer is more powerful than contentious arguments. Spread the word to other families. In praying the Rosary, children’s votes count as much as adult votes. Sometimes they pray with purer hearts than we do. If you are disgusted with the TV news, then turn it off and turn on the prayer Internet. What we hear in prayer leaves us in peace. When we pray for our country and for our fellow citizens, we are filled with peace. St. Paul tells us that our warfare is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers and the spirits of darkness.

Prayer is our protection. Let it also be a protection for our country. If you want to make Satan angry, pray the Rosary for the sake of Life. Pray that as a nation we will choose leaders that will say ‘no’ to the culture of death and say ‘yes’ to the culture of life. Save our children! Pray the Rosary!

There's a schism brewing in the Catholic Church in America. And when it erupts, abortion is going to be front and center.

--Shack

(H/T: InsideCatholic.com [and again])

Hope where there is none

2008-10-17T00:07:00.002-05:00

I haven't exactly been shy in my predictions. Much as I would like to think otherwise, I am all but certain that John McCain is going to lose this election in a landslide, due not only to a perfect economic storm but also to his own total and utter ineptitude during the debates.

If there's any chance left for McCain at all--and I have serious doubts about that--it lies in the fact that Obama's supporters are tactical morons.

I'm not speaking here of the insane assaults on Sarah Palin that completely and utterly backfired on the media. I'm speaking instead of what Zombie calls The Left's Big Blunder--an overemphasis on opinion polls that are almost certainly substantially inflated:

In the majority of strategy games, the most effective plan is to trick your opponent into underestimating you. The goal is to catch them unawares, to spring an attack when they least expect it. But there are exceptions to this rule: in poker, and sometimes in warfare, the most effective strategy can be the reverse -- to bluff, which means to trick your opponent into overestimating your strength.

There's a catch, however: bluffing only works when the rules of the game allow you to avoid a showdown with your opponent. Imagine, for example, that you were playing a hand of high stakes poker against a skilled opponent. You look at your cards and you see that your hand is not particularly good. Under these circumstances, some professional poker players will bet everything they have, and act confident, in hope of bluffing their opponents into folding. When the opponent folds, there is no final showdown; the player who was bluffing collects the winnings without having to reveal his cards, or, even if he does reveal them, doesn't actually need to have the better hand. The opponents gave up because they couldn't take the pressure. But what if the rules of this particular game of poker were changed so that every hand necessarily ended in a showdown: it was not possible to fold, and no matter how much you bluffed, and how much your opponent feared the strength of your hand, you still have to beat his hand at the end of betting. Under these circumstances, bluffing is not only ineffective, it's absolutely foolish, because you're risking everything on a group of cards that are not likely to win.

Similarly, in ancient warfare, if you could convince your opponent that your army was bigger than it really was, you could possibly trick them into surrendering without a fight -- a fight you might have actually lost if you had gone to battle.

Yet presidential elections are not like poker or siege warfare. There is no way to bluff your way to victory. The McCain campaign can't "fold" or surrender, nor can the actual voting on November 4 be cancelled. No matter how much the Obama supporters inflate their apparent strength, at the end of the day they're going to have prove it's true -- or lose the election. Because of this, bluffing in a presidential election is the worst possible strategy, because all you'll end up achieving is to inspire the opposing camp to fight more desperately, since they'll assume their backs are against the wall. Teddy Roosevelt advised that the best political posture is to "Speak softly and carry a big stick" -- but in 2008 the Democrats are yelling at the top of their lungs and carrying only a medium-sized stick.

It's the longest of long shots--but between the identities of the actual pollsters (i.e. the ones in direct contact with those being surveyed), the Clever Hans Effect, and a viscerally renewed Bradley Effect, Zombie lays out a pretty compelling case for the last hope McCain has left: that enough despairing conservatives go out to vote in protest, while enough complacent Obama supporters decide to just stay home.

Frankly, though, McCain would have a better chance of winning the lottery.

Twice.

In a row.

Playing the exact same numbers.

--Shack

(H/T: Dr. Sanity)

3rd debate

2008-10-16T05:32:00.004-05:00

For some reason (I'm not quite sure why) I went ahead and watched the final presidential debate.

McCain didn't do much to help himself...and then there was this little gem:

Now, 95 percent of the people in America will receive more money under my plan because they will receive not only their present benefits, which may be taxed, which will be taxed, but then you add $5,000 onto it, except for those people who have the gold-plated Cadillac insurance policies that have to do with cosmetic surgery and transplants and all of those kinds of things.

Transplants. Equated with cosmetic surgery.

That sound you hear? It's the last dwindling hopes of the McCain campaign--and of the United States of America, for at least the next four years--going down the drain.

--Shack

Too little, too late

2008-10-14T15:42:00.002-05:00

It's over.

2008-10-09T04:51:00.002-05:00

I had a lot of trouble finding the second presidential debate online (the C-Span embedded video on RCP had the volume set so low I couldn't hear anyone, and no apparent way to turn it up). Once I did manage to track it down, I wished I hadn't--because I was turning it off in disgust before the candidates had even finished with the first question.

This race is over.

John McCain and Sarah Palin have both had a problem throughout this campaign answering a straight question. In Palin's case, it's not an unreasonable expectation for someone who was thrown in the deep end a little over a month ago--and to compensate, over that month she's demonstrated a very short learning curve, which suggests McCain did indeed make the right pick for his running mate.

McCain's case, however, is another story--and rarely was the disconnect more evident than on the first question. What's the fastest, best way to "bail out" older and retired citizens whose savings have been decimated by the market crash?

McCain's answer: Reduce dependence on foreign oil.

...I'm sorry. WHAT?

Forget not answering the question. This was so far out of touch, Barack Obama should be taking that clip and running it as a TV ad for the rest of the campaign. On the very first question of the debate--when everyone tuned in was still watching--John McCain shot himself in the head.

This is a disaster for the country in so many ways.

An Obama administration will be a disaster for the pro-life movement.

It will be a disaster for the First Amendment.

It will be a disaster for the economy.

It will be a disaster for national security.

It will be a disaster for global security.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a way an Obama administration won't be a disaster.

But make no mistake--come January 2009, there will be an Obama administration.

May the good Lord have mercy on our souls.

--Shack

Bipartisan. Right.

2008-10-04T05:23:00.002-05:00

Writing at Human Events, Jay Homnick deconstructs the end of Joe Biden's performance at Thursday's debate:

The penultimate question to the candidates was: is there any position you changed while in office upon achieving new insights into the legislative process? Biden said yes. When he arrived in the Judiciary Committee, he brought with him a belief from law school. It held that if a President nominates a qualified jurist for the Supreme Court, the Senate was bound to confirm the nominee. He soon came to conclude that ideology should also be considered as a factor, so he proudly fought the elevation of Judge Robert Bork to the court.

Then Biden was granted the privilege of offering a closing argument. In it he assured the audience that Senator Obama and he would govern in a bipartisan spirit.

This pair of presentations combine to shine a piercing light into the dark soul of the Democrat worldview. If we decode – or “unpack”, in the jargon – his first point, he is telling us that until he arrived there was a bipartisan custom in place for handling Supreme Court appointments. Distinction was the only criterion for a Supreme Court Justice, with no thought of the Senate playing an adversarial role in their Constitutionally mandated “advice and consent”. When Biden arrived he decided that would no longer do, and henceforth every confirmation hearing would become a partisan wrangle.

So his self-described epiphany involved his bringing “change” to the Senate by making it more partisan. Immediately thereafter, he promises to usher in a new era of post-partisan cooperation.

This, of course, slots in neatly alongside the reality of the post-partisan scenario Obama et al have been proclaiming all along: full and uncontested Democratic control of all three branches of government, running roughshod over any and all Republican opposition (since it is, in their view, fundamentally illegitimate).

--Shack

VP debate thoughts

2008-10-03T02:58:00.003-05:00

If you missed the debate, C-Span has the whole thing up on YouTube.

At any rate, just flipping through my scribbled notes:

-Palin openly and deliberately switched topics multiple times during the debate, at one point even flat-out saying she was going to ignore the moderator and speak directly to the American people. That was a gamble, and I'm not sure whether it paid off.

-Palin once again hammered home the point that many small businesses are over the $250K threshold, and will thus have their taxes raised under Obama's plain. Biden countered that 95% of small business owners have incomes of less than $250K/year.

I'm willing to bet all the change in my pocket that both candidates are absolutely, positively, 100% correct. Can you spot the extra word Biden snuck into his above rebuttal?

-Biden picked up Obama's line hammering McCain's plan to pair the $5000 tax credit for health insurance with taxing employer health benefits. Steven Landsburg should be pleased.

-Neither McCain nor Obama gave an answer last week when asked what campaign promises they might not be able to fulfill because of the bailout. Biden did give one answer--namely, increased foreign aid--then went on to say the Obama campaign would also not carry out McCain's proposed tax cuts.

...WHAT?

-Palin, after snarking that she hadn't been on the campaign trail long enough to make any such expensive promises, suggested that McCain hasn't overextended himself to that point either.

-Palin got her head handed to her on climate change. When she said that she didn't want to argue about causes, Biden pounced--if you don't know the causes, you can't find the solutions, as he rightfully pointed out.

-Palin had a quick recovery, though. When the discussion turned to alternative energy sources, she immediately noted natural gas--conspicuously absent from Biden's list--and the Alaska pipeline, then went back on the offensive with three quick strikes: Obama/Biden's unwillingness to consider any domestic solutions, their referring to safe drilling processes as "raping" the land, and Biden's YouTube coal moment.

-The sound bite of the debate: Palin saying, "We'll know when we're finished in Iraq." I'm not quite sure which side it'll end up benefitting, but there it is.

-Biden tried to spin his vote authorizing the Iraq war as not a war vote, but as giving Bush the military option to maintain sanctions. Palin countered by invoking the outsider's view, and said flat-out that a war vote is a war vote.

-I'm not quite sure what to make of the exchange over Afghanistan. I'm not clear on what the "surge principle" Biden and Palin referred to is, and how it relates to increased troop levels and classic counterinsurgency strategy (which were both part of the surge in Iraq).

-To my surprise and delight, a close variant of the NYT's question on the role of the vice presidency was, in fact, asked, with reference to Cheney's creative interpretation. Palin argued for the flexibility of the office; Biden, by contrast, argued that the VP is exclusively an executive position, whose Constitutional powers over the Senate are ONLY to cast the tiebreaker vote.

Biden is flat-out wrong on this one. Article I, Section 3:

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The VP has voting power only in case of a tie, but his/her powers in presiding over the Senate are NOT limited to that instance. In fact, it would seem to be the exact opposite--the Constitution seems to imply that the VP's voting only in case of a tie break is a limitation on his/her powers in presiding over the Senate!

-Interesting, and disturbing, how Biden described his change in view on the fitness of judicial nominees, with explicit reference to the rejection of Robert Bork. Biden's former position is the one that Republican senators followed faithfully all the way up through the end of the last Democratic presidency, even after the spectacles of Bork and Clarence Thomas--putting Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer on the bench by votes of 97-3 and 87-9, respectively.

The GOP, apparently, was engaged in a little unilateral disarmament of their own. One hopes that if Obama is elected, they will keep this in mind.

-Snarky remark in Palin's closing statement about speaking to the American people without the filter of the MSM. For those who recall the creative editing of her interviews, this was a well-appreciated remark. For those who don't recall it...well, as I said at earlier, Palin's approach was a gamble.

-All pre-debate controversies aside, Gwen Ifill did an excellent job as moderator. No complaints whatsoever.

Overall, while Palin did a lot of meandering, she made very clear that she was changing the topic, so unlike her recent interviews, it didn't look like she didn't know what she was talking about. Biden didn't have any fatal gaffes.

Call this one a draw.

--Shack

One VP Q I'd like to see

2008-10-02T06:01:00.002-05:00

The New York Times gathered together a panel of commentators and surveyed them for questions they'd like to see at tonight's debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.

Most of the questions the NYT solicited were of the "Gotcha!" variety towards one running mate or the other, but there was one question, directed towards both of them, that I would really like to hear Palin and Biden's views on:

The claim by Dick Cheney that he was exempt from certain disclosure requirements because the vice president was a “legislative officer” has been greeted with outrage. But the main power the Constitution grants the vice president is a legislative one — breaking a tie vote in the Senate.
So, Governor Palin, Senator Biden, doesn’t Mr. Cheney have a point?
But, then, if the vice president is a legislative officer, how can he wield the vast executive powers that Mr. Cheney has exercised, including orchestrating and supervising a warrantless wiretapping program?
Can the vice president shift between branches at his convenience? If not, what, in your view, is the constitutional status of the vice presidency?
— GENE HEALY, the author of “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power”

Given Cheney's unusually prominent role as vice president in the Bush Administration, this is an extremely pertinent question, and one that gets to the heart of what Palin and Biden each see themselves doing should their tickets prevail. It's perfect for the vice presidential debate.

Meaning, of course, that there is roughly a 0.000002% chance it will be asked tonight (and that high only because it takes a swipe at the Bush Administration in passing).

--Shack

Brief thoughts on the first presidential debate

2008-09-27T08:55:00.003-05:00

In short: Obama won--big time.

Foreign policy was, by and large, a draw, with the two trading names and policies without noticeable slipups, and a considerable amount of agreement between the two (I think the McCain campaign's post-debate ad missed the point--the question about Obama isn't his leadership, so much as his judgment; the more he agrees with McCain, the less mileage McCain can get out of his main attacking point).

It was during the first part of the debate, devoted to economics, that Obama scored at the very least a solid points decision, if not an outright TKO.

Leaving aside the details of the debate, one thing came across very clearly. There was one, and only one, avenue of direct response in this debate: Obama to McCain.

Neither candidate gave anything even remotely resembling a direct answer to Jim Lehrer. McCain's responses to Obama were rambling, frequently changing the subject, almost always off the point--stump speech renditions, to be quite frank--and at times vying for a Golden Aikido award.

Obama's responses to McCain, by contrast, were direct, to the point, and covered what McCain had actually said. He had a full grasp of what McCain said, and sufficient command of the material to essentially control that portion of the debate.

McCain recovered later, to a degree--but for those critical opening minutes, Obama was fully and undisputedly in control. I expect him to get a big bump in the polls from this debate.

--Shack

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200 million

2008-09-20T18:04:00.004-05:00

Actually, scratch that. You can collect $200 million...as long as you're the right player in everyone's favorite new board game:

Obamonopoly!

(H/T: Don Surber)

--Shack

One economist for McCain

2008-09-20T05:04:00.002-05:00

Writing in the Atlantic, Armchair Economist author Steven Landsburg describes how his examination of the economic policies of John McCain and Barack Obama turned him from an undecided voter into a McCain supporter.

A couple of passages that jumped out at me:

McCain is not Bush. This came as a surprise to me. I'd been assuming, in my ill-read, uneducated way, that McCain had been complicit in most of the great travesties of the Bush administration and the execrable Republican Senate. I've learned that's largely untrue. He voted (to my great surprise!) against the prescription drug entitlement, against the Farm Security Bill, against milk subsidies, against Amtrak subsidies, and against highway subsidies.
Obama, by contrast, is in many ways a continuation of Bush. Like Bush (only far more so), Obama is fine with tariffs and subsidies. Like Bush, he wants to send jackbooted thugs into every meatpacking plant in America to rid the American workplace of anyone who happens to have been born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Like Bush, he wants a more progressive tax code. (It is one of the great myths of 21st century that the Bush tax cuts made the tax code less progressive; the opposite is true. If you are in the bottom 38% of taxpayers, you now pay zero income tax—and therefore have an incentive to support any spending bill that comes down the pike.) Like Bush, he wants more regulation, not less.
[...]

McCain gets health care right. The reason poor Americans get too little health care is that rich Americans get too much. The reason rich Americans get too much is that they're overinsured, and therefore run to the doctor for minor problems. The reason they're overinsured is that employer-provided health benefits aren't taxed, so employers overprovide them.
It has been clear for decades that the single most effective way to control health care costs is to eliminate the tax break for employer-provided health care. According to one careful study by my colleague Charles Phelps (admittedly several years old, but I'm not sure anything relevant has changed), this single reform could reduce health care costs by 40% with essentially no effect on health care outcomes.

Essential as this reform may be, I'd always assumed it was a political non-starter. I was therefore astonished to learn that it's the essence of McCain's health care reform. (At the same time, he would give each individual $2500, and each family $5000, to use for health care.)

I am astonished that I hadn't heard about this, and particularly astonished that Barack Obama hasn't thrust it in my face with a negative spin. Possibly he has and I just wasn't paying attention. In any case, this is just what the doctor ordered, and I am delighted that McCain has put it on the table.

Read the whole thing.

--Shack

Okay, this is just rich.

2008-09-16T02:43:00.002-05:00

Newsbusters highlights the case of Marketwatch columnist Jon Friedman--who got so caught up in mocking Sarah Palin's lack of knowledge about the Bush Doctrine during her interview with Charlie Gibson, he cited the wrong Bush Doctrine. (There are at least four, you might recall.)

Gloated Friedman:

Specifically, Palin seemed to have little idea about the Bush Doctrine, in which the U.S must spread democracy around the world to halt terrorist acts.

Lectured Gibson:

The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.

Whoops.

--Shack

Palin and Adams-Jefferson

2008-09-14T04:56:00.002-05:00

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward looks at an angle of the Sarah Palin nomination I don't recall having seen before. Noting that Palin received a less-than-enthusiastic reception not just from the ideologically opposed left, but also from a number of prominent commentators on the right (David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will being named), Hayward suggests that the real argument over Palin goes clear back to the Founding Fathers:

If the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are watching the storm over Palin, they must surely be revisiting their famous dialogue about America's governing class. Adams's widely misunderstood argument that there should perhaps be an explicit recognition and provision for an aristocratic class finds its reprise in the snobbery that greeted Palin's arrival on the scene. It's not just that she didn't go to Harvard; she's never been on Meet the Press; she hasn't participated in Aspen Institute seminars or attended the World Economic Forum. She hasn't been brought into the slipstream of the establishment by which we unofficially certify our highest leaders.
The issue is not whether the establishment would let such a person as Palin cross the bar into the certified political class, but whether regular citizens of this republic have the skill and ability to control the levers of government without having first joined the certified political class. But this begs an even more troublesome question: If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfit for the highest offices, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest officers through free elections?

In his reply to Adams, Jefferson expressed more confidence that political virtue and capacity for government were not the special province of a recognized aristocratic class, but that aristoi (natural aristocrats) could be found among citizens of all kinds: "It would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society." Jefferson, moreover, trusted ordinary citizens to recognize political virtue in their fellow citizens: "Leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise."

Hayward subscribes to Jefferson's view, and marshalls the examples of Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman in support.

In character, she certainly seems to share certain essentials with those two luminaries. (I'd be much more comfortable, though, if she didn't seem to share John McCain's half-panicky tendency to answer any question, no matter how simple, with rambling/pre-emptive explanations.)

--Shack

A pro-choice Sartre

2008-09-12T05:15:00.002-05:00

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the best-known atheists of the 20th century. He was also one of the most rigorously, uncompromisingly consistent of the bunch--unflinchingly following his reasoning wherever it would go, no matter how uncomfortable the conclusions.

Something similar bubbles up in a recent Salon column by Camille Paglia. The column is largely about Paglia, an Obama supporter, coming to the defense of Sarah Palin against the excesses of the left (something remarkable in and of itself); however, near the end, Paglia pauses to delineate her position on abortion--a position striking not only for its stark honesty, but for its unflinching embrace of the inhumanity at the very core of the pro-choice viewpoint:

Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

Would that Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and their ilk were so honest.

If they were, the Human Life Amendment would be enshrined in the Constitution in a matter of months.

--Shack

GOP convention thoughts

2008-09-03T23:04:00.003-05:00

I was off today, so I was able to watch the speeches live for a change. A few thoughts:

-Fox News should have been focusing more on the convention and less on itself. The talking heads of the moment went right over Mitt Romney's speech, not even paying attention to what he was saying. I had to switch over to MSNBC to actually hear Romney, and ended up staying there until the break before Giuliani came to the podium.

-While over there, I got to confirm that Olbermann is as big an idiot as ever. At the end of Mike Huckabee's speech, he immediately felt compelled to address two "factual" errors: Abraham Lincoln was not, in fact, the founder of the Republican Party, and Joe Biden did, in fact, manage to get more votes for President than Sarah Palin managed for Mayor.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

-Neither channel bothered to cover the governor of Hawaii's speech. Why?

-Rudy Giuliani was solid gold tonight. I especially liked this bit:

When Russia rolled over Georgia, John McCain knew exactly how to respond.

Having been to that part of the world many times and having developed a clear worldview over many years, John knew where he stood. Within hours, he established a very strong, informed position that let the world know exactly how he'll respond as President. At exactly the right time, John McCain said, "We're all Georgians."

Obama's first instinct was to create a moral equivalency - that "both sides" should "show restraint." The same moral equivalency that he has displayed in discussing the Palestinian Authority and the State of Israel.

Later, after discussing it with his 300 foreign policy advisors, he changed his position and suggested that the "the UN Security Council," could find a solution. Apparently, none of his 300 advisors told him that Russia has a veto on any UN action. Finally Obama put out a statement that looked ...well, it looked a lot like John McCain's.

Here's some free advice: Sen. Obama, next time just call John McCain.

(In the actual address, Giuliani noted in addition that this evolution took Obama three days.)

-Palin's speech was good, but I really, really wish she hadn't brought up the Bridge to Nowhere. She not only supported the bridge as a gubernatorial candidate, but as governor, while she killed the project, she kept the money.

This is the one major chink in her reformer's armor, and by once again bringing it up herself, she's given the media free license to zero in on it to the exclusion of all else.

It was fun watching McCain indulge in some well-earned gloating over his VP pick, though.

--Shack

Thought of the day

2008-09-02T02:32:00.002-05:00

From Paul Farhi of the Washington Post:

Is it really a weather story at all unless the TV people can go outside in the storm and, while risking bodily injury, warn viewers that they shouldn't go outside in the storm and risk bodily injury?

--Shack

What the...?!

2008-09-01T03:54:00.001-05:00

It's a coincidence. I know it's a coincidence. Still...

From today's New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Residents here who buy a gun to keep legally at home, now that the Supreme Court has overturned the city’s ban on handguns, will find that a bureaucratic maze leads them to an unmarked door on Good Hope Road Southeast where Charles W. Sykes Jr. does business.

Mr. Sykes does not sell guns, but on Tuesday he is expected to become the only federally licensed dealer in Washington to serve as the transfer agent for the carefully controlled transactions that will put guns in the hands of district residents.

Heh.

--Shack

Obama, in his own words

2008-08-28T15:22:00.003-05:00

If John McCain is smart, he'll take the last 30 or so seconds of this new web ad and turn it into a TV spot.

Breitbart.tv includes here a transcript of those last 30 seconds--Obama, before entering the Senate, discussing the possibility of running for president:

I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job. And I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I am not one of those people.

One possible tagline: "Don't take our word for it. Take his."

(...or should that be His?)

--Shack

"How can we lose to these racists?"

2008-08-23T15:02:00.002-05:00

Around this time in 2004, Charles Krauthammer penned a brilliant column comparing the panicking Democratic Party to temperamental chess genius Aaron Nimzowitsch:

Upon losing a game at the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament, Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess theoretician and a superb player, knocked the pieces off the board, jumped on the table and screamed, "How can I lose to this idiot?"
Nimzowitsch may have lived decades ago in Denmark, but he had the soul of a modern American Democrat. After all, Democrats have been saying much the same — with similar body language — ever since the erudite Adlai Stevenson lost to the syntactically challenged Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. They said it again when they lost to that supposed simpleton Ronald Reagan. Twice, would you believe? With George W. Bush, they are at it again, and equally apoplectic.

Actually, this time around, even more apoplectic. The Democrats' current disdain for George Bush reminds me of another chess master, Efim Bogoljubov, who once said, "When I am White, I win because I am White" — White moves first and therefore has a distinct advantage — "when I am Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov." John Kerry is a man of similar vanity — intellectual and moral — and that spirit thoroughly permeates the Democratic Party.

Democrats feel a mixture of horror and contempt for the huddled masses — so bovine, so benighted, so besotted with talk radio — who made a king of an empty-headed movie star (Reagan, long before Arnold) and inexplicably want the Republicans' current nitwit leader to have a second term.

(Read the whole column, when you have the time--it's a classic.)

Don't look now, but it's happening again. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg writes:

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

What gives, indeed? If you need a hint, here's the title of Weisberg's piece: Racism is the only reason Obama might lose

Yep, they're panicking.

--Shack

The Next Wright?

2008-08-11T09:31:00.003-05:00

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the credited source of the title of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, proved to be such an embarrassment that Obama was eventually forced to disavow him.

The likely source of Obama's most (in-?)famous campaign line is apparently such an embarrassment that he never even avowed her in the first place.

Over at Human Events, Fred Eckert has the lowdown on Alice Walker, author of the 2006 essay collection We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. As you might expect, she's an Obama supporter:

Obama is, she proclaims, “not perfect but humanly stunning…We look at him…and are glad to be of our species.”

However, her enthusiasm for left-type leaders doesn't stop at Obama. She's nearly as enthused about a certain individual roughly 90 miles south of Florida:

Others of our species that she goes gaga over include Fidel Castro: "What's not to like about the man?” she asks. “If Fidel could dance, he'd be perfect!"

A little closer to home, we find another of Walker's favorite people:

A segment of our species Walker seems to be especially fond of is convicted cop killers. She has more than once visited in prison one of America’s best-known cop killers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a cause celeb of the far Left. He’s “a beautiful person” and “compassionate,” she tells us, “he has a lot of light.” Besides, she has a feeling that what he was actually doing at the scene where the police officer was murdered was just “trying to help.”

The bullet extracted from the dead officer’s brain matched the five spent shells that were in the gun registered to her beautiful person/compassionate friend -- the gun he had with him at the scene, the gun he attempted to keep away from police arriving at the scene of the murder, the gun that fit into the holster he was wearing. And there was a return bullet from the police officer’s gun in his chest.

So what if a jury convicted him, so what if five eyewitnesses implicated him, so what if he subsequently screamed, “If you let me go, I’ll kill all of you cops.” So what if even the likes of Michael Moore has pronounced him guilty as charged? To the nuttiest of the Loony Left -- which includes this woman from whom Obama gets his rallying call -- this cop killer is their kind of guy.

And what overview of an Obama supporter would be complete without taking a look at her ideas of how to fix what's wrong in the world's hot spots?

Walker’s advice on how we need to deal with Osama bin Laden: 1) We need to “remind him of all the good, nonviolent things he has done,” and 2) we need to convince him to understand “the preciousness of the lives” of the people he’s killed. Of course, in the matter of preciousness of life, she is pro-abortion and has had one.

She doesn’t like religions, especially the Catholic Church. And she says the real problem in the Middle East is the Jews.

Of course, if Obama could claim that he had no knowledge of Wright's more extreme rantings--in spite of sitting in the pews every Sunday for two decades--and get away with it, it shouldn't be too hard for him to disclaim any knowledge of Walker, as well.

After all--he's already appropriated her title, and to all appearances, he never even admitted he got it from her in the first place.

He doesn't need her anymore.

--Shack

The "Left Behind" Code

2008-08-09T02:54:00.002-05:00

You can't make this stuff up.

Time's Amy Sullivan reports that Democrats are worried that John McCain's ad "The One" invokes the language and imagery of the Left Behind series of novels--and, taking the whole thing a step further, thus invites parallels between Barack Obama and Left Behind's Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia.

To what end? Apparently, stoking Evangelical opposition to Obama's campaign:

Even if a fraction of the Internet-using public engages in outrageous Antichrist speculation, feeding those extreme beliefs wouldn't seem to be an obvious political strategy. But McCain advisers are aware that one of the goals of Democratic outreach to Evangelicals has been to simply neutralize their opposition. "You just have to take the edge off," says Michigan Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer, explaining why he spent much of a 2006 meeting with conservative pastors around his state. "Now that they've met me, they can see I don't have two horns and a tail."

A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative Evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain's candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote. That's what worries Campolo, who also sits on the Democratic Party's platform committee. "Those books have created a subliminal language, and I think judgments will be made unconsciously about Barack Obama," he says. "It scares the daylights out of me."

Those diabolical Republicans! Those Manipulative Bastards!

Of course, pointing out Obama's pro-infanticide history with the Illinois equivalent of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act will do far more to put two horns and a tail on The One.

One (though not The One) hopes that McCain is merely waiting until after the Olympics to finally start going after Obama on that point.

--Shack

Zucker is coming

2008-08-05T06:05:00.002-05:00

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes reports that David Zucker, of Airplane! and Naked Gun fame (and, more recently, a certain skewering of the Iraq Study Group) has a new film coming out this fall.

The movie, a satirical look at the War on Terror titled An American Carol, thoroughly skewers the left wing:

The war on terror, of course, does not lend itself to hilarity. But Zucker knows comedy and has spent nearly four decades making people laugh. With his friend Lewis Friedman, a comedy writer, Zucker went looking for the absurd in the political left and found an abundance of material.

Zucker and Friedman poked fun of the know-nothing culture of antiwar protests. During a rally at Columbia University, students chant: "Peace Now, We Don't Care How!" Some of their protest signs are ones you'd find at any antiwar rally. Some are not. "9/11 Was an Inside Job," "Kick Army Recruiters Off Campus!" "End Violence--War Is Not the Answer!" "End Disease--Medicine Is Not the Answer!" "It's Too Dark Outside, The Sun Is Not the Answer!" "Overpopulation--Gay Marriage Is the Answer!"

Other claims were so absurd they didn't require exaggeration. "We really didn't have to do a lot of stretching," says Zucker.

When he heard Rosie O'Donnell claim that "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state," he knew he had several minutes of material.

In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O'Connell makes an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The Truth About Radical Christians. O'Reilly shows a clip, which opens with a pair of priests walking through an airport--as seen from pre-hijacking surveillance video--before boarding the airplane. Once onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of choice. Next the documentary looks at the growing phenomenon of nuns as suicide bombers, seeking 72 virgins in heaven. A dramatization shows two nuns, strapped with explosives, board a bus to the cries of the other passengers. "Oh, no! Not the Christians!" O'Connell's work ends with a warning about new threats and the particular menace of the "Episcopal suppository bomber."

The film is scheduled for release on October 3--right at the peak of the presidential campaign.

Here's hoping Zucker has better luck, politically speaking, than Michael Moore (whose pseudo-doppelganger, incidentally, is the protagonist of An American Carol) did with Farenheit 9/11 in 2004.

--Shack

Once again, the hard truths

2008-07-26T05:27:00.004-05:00

These things keep getting pointed out--and pointed out--by people who believe in global warming, no less--and they keep getting ignored in favor of lurid fantasies of Nuremberg trials for "deniers."

The latest to speak the truths that really are inconvenient is Samuel Thernstrom:

Here is a simple truth that everyone who actually cares about climate change should understand: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions costs money. Reducing them a lot will cost a lot of money. Drastically reducing them very quickly will cost vast amounts of money. And, no matter what we do, cutting them enough to stop warming without the cooperation of major developing economies such as China and India will be impossible. These facts do not mean that we should do nothing to cut emissions, by any means--but understanding these inconvenient truths must be the first step towards crafting a realistic climate policy.

...

It is relatively easy to make very modest reductions in emissions; in the short term, it is virtually impossible to cut them deeply enough and quickly enough to actually stop warming. We can save money and cut emissions by picking the low-hanging fruit--taking advantage of opportunities to eliminate waste and conserve energy. That is happening, and it will continue. But when that's done, we will still need to climb the biggest tree imaginable and pick it clean if we want to curtail warming--and that is not going to be an economical proposition in the immediate future, no matter what Gore tells you. No government policy could make it so.

...

Gore promises that switching to renewable energy sources will save us from high energy prices--conveniently ignoring that renewables cost more than the high-carbon content fuels that Gore wants to eliminate. You don't make energy cheaper by eliminating the most abundant and affordable sources of it. It is not possible to cut the cost of energy by shutting down every power plant in the country that runs on the cheapest, most abundant, domestically available fuel--coal (which generates 49 percent of our electric power)--as well as the second largest source of the same, natural gas (20 percent). Prematurely retiring more than $500 billion worth of energy infrastructure is not the key to renewed economic growth, to say the least. It couldn't be done, but if it were attempted, it would cause economic ruin. If America thinks that this is really what climate policy demands--and what it promises--it may well decide it prefers the Bush approach after all. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what happened the last time that Gore controlled climate policy.

...

If we are to have any hope at all of crafting sensible climate policy in the coming years, we must at least learn from our worst mistakes, and have a healthy respect for the risks that poor policy may entail. An important new book from one of the nation's foremost environmental economists, William Nordhaus, makes this abundantly clear. If we do nothing to halt it, global warming is likely to cause $23 trillion in damages by the end of the century. Sound policies to address it would be highly beneficial--generating as much as $3 trillion in net benefits--but poorly designed climate policies could be nearly as damaging as warming itself. Gore's proposal to cut U.S. emissions by 90 percent by 2050, Nordhaus calculates, would have a net social cost of $21 trillion--the equivalent of taking $63,000 from every person in America. The danger that climate change poses is twofold, therefore: the risk of environmental damage, and the risk of economic disaster arising from poorly designed climate policies.

Pay particular attention to those highlighted lines in the last paragraph. Gore's proposal would do nearly as much economic damage as doing nothing, in half the time (and those are damages just in the US--one can assume comparable, albeit lesser, costs elsewhere--whereas the costs of global warming above are presumably spread worldwide).

I am largely agnostic on the global warming issue (though leaning more towards the deniers in recent weeks, based on new evidence). However, I have always been of the position that anything we do about global warming must be informed by whether and how effective it would be, relative to its costs.

Token penances like carbon credits are worse than useless; they're not even being offered to someone who could really do something about the problem--instead, they merely divert attention and resources from actual solutions.

If we're going to do this, it must be done right. Doing it wrong would be just as bad as doing nothing at all...if not worse.

--Shack

Oh, brother.

2008-07-24T06:28:00.002-05:00

I'm usually not one for the Dr. Sanity style of blogging, which examines the positions of the left and then diagnoses them as manifestations of various psychological disorders.

However, in looking at Stuart Carlson's editorial cartoon in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the thought is pretty much unavoidable:

Projection much?

--Shack

There goes the greenhouse effect.

2008-07-19T05:45:00.002-05:00

Writing in The Australian, David Evans lays out a particularly devastating piece of evidence against the very core of the theory of man-made global warming:

The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.
If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming.

Which, in turn, suggests that recent global warming originated in nature, rather than in our activities...and that any reductions in carbon emissions we make--no matter how drastic--will not have a significant effect on global temperatures.

--Shack

Well, that settles that.

2008-07-18T05:23:00.002-05:00

Over at the Politico, Bruce Bartlett, in attempting to argue that there isn't much difference for conservatives between a McCain presidency and an Obama presidency, delivers possibly the single most unwittingly counterproductive statement of this entire election season thus far:

As far as Obama is concerned, he will undoubtedly nominate justices who are more liberal than those McCain would nominate. But he will be constrained by the same filibuster threat in the Senate that stymied Reagan and Bush 43. Although Republicans controlled the Senate during much of those presidencies, Democrats had great success in defeating their nominees to the court when they were viewed as too conservative. Republicans can do the same thing, arguing that Obama’s nominees are too liberal, forcing him to appoint moderates in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

I think we can all agree that pretty well sums up the case for John McCain on judges.

--Shack

An opening for McCain

2008-07-06T20:02:00.002-05:00

The Emperor has made a critical error, and the time for our attack has come. Our Bothan spies have...

...er, sorry, wrong script. Right sentiment, though.

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann report that Barack Obama's first national ad of the campaign includes a whopper of Burger King proportions:

The Obama ad, which introduces him as someone who worked his way through college, fights for American jobs, and battles for health care also seeks to move him to the center by taking credit for welfare reform in Illinois which, the ad proclaims, reduced the rolls by 80%.

But there's one problem - Obama opposed the 1996 welfare reform act at the time. The Illinois law for which he takes credit, was merely the local implementing law the state was required to pass, and it did, almost unanimously. Obama's implication -- that he backed "moving people from welfare to work" -- is just not true.

With Obama running the ad in all the swing states (Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia), this gross usurpation of credit affords the McCain campaign an incredible opportunity for rebuttal.
...
[I]f McCain calls him on his distortion, he can do grave damage to Obama on three fronts: credibility, centrism, and experience. By catching Obama in a lie, he can undermine the effectiveness of any subsequent ads the Democrat runs. By showing that he opposed welfare reform, McCain can do much to force Obama back to the left and cast doubt on his efforts to move to the middle. And by emphasizing Obama's limited experience, he can strike at a soft spot --- made softer by Hillary's attacks in the primary.

Pay particular attention to the bolded line. Obama's massive fund-raising advantage stands second only to McCain's affiliation with the Republican Party as trump cards for the Democrats this election.

If McCain can blunt that advantage, even a little, so early into the campaign, it can only be of help to him.

--Shack

McCain to hammer Obama on Born Alive

2008-06-22T05:14:00.002-05:00

It's about time.

In coming weeks, John McCain is planning to confront Barack Obama on three issues dear to conservatives’ hearts.
...
Third is Obama’s vote in 2002 as an Illinois state senator against a bill to define as a “person” a fully born baby who survived an abortion. The bill was intended to make it clear that if an abortion were botched, an infant born alive would not be killed and would receive medical care. Twice, Obama voted against various versions of the bill and twice voted “present.” The Illinois bill did not pass.
The legislation was similar to the federal Born-Alive Infants Act, which even Hillary Clinton supported in 2001. Leading abortion rights groups, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood, said they would not oppose the federal legislation.
Only 15 members of the U.S. House opposed the bill, and it passed the Senate unanimously on a voice vote. President Bush signed that bill into law in August 2002.
...
The coming major attacks on Obama over substantive issues will be by McCain himself. He will paint Obama as having extremist positions or as being out of touch with the fact that we live in a dangerous world. The attack on Obama’s born-alive abortion position could come later in the summer, a McCain aide said.

You've heard of "more Catholic than the Pope." Barack Obama is more pro-choice than NARAL--which is, if anything, even harder to fathom, let alone accomplish.

Obama is likely to respond to this attack in the same manner as he has pretty much every other criticism thus far--by dismissing it as an example of the "old" and "divisive" politics we are all called upon to transcend as we follow the Promised One into Nirvana.

It remains to be seen whether he'll get away with that, or whether Born Alive will turn into another Reverend Wright.

--Shack

(H/T: Jill Stanek, via Death Roe)

Stones and Glass Houses

2008-06-18T03:44:00.004-05:00

The Bounce hasn't happened.

Barack Obama, after finally putting Hillary Clinton away, leads John McCain in the polls by a surprisingly small amount--only six percentage points.

But, as ABC News explains, Obama knows full well what went wrong:

The poll indicates that Obama did not get the traditional "bounce" in the public's opinion by finally defeating Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and getting her endorsement as the Democratic presidential candidate.
While leading among young voters and other key demographics, ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos saw what he called "danger signs" for Obama.
In an exclusive network interview with ABC News, Obama said that his long Democratic primary battle with Clinton, which wasn't settled until early June, spared McCain critical scrutiny.
"While we were doing that, John McCain basically was getting a pass, both from the media . . . as well as from other opponents. And so I think that explains it," said Obama of the close race.
It is an ironic accusation from Obama.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have an early front-runner for Understatement of the Year.

--Shack

Bipartisan consensus, of a sort

2008-05-28T06:31:00.003-05:00

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'll leave to the reader to decide.

Charles Krauthammer, in January of '07:

First, tax gas. The president ostentatiously rolled out his 20-in-10 plan: reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. This with Rube Goldberg regulation — fuel-efficiency standards, artificially mandated levels of "renewable and alternative fuels in 2017'' and various bribes (er, incentives) for government-favored technologies — of the kind we have been trying for three decades.

Good grief. I can give you a 20-in-2: tax gas to $4 a gallon. With oil prices having fallen to $55 a barrel, now is the time. The effect of a gas-tax hike will be seen in less than two years, and you don't even have to go back to the 1970s and the subsequent radical reduction in consumption to see how. Just look at last summer. Gas prices spike to $3 — with the premium going to Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and assorted sheiks, rather than the U.S. treasury — and, presto, SUV sales plunge, the Prius is cool and car ads once again begin featuring miles per gallon ratings.

Thomas Friedman, today:

No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: guarantee people a high price of gasoline — forever.

This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving behavior and buying behavior in way that $3-a-gallon gas did not. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas guzzlers, and the price steadily crept back up to where it is today.
We must not make that mistake again. Therefore, what our mythical candidate would be proposing, argues the energy economist Philip Verleger Jr., is a “price floor” for gasoline: $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today. Washington would declare that it would never let the price fall below that level. If it does, it would increase the federal gasoline tax on a monthly basis to make up the difference between the pump price and the market price.

Again, no comment from me.

--Shack

19.5%

2008-05-20T22:06:00.003-05:00

In the 1950s, the top individual tax bracket was a whopping 91%.

America's tax revenues were roughly 19.5% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

Around 1965, the top individual tax bracket dropped to around 70%.

America's tax revenues were roughly 19.5% of the GDP.

1985--the top bracket was 50%.

America's tax revenues were roughly 19.5% of the GDP.

In the '90s, the top bracket was 40%.

America's tax revenues were roughly 19.5% of the GDP.

To summarize:

In (insert time period here), the top bracket was (insert percentage here).

America's tax revenues were roughly 19.5% of the GDP.

David Ranson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls it Hauser's Law, after the economist who first noted the post-WW II pattern 15 years ago. It's jarring, counterintuitive--and the last thing the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton want to hear:

The data show that the tax yield has been independent of marginal tax rates over this period, but tax revenue is directly proportional to GDP. So if we want to increase tax revenue, we need to increase GDP.
What happens if we instead raise tax rates? Economists of all persuasions accept that a tax rate hike will reduce GDP, in which case Hauser's Law says it will also lower tax revenue.

Gee...imagine that.

--Shack

The bottom line on Obama

2008-05-13T03:42:00.002-05:00

On July 17, 2007, Barack Obama gave a speech before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, in which he promised the following:

"[T]he first thing I’d do as president is ... sign the Freedom of Choice Act."

(HT: Christian Newswire)

This is the endgame for the pro-choice movement. FOCA is the abortion equivalent of Dred Scott v. Sandford; it would nullify any and all restrictions on abortion at any level--be it federal, state, or local--thus permanently banishing the pro-life movement from the legislative arena.

And with Obama-selected Justices packing the Supreme Court, there isn't be a snowball's chance in hell of FOCA being overturned.

An Obama victory is the final pro-abortion victory--government-sanctioned homicide, unhindered and irrevocable, on into perpetuity.

--Shack

McCain-Ryan?

2008-05-09T02:22:00.004-05:00

Over at Human Events, John Gizzi has been looking at potential running mates for John McCain in a series of columns. To my surprise, one of the candidates thus examined is our own Paul Ryan:

Earlier this year, when I asked Rep. Phil English (R-Penn.) his favorite choice for a runningmate with John McCain. “Paul Ryan,” he replied, naming his Republican colleague from Wisconsin and fellow House Ways and Means Committee Member and, in the process, giving me a jolt.

Paul Ryan? At 38 and after a decade in Congress from Wisconisn’s 1st District (Janesville-Konosha), Ryan is not exactly a “household word.” A graduate of Miami Univeristy (Ohio), Ryan worked as speechwriter for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at their “Empower America” organization, and was then legislative director for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KA). Anticipating that incumbent Rep. Mark Neumann would run for the Senate in 1998, Ryan moved back to his hometown, mobilized a campaign in which he wouild easily win nomination and electon (57% of the vote) to Congress. As a Member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, he has been a force behind tax cuts and trimming discretionary spending. Ryan (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 93%) has also been a strong booster of gunowners’ right, pro-life legislation, and tougher measures on illegal immigration.

Impressive, all right, but the first impression is not ready for presidential politics. English disagrees. As he put it, “Paul is Catholic, from the Rustbelt, and has the economic credentials Sen. McCain needs.” Other Republican backbenchers agree, and talk of Ryan-for-Veep mushrooms in the House GOP Conference.

I, for one, agree with the first impression. (I also think Gizzi should have run this column through a spell-checker.) Ryan just doesn't enjoy the national prominence that one might expect out of a VP candidate; moreover, he lacks the executive experience that McCain is going to need in a running mate--given his age, President McCain's VP would have to be someone the country trusts to take over in the White House.

It should also be pointed out that, given the prevailing anti-Republican sentiment in the country, Ryan as McCain's running mate would almost certainly mean forfeiting his House seat to a Democrat, as happened to Mark Green's seat when Green ran for governor in 2006.

(Interestingly, quite a few of the early commenters on the Gizzi column argued for my own first choice for McCain's running mate: JC Watts.)

--Shack

Don't like torture? Blame Carter.

2008-04-25T15:14:00.002-05:00

David Rivkin and Lee Casey have a piece in today's Wall Street Journal discussing the ongoing controversy over US interrogation techniques (among other things) and the more recent push to try the Bush administration's legal counsel for "war crimes."

Of particular interest, I thought:

In truth, the critics' fundamental complaint is that the Bush administration's lawyers measured international law against the U.S. Constitution and domestic statutes. They interpreted the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention forbidding torture, and customary international law, in ways that were often at odds with the prevailing view of international law professors and various activist groups. In doing so, however, they did no more than assert the right of this nation – as is the right of any sovereign nation – to interpret its own international obligations.

But that right is exactly what is denied by many international lawyers inside and outside the academy.

To the extent that international law can be made, it is made through actual state practice – whether in the form of custom, or in the manner states implement treaty obligations. In the areas relevant to the war on terror, there is precious little state practice against the U.S. position, but a very great deal of academic orthodoxy.

For more than 40 years, as part of the post World War II decolonization process, a legal orthodoxy has arisen that supports limiting the ability of nations to use robust armed force against irregular or guerilla fighters. It has also attempted to privilege such guerillas with the rights traditionally reserved to sovereign states. The U.S. has always been skeptical of these notions, and at critical points has flatly refused to be bound by these new rules. Most especially, it refused to join the 1977 Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions, involving the treatment of guerillas, from which many of the "norms" the U.S. has supposedly violated, are drawn.

Well, of course it is the Evil Republicans (TM) who are to blame for this as well, right? Certainly, no self-respecting (Secularly) Holy Democrat (TM) could have committed a Crime Against Humanity (TM) like this.

Now, which Evil Republican (TM) was president in 1977? Let's see here...

...Hmm...

...wait, it'll come to me...

--Shack

Here's an economic incentive for you.

2008-04-19T22:48:00.004-05:00

Just ran across this, and thought it was interesting, in light of the article that ran in the Journal Sentinel a couple of weeks ago questioning the economic value of Miller Park.

The Sacramento Bee recently pointed out an economic benefit from professional franchises that you don't see much press about--players on VISITING teams have to pay local and state income taxes.

The Bee article explains:

Professional athletes are required to pay income taxes in every state and city that levies them where they earned a salary during away games. That means Kings and River Cats players must file tax returns in dozens of states and several cities. In some jurisdictions, that includes practices, as well.
Each state determines taxable service performed, also known a "duty day." The nonresident income tax, which is dubbed the "jock tax," surfaced in the 1990s as a way for states to tap into the soaring paychecks of visiting professional athletes, said Ryan Losi, the executive vice president of Piascik & Associates, an accounting and financial services firm in Virginia that works with professional athletes.
Losi said many believe "jock tax" enforcement began when California taxed Michael Jordan when the Chicago Bulls beat the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 NBA Finals.
Today, taxes generated in California from visiting athletes bring in an estimated $100 million each year, according to the state tax board.

In other words--by having NBA, MLB and NFL franchises, the state of Wisconsin can collect taxes from a significant number of NBA, NFL and MLB players (particularly in the case of the NBA, where every team has at least a home-and-home series with every other team--the state can thus collect taxes from every virtually player in the league).

The taxes collected are probably not anything close to what California (with its multiple baseball, basketball, and hockey teams) generates, but given that we're still arguing over whether Miller Park was worth it--and are almost certainly going to go through the same debate in the near future about renovating/replacing the Bradley Center, lest we lose the Bucks--this is something to keep in mind.

--Shack

Bush the fiscal hawk?!

2008-04-19T21:50:00.003-05:00

Interesting little bit buried at the end of this Weekly Standard piece by Fred Barnes, which argues that President Bush is far from a lame duck:

At one time or another, every president figures out that executive orders are underrated as a tool of White House power. Certainly Bush has. (The media have yet to realize this.) Of course it's true that presidential orders can be revoked by subsequent presidents. But they usually aren't.

Earlier this year, Bush's budget office sent a letter to every federal department barring them from implementing any congressional earmarks not authorized in specific statutory language. These must get explicit White House approval.

The order covered the majority of the thousands of pork-barrel earmarks passed by Congress. Its aim is to stall the implementation of many earmarks, perhaps forever, and to kill many others. Will the next president lift this order, thus prompting more earmarks? Not likely.

Given that fiscal restraint is going to be a major part, if not the core, of John McCain's pitch on the economy this fall--and that McCain himself has long been conspicuously hostile to earmarks--it'll be interesting to see how much attention this gets...and from whom.

Any progress that President Bush makes on this front now is progress that a President McCain wouldn't be able to make in 2009--and hence, one less reason to vote for the GOP nominee. This has the potential to cut McCain off at the knees.

--Shack

x_X

2008-04-04T00:42:00.004-05:00

The subject line of this post is an emoticon.

Using any emoticons--let alone Eastern style emoticons--is not my normal practice on this blog, for reasons that should need no elaboration; still, I think in this column from the Boston Herald's Michael Graham, I have reason to make an exception.

Oh, to be a campus activist now that spring is here.

“Campus activist” is what the Boston Globe-Democrat calls the students pushing for coed dorm rooms at colleges across the country. Not just coed dorms, floors or even suites. One room, two beds, a boy and a girl.

As Dr. Frankenstein said just before he threw the switch, “What could possibly go wrong?”
More than 30 colleges and universities, including Dartmouth, Clark, Brown, and Brandeis have coed dorm room policies.
...

This movement is led by the National Student Genderblind Campaign, which insists that colleges without gender-neutral housing are “heterosexist, oppressive, and anti-affirmative.”

x_X

Just...

x_X

--Shack

...

2008-03-20T05:11:00.003-05:00

These days, Dick Morris is generally regarded as being on the right, such as it is.

Every so often, though, he'll come out and say something that reminds you that he was once one of Bill Clinton's inner circle, with all that implies--and that in those regards, he hasn't changed one bit.

The latest example comes from Morris' cynical take on the Barack Obama-Jeremiah Wright scandal:

Wright's rantings are not reflective of Obama's views on anything. Why did he stay in the church? Because he's a black Chicago politician who comes from a mixed marriage and went to Columbia and Harvard. Suspected of not being black enough or sufficiently tied to the minority community, he needed the networking opportunities Wright afforded him in his church to get elected. If he had not risen to the top of Chicago black politics, we would never have heard of him. But obviously, he can't say that. So what should he say?
He needs to get out of this mess with subtlety, the kind Bill Clinton should have used to escape the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- but didn't. As the controversy continues, Americans will gradually realize that Obama stuck by Wright as part of a need to get ahead. They will chalk up to pragmatism why he was so close to such a preacher. As they come to realize that Obama doesn't agree with Wright but used him to get started, they will be more forgiving.

Only someone who has the character to be a part of a Clinton campaign--either one of them--could regard a candidate using a preacher for political gain as something that the American people would understand, condone, or forgive.

Disgusting.

--Shack

#4 done in by fear of #2

2008-03-06T00:45:00.007-06:00

Well, it's been a couple of days.

The shock is starting to fade, and I'm getting to the point where I can accept that Brett Favre has retired and think clearly again.

(I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting there.)

In the immediate coverage following the announcement, one thing really jumped out at me--a very telling comment from the voice mail Favre left for ESPN's Chris Mortensen.

Favre talked about what the expectations for next season would have been, and that anything less than making the Super Bowl would be a disappointment. Then, he paused for a moment, and added: "And if we did that--and lost--that would almost be worse than anything."

Those are the words of experience talking.

Chalk up one last casualty from the Packers' historic choke-job to the Broncos in Super Bowl XXXII. Clearly, at some level, Favre never recovered from that debacle; and as the years passed by, and he grew older and older--and Green Bay never made it back to the Super Bowl--the scar from that wound grew more and more painful.

In retrospect, it looks like once Green Bay got to the conference championship, that was it, win or lose. If they had won it all, it would have been the perfect way to go out--on top; when they lost, the pain of falling short when they had been so close reopened that old wound...and that's what pushed Favre over the edge.

Given that, count me among those who do not expect a comeback, either with the Packers or with another team. No one could guarantee a Super Bowl win if he did, and the only team that would be a better bet than the Packers for Favre to make such a run is currently led by the second coming of Joe Montana, and would neither need nor want him.

The future has me worried, certainly. I first followed the NFL, and the Green Bay Packers, in 1989--the season of the Cardiac Kids, the season Don Majkowski became the "Majik Man"--and it likely spoiled me more than a little bit. When the Packers went back to being the Packers in '90 and '91, it hurt. It gave me a keen appreciation for what a fluke that '89 season was--and all the more appreciation for what we had when Favre appeared on the scene and put those days behind us for at least 16 years.

Still, the future looks much brighter than it did two years ago. Favre knew what he was talking about when he called the 2006 Packers the most talented team he'd ever played with; he had his best supporting cast at the very end, and if Ron Wolf had drafted the way Ted Thompson has, there's little doubt in my mind that Favre would have had more than just the one ring.

If Aaron Rodgers can stay healthy--and that's a big If, considering that in the last two seasons, AS A BACKUP, he's suffered two season-ending injuries (one of them in practice, for Pete's sake!)--then the Packers can, I think, compete and win.

Maybe not win it all--not without exceptional seasons on several fronts--but that's the condition of most NFL teams, year in and year out.

And that's one more way Favre spoiled us.

--Shack

Same old, same old?

2008-03-02T17:36:00.004-06:00

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Jonathan Last sees something disturbingly familiar in what he's been hearing from the campaign trail these days:

A Democratic line is emerging about Sen. John McCain that is voiced daily by Sen. Obama (and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) in the presidential campaign.

"Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for 100 years in Iraq," Obama says, "which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House." Or more directly, as Obama told a Houston audience, McCain "says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq."

Obama's claims are, at best, deliberately misleading. At worst, they are the type of politics-as-usual distortion that the Illinois senator usually decries. No one, in politics or the media, who voices the "100 years" canard is being fair-minded. So let's put it to rest now, once and for all:

On Jan. 3 in Derry, N.H., a voter prefaced a question to McCain by saying, "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years . . ." Here, McCain cut him off, interjecting, "Make it a hundred."

The voter tried to continue his question, but McCain pressed on: "We've been in . . . Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It's fine with me, I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training, equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day."

McCain's analysis is, objectively speaking, exactly correct. Throughout history, U.S. troops have remained in the field long after the conclusion of successful wars.

Note, of course, the key words there: Successful wars. Obama is by far the candidate most closely wed to the idea that Iraq is an irredeemable disaster (though Hillary Clinton has been doing her best to imitate that pose since the war there went bad) and thus, his vehement disagreement with the effect--100 years of troops in Iraq--should hardly be a surprise, since he also vehemently disagrees with the cause--victory in Iraq.

The real question here is whether Obama is:

so narrow-minded that he cannot even imagine a reasonable person seeking victory in Iraq, with the ensuing effects

...or....

trying to entrap McCain with a campaign equivalent of the infamous courtroom question: "When did you stop beating your wife?"

In either case, Last comes to the proper conclusion:

McCain's "100 years" is not a commitment to "100 years of war," as Obama claims. It is simply another sign of McCain's seriousness and understanding of the realities of foreign affairs in general and Iraq in particular.

Obama's distortion of this remark, however, is the first sign that he may not be a serious-minded candidate.

Taken a step further--this calls into question Obama's lofty claims of running a higher campaign...which in turn calls into question Obama's lofty claims of "bringing the country together."

And said claims, as we all know, are the hallmark, trump card, and primary (sole?) selling point of his campaign.

--Shack

How NOT to beat Barack Obama

2008-02-21T01:31:00.002-06:00

Given the distinct contrast in their biographies, there will undoubtedly be a great temptation for John McCain to challenge Barack Obama on the question of character and experience. It would seem to play to McCain's strengths, and to Obama's weaknesses.

Just one problem: that's what Hillary Clinton tried. Michael Medved explains:

With his unexpectedly decisive landslide victory in Wisconsin, Barack Obama has solidified his status as the Democratic frontrunner. His success owes less to his own political strategy than it does to a fatal mistake by Hillary Clinton. At the beginning of her campaign, Clinton made a decision to avoid an ideological battle with her rival and decided to frame the race as a choice between “experience” and “charisma,” between “work” and “words.” In other words she decided to fight Obama on personality, rather than the issues, and in terms of a compelling, appealing personality, Obama obviously wins. Clinton could have won an issues election – mobilizing the broad middle of the Democratic Party and leaving Obama to run to her left. She could have criticized him for preaching surrender on the war, for minimizing the reality of the terrorist threat, for calling unequivocally for big government and higher taxes, for rejecting the free trade heritage of Clintonism. Instead, she insisted that she and her opponent hardly differed on the issues, and it was only a question of who is better “prepared to take over as commander-in-chief from day one.” By emphasizing my “thirty-five years of work fighting for change” Hillary not only made herself sound older, but high-lighted the meaningless, trivial nature of the change she sought and, allegedly, achieved: most Democrats don’t like the results of the last thirty-five years of government policy.

...

John McCain needs to learn the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign. If he tries to emphasize his obviously superior experience and preparation for the job, he’ll lose in a landslide. Obama can easily characterize him as “yesterday’s man” (as he did in his victory speech on Tuesday night) and emphasize his opponent’s advanced age by “graciously” saluting his “fifty years of service.” He thereby makes the point that he himself isn’t even fifty years old, confirming his vacuous declaration that “we are the change that we’ve been waiting for.”

Beyond that, as George Will points out, history provides a particularly devastating comparison of Veteran vs. Novice in the presidency:

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to the rank as America's worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.

Ouch.

--Shack

VP wishlist

2008-02-15T00:21:00.002-06:00

Over at The American Spectator, Quin Hillyer is pondering what all-but-certain GOP nominee John McCain should be looking for in a running mate. In short:

McCain needs a solidly "full-spectrum" conservative, reformist, youngish, cool, well-rounded, brainy, all-media-respected, articulate, telegenic, border-state/constituency-challenging, non-party-weakening, executive-experienced, running mate who can handle the presidency at a moment's notice.

Hillyer says he can think of several potential running mates who might fit that description; he puts off naming them until later, though (which makes sense, from a productive standpoint--there's at least one full column right there, and probably more).

In the meantime, though, Patrick McIlheran and James T. Harris have stumbled onto someone who fits pretty much all of the above criteria, and then some.

Works for me.

--Shack

The "Keystone Cops" Campaigns of 2008

2008-01-31T14:49:00.000-06:00

Michael Barone, in a very interesting piece, takes a look at the chaos of this 2008 presidential campaign and comes to a startling conclusion: Without exception, the strategies of every major candidate--Republican and Democrat, including both current front-runners--all failed.

Every single one of them was a flop (which is the only reason McCain, for one, is even still in the race, let alone being the putative GOP front-runner).

Given how many other areas of American life this past year have been in a similarly chaotic state, it seems somehow fitting that the presidential campaign would follow suit.

Not confidence-inducing, true--but fitting, nonetheless.

--Shack

Winning by losing?

2008-01-23T12:41:00.000-06:00

Dick Morris, who certainly can claim to know a thing or two about how devious the Clinton political machine is, unveils what he claims is Hillary's master plan for securing the Democratic nomination: Losing South Carolina to Barack Obama.

Morris elaborates:

By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama's, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue.

Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle. Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he's going to lose?

Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama's ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It's one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don't read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.

Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race -- and Obama ultimately loses.

Playing the race card while not playing the race card? That seems more than a little cynical and convoluted, even in this race.

Still, if there's a pair of politicians capable of pulling this off--and by that, I mean not just having the skill to execute it, but having the lack of conscience to actually go through with it--it's the Clintons.

--Shack

1,251,921

2008-01-22T12:29:00.001-06:00

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court's determination that a right to privacy trumps a right to life through the first three months of pregnancy.

It is also the 35th anniversary of Doe v. Bolton, Roe's companion case. The 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court's determination that even after the first three months--indeed, all the way up to the very end of the pregnancy--an unborn child may be slaughtered under the most utterly flimsy of pretenses: the widest possible definition of the mother's "health," as determined by the only doctor who need be involved in the decision...the abortionist.

I am vehemently pro-life. It is, in my eyes, the most important domestic issue--the most important human rights issue--facing this country today. I have long been involved in the fight against abortion on various levels.

I am also a man.

And, as such--as I have been told repeatedly, vehemently, often in terms I would prefer not to use on this blog--I have no right to have any say on this issue. I am not a woman; I cannot get pregnant; I can't even claim the prerogative of a father (even though that prerogative is itself routinely denigrated and denied).

Therefore, I am told, it is none of my business.

I beg to differ.

There's a link to the right of this post. It reads, "My Axe." Clicking on that link will take you to a site called Death Roe Survivors. It is a site by and for the lucky ones.

The ones born after 1973.

The ones who could have been snuffed out in the womb without any legal repercussions--but weren't.

The ones who are here only by the grace of their mothers, who chose to carry them to term.

I am one of the lucky ones.

I was born in 1979.

According to the CDC, there were 1,251,921 abortions in the United States that year.

1,251,921 unlucky ones.

1,251,921 of my immediate peers.

I repeat: 1,251,921 OF MY IMMEDIATE PEERS.

Taken together with live birth statistics, a little over 26% of pregnancies that year (excluding those that ended in miscarriage) ended in abortion.

My generation has been decimated. A little more than one in four of MY OWN PEOPLE were sacrificed in the bloody name of "Choice," their very HUMANITY denied. Had my mother decided differently, I would have been one of them.

None of my business? No right to interfere?

I have EVERY right to interfere. A wrong has been done to me and mine that can never be fully repaid, that continues to be visited on each succeeding generation after us.

All I can do is see that it comes to an end. That it MUST come to an end. I owe it to all those who weren't as fortunate as I was.

On this 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, I have 1,251,921 reminders of why I continue to fight.

--Shack

From one Times to another

2008-01-17T13:59:00.000-06:00

With regards to new columnist Bill Kristol, the Comment Editor of the one in London suggests, to my great amusement, that readers (and the ombudsman) of the one in New York get a grip.

He'd have better luck telling the sun to rise in the west.

--Shack

3/5 there

2008-01-16T20:56:00.000-06:00

Huckabee took Iowa.

McCain took New Hampshire.

Romney took Michigan.

All we need now is for Thompson to take South Carolina and Giuliani to take Florida, and the GOP will be well on its way to a brokered convention nightmare.

--Shack

GOP disses

2008-01-03T03:52:00.000-06:00

National Review's Richard Brookhiser, unlike me, supports Rudy Giuliani, Planned Parenthood's dream candidate for the Republican nomination. I don't think much of the reasons he gives for supporting Giuliani; however, that doesn't stop me from being amused by some of his observations about Giuliani's opposition in the primaries (even when I don't agree with said observations):

Fred Thompson: "The most damning thing anyone has said about Thompson was said by Thompson himself to Byron York, who asked him what his greatest achievements in the Senate were. Thompson talked about the accomplishments of the GOP majority during his Senate years. It is pretty sad when a veteran of the talk palace of the Senate can only take cover among his colleagues."

John McCain: "During one of Frederick the Great’s battles, a general told him as their charge faltered, 'Your majesty and I cannot take the enemy’s position all by ourselves.' But that is McCain’s preferred tactic."

Mitt Romney: "Mitt Romney has been bedeviled throughout the race by the nail-polish glaze of phoniness. It is a glaze, and there is a real Romney underneath it. That man consists of his religion, which he defends eloquently; his ambition to follow in his father’s footsteps, and to succeed where he failed; and his confidence in his own intelligence and talents. Political principles are not part of the mix and have been adopted to suit circumstances."

Mike Huckabee (aka Bush 3.0, aka Quayle v.2, aka The New Jimmy Carter): "Huckabee’s faux-naïve riff on Romney’s Mormonism and the siblings of Lucifer was slick, vulgar, and depraved — the image of the man who uttered it."

Ron Paul: "Ron Paul is a 72-year-old 20-year-old."

I am, I think, leaning towards Thompson, with McCain as my second choice.

All the same, though, I'm guiltily relieved that the nomination will probably have been wrapped up before Wisconsin goes to the polls this time around.

--Shack

More recognition...

2007-12-19T04:39:00.000-06:00

...of Mike Huckabee as Bush 3.0--this time from National Review's Jonah Goldberg (who doesn't regard this as a good thing).

--Shack

A primary debate ideal

2007-12-15T04:10:00.000-06:00

Don Surber, disgusted with the final Iowa debates--and especially with the final Iowa debates' moderator--lays out the kind of primary debate he'd like to see:

Give them one question and 5 minutes to answer. Have each answer it. Allow a 2-minute rebuttal. For 8 candidates, that would take an hour. Then allow re-rebuttals, ad infinitum. Cable TV news is not so inflexible that it cannot give these guys 2 hours, 3 hours, till the cows come home hours.

Give them the question in advance so they can answer precisely how they feel.

Let them take potshots at one another.

Let them say whatever they want.

Then, when they are finished, politely thank them for their time.

Quit having the tail try to wag the damned dog.

Seconded.

--Shack

Reiteration: Cheating? In BASEBALL?

2007-12-15T00:12:00.000-06:00

I originally posted this back in May; my thoughts haven't changed since then, so with the fallout from the Mitchell report in full swing, this seems like a good time for a repost:

Now, there are plenty of excellent reasons to denounce steroid use in baseball: it's bad for the players' health, it's a terrible example for youth, etc.

What I've heard more than enough of, though, is that steroids in baseball are bad because it's "cheating," and that impugns the "integrity of the game" and its hallowed statistics.

With any other sport, people might have a point.

But this is baseball.

This is the sport of sign-stealing, spitballs, corked bats, doctored balls, planted balls, midget batters, beanballs, fast/slow home fields, mind games, and every other dirty trick you could possibly think of and/or get away with.

When it comes to baseball, the rule is that if you can get away with it, more power to you. Cheaters aren't denounced because they cheated; they're denounced because they got caught.

What's the problem people have with steroids in baseball? If you ask me, it's because it's too easy to do. It doesn't take skill to use steroids--and that sets steroids apart from pretty much every other dirty trick in the history of the sport.

If sportswriters want to denounce steroid users for grabbing an easy/cheap advantage over the opposition, more power to them. But they shouldn't pretend that they're upholding the integrity of a game that has thrived for more than a century on finding ways to break the rules.

And those are my first and last words on the subject.

They remain my first and last words on the subject.

--Shack

Moderator smackdown

2007-12-13T04:54:00.000-06:00

Ronald Reagan.

Fred Thompson.

Just saying.

--Shack

Bush 3.0 = "Easy kill"

2007-12-12T00:09:00.000-06:00

A couple of months ago, when Mike Huckabee was just beginning to emerge as a serious contender for the GOP nomination, I took a look at him and came to the conclusion that he was, in essence, candidate George W. Bush, circa 2000--just with updated labels. At the time, I dubbed Huckabee "Bush 3.0" and, on that basis, concluded that he would be slaughtered if he managed to make it to the general election.

It looks like the Democratic National Committee agrees with me.

Drudge reports:

Democrat party officials are avoiding any and all criticism of Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee, insiders reveal.

The Democratic National Committee has told staffers to hold all fire, until he secures the party's nomination.

The directive has come down from the highest levels within the party, according to a top source.

Within the DNC, Huckabee is known as the "glass jaw -- and they're just waiting to break it."

In the last three weeks since Huckabee's surge kicked in, the DNC hasn't released a single press release criticizing his rising candidacy.

The last DNC press release critical of Huckabee appeared back on March 2nd.

[DNC Press Release Attack Summary:

Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) – 37% (99 press releases)
Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NY) – 28% (74)
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) – 24% (64)
Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) – 8% (20)
Governor Mike Huckabee – 2% (4)]

In fact, as the story broke over the weekend that Huckabee said he wanted to isolate AIDS patients back in 1992, the DNC ignored the opportunity to slam the candidate from the left.

"He'll easily be their McGovern, an easy kill," mocked one senior Democrat operative Tuesday morning from Washington.

"His letting out murderers because they shout 'Jesus', his wanting to put 300,000 AIDS patients and Magic Johnson into isolation, ain't even scratching the surface of what we've got on him."

Regardless of how well he does in Iowa, I don't think there's much of a chance of Huckabee winning the nomination. However, he's someone that a Rudy Giuliani, for example, might seriously consider as a running mate, because of his regional and issue appeal.

In which case the appropriate label might not be "Bush 3.0," but "Quayle version 2."

--Shack

Rudy's priest problem

2007-11-28T07:00:00.000-06:00

No, not the one about how they should be denying him Communion--I mean the one about how he has a priest who happens to be an alleged sexual abuser for an adviser.

InsideCatholic.com columnist Deal Hudson assesses the potential scandal of Giuliani's association with Monsignor Alan Placa:

Although the relationship between Placa and Giuliani has been widely reported, it has yet to become an issue in Giuliani's presidential run. Could it be that Giuliani's capacity for loyalty to an old friend is more important to voters, particularly Catholic voters, than anything else?

The suspension of Placa's priestly duties has now reached the five-year point, far beyond the norm in such cases. Will Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre remove Placa's priestly faculties during the presidential campaign? That would be both an embarrassment for Giuliani and an implicit admission by the diocese that the case against the monsignor was serious. Of course, given Giuliani's legendary influence in the New York metropolitan area, Placa's faculties are not likely to be removed before the election.

If Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee, his pro-abortion view is not likely to be the only issue troubling to Catholic voters. Catholics in the United States have just passed through the most tumultuous period in their history since the public school riots of the mid-19th century. Catholics want to put the sex abuse crisis behind them -- and a Giuliani nomination will keep the name of Msgr. Alan J. Placa in the headlines. It will become widely known that Placa stands accused of abuse, but perhaps more importantly, he stands accused of preventing and delaying "the discovery of criminal abuse by priests."

This hardly comports with Giuliani's law-and-order image, and it will not help him to convince Catholics to trust his judgment as the future leader of our nation.

If it's not an issue now, you can be darned well sure that, should Giuliani somehow win the nomination, Hillary Clinton will make it an issue.

And that makes it one more big hole in Giuliani's case for the GOP to abandon its principles simply because he's "electable."

--Shack

Taking Blackmun at his word

2007-11-14T17:54:00.000-06:00

WorldNetDaily reports that Colorado is moving forward with a voter initiative to declare that the unborn are persons from fertilization onward. (H/T Dad29)

This takes advantage of Justice Harry Blackmun's observation in Roe v. Wade that, if the unborn is found to be a person, he or she would then have a right to life specifically guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. (Blackmun then used an argument from silence to conclude that the Fourteenth Amendment didn't cover the unborn.)

It must be said that it's about time. The pro-life movement has been on its heels on the core of the issue for far too long.

It must also be said, though, that there is no chance whatsoever of this passing. South Dakota, a far more conservative state than Colorado, couldn't get a less comprehensive abortion ban through its voters.

And note the reason that I call South Dakota's ban less comprehensive: by guaranteeing personhood at fertilization, the Colorado initiative bans not only abortion, but all embryonic stem cell research--public and private--as well. In the present political and cultural climate, once that fact is pointed out--and it will be--the measure is doomed.

It must further be said that I am acting much like Democrats were in the impeachment fiasco last week--I'd be far less supportive of this if I thought it actually had a chance of passing.

Why? Because it's too soon. If this did pass, it would be challenged in court. It would go to the US Supreme Court. And barring the 2008 election of a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a quick retirement of one of the Court's liberal justices, what you would almost certainly see is the Court, by a 5-4 vote, offering a Dred Scott for abortion--closing Blackmun's Roe loophole, and definitively declaring that the unborn are not and cannot be persons.

That would effectively close off the courts. The Human Life Amendment would be the only arrow left in the pro-life movement's quiver--and that has no chance of passing while this generation is ascendant.

We're only going to get one shot at this. If we blow it, it'll be decades before we get this close again.

--Shack

Thank you, Ma'am. May we have another?

2007-11-14T02:53:00.000-06:00

The New Republic examines Hillary Clinton's love-hate relationship with the media. To put it briefly, the media does the loving, and Hillary does the hating:

Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. "It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them," says a veteran Democratic media operative. The media has paved a smooth road for signature campaign moments like Hillary's campaign launch and her health care plan rollout and has dutifully advanced campaign-promoted themes like Hillary's "experience" and expertise in military affairs.

Charlie Sykes suggests, somewhat facetiously, that this is an example of Stockholm Syndrome. Looking deeper, though, Michael Crowley raises an excellent point a little later in the article:

It's enough to make you suspect that breeding fear and paranoia within the press corps is itself part of the Clinton campaign's strategy. And, if that sounds familiar, it may be because the Clinton machine, say reporters and pro-Hillary Democrats, is emulating nothing less than the model of the Bush White House, which has treated the press with thinly veiled contempt and minimal cooperation. "The Bush administration changed the rules," as one scribe puts it--and the Clintonites like the way they look.

To say that the media has not rewarded the Bush administration's treatment of reporters with favorable coverage would have to merit one consideration for understatement of the year, if not decade. So this naturally raises the question: Why is the media bending over for Hillary?

TNR being TNR, the article doesn't even bother to try to answer the question (though given TNR's readership, Crowley may have assumed the answer to be a given).

For the rest of us, it should give some inkling of just how badly the mainstream media wants a Democrat in the White House--with Hillary the Inevitable (TM) being their first choice.

--Shack

Dismantling a "religious" dismissal

2007-11-05T02:29:00.000-06:00

On Sunday, the LA Times published a column by Garry Wills titled, "Abortion isn't a religious issue." The statement made by the title is true.

It is also just about the last true thing in the column, which was almost a laundry list of some of the pro-choice movement's most popular, most deceptive, and most deeply flawed arguments.

What makes opposition to abortion the issue it is for each of the GOP presidential candidates is the fact that it is the ultimate "wedge issue" -- it is nonnegotiable. The right-to-life people hold that it is as strong a point of religion as any can be. It is religious because the Sixth Commandment (or the Fifth by Catholic count) says, "Thou shalt not kill." For evangelical Christians, in general, abortion is murder. That is why what others think, what polls say, what looks practical does not matter for them. One must oppose murder, however much rancor or controversy may ensue.

I always get a good chuckle whenever I hear someone claim that opposition to abortion is and must be religious in nature. The most vehement pro-lifer I've ever encountered was an outspoken atheist--a transvestite, no less--whose vicious verbal assaults upon those who were pro-choice were matched only by his attacks against religion. (Now that I think on it, the split contempt reminds me a great deal of Christopher Hitchens, though with regards to Iraq rather than abortion.)

Of course, anecdotal evidence like this and a quarter won't even get me a phone call, if there are any phone booths left. So, for the moment, let's just point out that Wills is conflating the contention that abortion is murder with the religiously-fueled obligation to oppose that murder--the latter is the genuine article, and its role is virtually identical to that of religious involvement/leadership in the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.

But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

Actually, the parallel is not only valid, it's precise. People in Germany thought it was all right to kill a Jew because, in their opinion, they weren't killing a person--they were killing something less than a person, something inferior.

Note also the sly implication that the "evangelical community" would call for the mother's ~~stoning~~ execution. Leaving aside the heated controversy over capital punishment, where Wills mistakenly believes there to be monolithic consensus--it's widely recognized by the pro-life movement, religious and irreligious alike, that in an abortion, the mother is at least as much a victim as she is a perpetrator.

The central criminal in an abortion is the abortionist. There lies the brunt of the responsibility.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

Wills is exactly right about the hard answer: there are no legitimate exceptions for rape or incest (one of the few things he's right about). But I have to say--only 10%? A higher percentage of evangelicals voted for John Kerry in 2004!

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder.

This is ridiculous. Wills would seriously have you believe that the Catholic Church baptizes corpses?! What in the world does he think baptism is for?

The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

(emphasis mine) Chapter 2 of the Didache (circa AD 100) says "Hi."

Lacking scriptural guidance, St. Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle's view of the different kinds of animation -- the nutritive (vegetable) soul, the sensing (animal) soul and the intellectual soul. Some people used Aristotle to say that humans therefore have three souls. Others said that the intellectual soul is created by human semen.

Aquinas denied both positions. He said that a material cause (semen) cannot cause a spiritual product. The intellectual soul (personhood) is directly created by God "at the end of human generation." This intellectual soul supplants what had preceded it (nutritive and sensory animation). So Aquinas denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation.

Wills devotes considerable attention to Aquinas' musings--musings based on Aristotle, the best source Aquinas had to work with, but a source which has been almost completely replaced in the present--with the apparent sneering implication that this is the basis for pro-life opposition to abortion today.

Much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception -- that it is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion.

A rehashing of Wills' false conflation of the two aspects of the pro-life case from the start of the column.

Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.

John Henry Newman, a 19th century Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, once wrote that "the pope, who comes of revelation, has no jurisdiction over nature." The matter must be decided by individual conscience, not by religious fiat. As Newman said: "I shall drink to the pope, if you please -- still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterward."

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise, not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer -- they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.

Wills only wishes that the pro-life movement wants to avoid reason and science. By any objective, quantifiable, testable measurement, there is no difference between a human being before or after birth, save age and appearance.

It's only when you introduce subjective, unreliable, unverifiable, qualitative standards that you can find differences of opinion, that you can find any uncertainty on the question at all. And into whose province do these decidedly "non-Enlightened" prejudices fall?

Philosophers--whom Wills proclaims to be "relevant experts," alongside neurobiologists and embryologists.

"One of these things is not like the other...one of these things just doesn't belong..."

So evangelicals take shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot be indiscriminately pro-life.

If one claimed, in the manner of Albert Schweitzer, that all life deserved moral respect, then plants have rights, and it might turn out that we would have little if anything to eat. And if one were consistently pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia, insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells, asparagus and so on. Harvesting carrots, on a consistent pro-life hypothesis, would constitute something of a massacre.

Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. They are both human products, and both are living things. But not even evangelicals say that the destruction of one or the other would be murder.

There are only two charitable interpretations of the above, an appallingly common pro-choice argument: Either Wills has forgotten everything he learned in Biology 101, or he flunked that class.

The semen and the ovum are haploid sex cells. They are recognizably part of their source organisms. They are incapable of growth or metabolism or adaptation. They have a single, specific function--to merge with their gender counterparts. If that function is not met within a very short timeframe, then the cells will die.

The newly fertilized human being, by contrast, is a diploid cell. He/she (and yes, he/she already has a gender at this point) possesses a unique genetic code, recognizably distinct from both father and mother, and a distinct genetic blueprint. He/she is capable of metabolism and growth--has in fact already begun to grow--and barring outside interference, will continue to grow and develop along the lines of that blueprint.

Equating these, as Wills and far too many pro-choicers do, is an exercise in pure ignorance. The only question is whether that ignorance is deliberate.

Defenders of the fetus say that life begins only after the semen fertilizes the egg, producing an embryo. But, in fact, two-thirds of the embryos produced this way fail to live on because they do not embed in the womb wall. Nature is like fertilization clinics -- it produces more embryos than are actually used. Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

Time for another hard answer: YES. They die in mass numbers, without anyone even knowing they were there--but in every quantifiable way, they differ from us only in age and appearance.

The universal mandate to preserve "human life" makes no sense. My hair is human life -- it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows. When it grows too long, I have it cut. Is that aborting human life? The same with my growing human fingernails. An evangelical might respond that my hair does not have the potential to become a person. True. But semen has the potential to become a person, and we do not preserve every bit of semen that is ejaculated but never fertilizes an egg.

A rehashing of the idiotic "every sperm is a person" argument from above, with a little wrinkle added in: the "potential person," the all-purpose pro-choice fallback. Can't answer a pro-life argument? No worries. "It's only a potential person. Why? Because I said so!"

And even more insultingly, he puts "potential person" in the mouth of the pro-lifer!

The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul.

Back to the philosophers, and their subjective standards--which, we are to understand, work for them, and so cannot be challenged in any way. Wills sneakily lumps Aquinas in with these, thus trying to imply that pro-lifers' standards are based on these same, "works-for-them" standards.

Note the line of thought here. Wills isn't looking for the beginning of personhood, with the idea that it's to be protected and cherished from there on out. He's looking for a beginning of personhood so that any human beings before that stage can be relegated to subhuman status, and killed freely.

A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.

Not surprisingly, that is the earliest point of viability, the time when a fetus can successfully survive outside the womb.

The fact that six months is currently the earliest point of viability has less to do with the development of the brain and more to do with current medical technology. As the science advances, that viability point is going to keep being pushed further and further back--and, conversely, in places where that medical technology is not available, the point of viability is much later than six months.

Whether through serendipity or through some sort of causal connection, it now seems that the onset of a functioning central nervous system with a functioning cerebral cortex and the onset of viability occur around the same time -- the end of the second trimester, a time by which 99% of all abortions have already occurred.

Opponents of abortion like to show sonograms of the fetus reacting to stimuli. But all living cells have electric and automatic reactions. These are like the reactions of Terri Schiavo when she was in a permanent vegetative state. Aquinas, following Aristotle, called the early stage of fetal development vegetative life. The fetus has a face long before it has a brain. It has animation before it has a command center to be aware of its movements or to experience any reaction as pain.

Wills invoking Schiavo is instructive, because it follows logically--if these things that the philosophers decide constitute personhood emerge at some point, then they also deteriorate at some point--and at that point, even if you're still alive, you're not a person anymore.

These are difficult matters, on which qualified people differ. It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her, not just a fetus. Certainly by the late stages of her pregnancy, a child is ready to respond with miraculous celerity to all the personal interchanges with the mother that show a brain in great working order.

Given these uncertainties, who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious leaders? They have no special authority in the matter, which is not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority is given by the people it represents, and the people are divided on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest to the decision. Under Roe vs. Wade, no woman is forced to have an abortion. But those who have decided to have one are able to.

(emphasis mine) This is the pro-choice case in a nutshell: ABSOLUTE POWER.

The power for a person to bestow personhood upon another living human being--or to deny personhood to another living human being--and to act accordingly.

It's hardly surprising that "qualified people" differ over this; the last time the United States struggled with a question of absolute power, so many "qualified people" differed that it took a Civil War to finally settle the matter.

The answer we came to in 1865 was a resounding "NO." No one has absolute power over another human being.

NO ONE.

That wasn't a religious issue, either.

--Shack

Fear of Giuliani

2007-10-31T07:07:00.000-05:00

One of the dominant storylines of the GOP presidential campaign thus far has been the standoff between social conservatives and front-runner Rudy Giuliani. Every motive/explanation under the sun has been ascribed to the hostility of James Dobson et al to Giuliani--immaturity, selfishness, short-sightedness...rarely examined has been the Politico's latest stab at an answer: Fear.

Fear, the Politico suggests, that a pro-choice nomination will permanently cripple the power that social conservatives have in the party in the future.

It gets close...but still not close enough. Fear, yes--but a far more fundamental fear.

The Republican Party is pro-life for one reason, and one reason only: because the Democratic Party is pro-choice. Opposing the donkey is the only virtue the GOP sees in it; it is a position party "moderates" can and do discard at the drop of a hat.

If party leadership believed they could gain more votes by adopting a pro-choice stance than they would lose by jettisoning their pro-life stance, they would do so in a heartbeat--and the pro-choice wing of the party has been urging Republicans to jettison away from almost the second the GOP adopted a pro-life platform.

A Giuliani nomination/presidency will very likely trigger just that.

That is the nightmare scenario that is prompting social conservatives to threaten to pre-emptively shatter the Republican coalition: a two-party system with two pro-choice parties.

--Shack

"Realism"

2007-10-28T22:13:00.000-05:00

Victor David Hanson once again makes a point that, particularly in this political environment reflexively opposed to all things Bush, can't be made often enough:

Neoconservatism is slandered as messianic and dangerous in its advocacy of democratic reform. Are we then to revert to amoral realism that tolerated Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or winked as the House of Saud funded madrassas that empowered global jihad? Or should we treat terrorism as a “criminal justice” matter? We did that serially in the 1990s, from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS Cole — and earned 9/11 as the logical outcome of such appeasement.

This isn't just slamming the foreign policy of the Clinton administration. It's also slamming the foreign policy of the first Bush administration, and of the sainted Reagan administration before it--and rightly so in all cases, because they are in large part responsible for what confronts us in the Middle East today.

We created this mess. We created it long before W-The-Antichrist (TM) came into office. We have a responsibility to fix it--a responsibility not only to the security of our own country, but to the people of that region.

And a laissez-faire foreign policy--or a laissez-UN foreign policy, for that matter--is not going to get the job done.

--Shack

Abortion ruminations

2007-10-27T16:23:00.000-05:00

Charles Moore has a thought-provoking column in the Telegraph on how abortion is viewed and defended in this age, which he compares to slavery 200 years ago. He makes some fascinating points, but I am not as sure about the inevitability of abortion being rejected in the future as Moore is.

This is largely because he compares it to what he sees as the inevitability of slavery being rejected. What I think Moore fails to see is how radical the movement to end slavery really was, and how unprecedented its success. Slavery was about as close to a universal institution as you could get--present virtually everywhere, in virtually every time, since the dawn of recorded history.

There's something undeniably naive about believing, in the face of all the history behind it, that civilization's rejection of slavery was inevitable in any sense of the word.

Likewise with abortion. The technology necessary for surgical abortions was not developed until the late 18th century; however, chemical abortions and infanticide by exposure have both been a constant presence since before the time of Christ.

And unlike slavery, where its ban was preceded by restrictions, in the case of abortion the trend has been in the exact opposite direction--the practice has been granted, in increasing measure, the sanction and blessing of governments throughout the world.

Can it be done? Yes, I think it can. Moore has it right in that the pro-life movement's most powerful allies (outside of God, for the religiously inclined) are science and technology, which are not only making it possible for the unborn to survive outside of the womb at an ever earlier age but are also making it ever clearer just how human those "blobs of tissue" really are. These allies will grow still stronger in the future.

But it serves no one to make light of just how massive a challenge this really is. As was the case with slavery, the pro-life movement is squaring off against history itself, seeking a break with the past every bit as radical and unprecedented as abolition was.

The pro-life movement may well succeed, but that success is far from inevitable--and only a fool would wager on a timeframe.

--Shack

Reductio ad Ahmadinejad

2007-10-23T05:55:00.000-05:00

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria makes an excellent point, then immediately forgets he ever made it:

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

Leaving aside quibbles about the reliability of the CIA's intelligence, the logical conclusion to draw from all this would be that the person you really need to worry about with regard to Iran is Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad.

Instead, though, Zakaria spends his column expounding on why Ahmadinejad is really not so bad, how Iran hasn't invaded anyone for over 200 years--which is SUCH a comfort when the actions we're worried about Iran taking don't involve invasion at all--and so forth.

I do agree that there's a tendency on the part of many to overemphasize the importance of Ahmadinejad in the overall picture.

Unfortunately, Zakaria took that valuable insight and ran with it...straight off a cliff.

--Shack

Let's play "Count the Parallels"

2007-10-20T04:45:00.000-05:00

David Brooks had a column in the New York Times yesterday touting Mike Huckabee as a potential Republican nominee.

The thing is--take away the names and the slightly different labels, and for much of the column, it sounds like Brooks is talking about George W. Bush, circa 2000.

"He talks about issues in a down-to-earth way ... a collaborative conservative ..." And so forth. I counted no fewer than six different Huckabee-Bush parallels, and I'm sure I missed a few.

The GOP nominating Bush 3.0 would, it seems to me, be the surest way to ensure that the next White House occupant is addressed "Madame President." Qualified or not, deserving or not, the similarities would guarantee Huckabee's obliteration in the general election.

--Shack

Keeping your environmental issues straight?

2007-10-14T19:32:00.001-05:00

Kind of a head-scratching passage in the Chicago Sun-Times' contribution to the endless parade of editorials serenading Nobel ~~Environmentalism~~ Peace Prize winner Al Gore:

Global warming is a problem that needs solving.

Carbon dioxide emissions are boring a hole in the Earth's atmosphere and are predicted to cause more extreme weather, harm crops, kill off animal species, invite disease and ignite wars.

Now, I know no one's really talked about it for a while, but this sounds more like a description of depletion of the ozone layer than it does of global warming--and I don't recall carbon dioxide emissions having anything to do with the ozone layer.

Of course, I could be wrong. After all, who am I to quarrel with an editorial board?

--Shack

WHO's electable?

2007-10-10T18:29:00.000-05:00

Maggie Gallagher takes aim at the idea that Rudy Giuliani can beat Hillary Clinton--or any other Democratic candidate, for that matter--in the general election:

The once-powerful Reagan coalition had three legs -- strong on defense, less government and social conservatism. But the war in Iraq is not the same as the war on communism. It's very unpopular, and Rudy has become as identified with this unpopular war as John McCain. Meanwhile, he has abandoned social conservatism. What's left of the Reagan coalition for Rudy to run on? Naked fiscal conservatism? Conservatives are deluding themselves if they think fiscal conservatism by itself is a winning political coalition. Do they not remember the party of Gerald Ford? It was very fiscally conservative, socially moderate, and a permanent minority party.
The halo of "America's Mayor" is already slipping. For months, polls showed Rudy Giuliani leading Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head matchup, but by June of this year that lead had begun to evaporate. The latest poll, conducted in late September by ABC News and The Washington Post, shows Hillary Clinton beating Rudy Giuliani by eight points. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney trails Clinton in a head-to-head matchup in the latest Rasmussen poll by only nine points. One point better than Romney does not a convincing argument make for abandoning all principles.

To put it mildly.

--Shack