John McCain and Super Tuesday

John McCain is emotionally volatile, sometimes even ugly. He opposed the Bush tax cuts, he opposes increased oil production in the United States, he opposes free political speech, and he favors amnesty for illegal aliens and opening our borders to anyone who wants to come into the country. If he scores big in Tuesday's primary it will be a dark day for the Republican party and an even darker day for conservatives.

McCain would probably be an underdog in the race were Mike Huckabee not attacking Mitt Romney and siphoning votes away from him. Huckabee, by his tactic of running interference for McCain, has lost a lot of respect from people who formerly admired him. Readers who are undecided about McCain ought to read this piece by former Senator Rick Santorum.

I am not prepared to join with those who have said they will not vote for McCain in the general election. Despite his shortcomings, he's still preferable to either Clinton or Obama, but he's not the best option on offer in the Republican primary. Mitt Romney has a much more stable temperament and is more consistently conservative than is McCain. It reflects poorly on the American electorate that so many who call themselves conservative seem to be unaware of this.

RLC

The Ribosome

Casey Luskin finds a bunch of Darwinians, oddly enough, marveling over the irreducible complexity of the ribosome. The ribosome is the structure in the cell which superintends protein synthesis along strands of messenger RNA, and it requires 53 proteins in order to function.

The clip below shows a computer animation of the ribosome mediating the construction of a protein by holding the mRNA in place while the transfer RNA brings amino acids to the assembly point where they are joined into a polypeptide chain.

It really is astonishing, especially to think that this machinery just came about by random chance, but for Darwinians to give even a hint that they think it is irreducibly complex and therefore, by implication, intelligently designed is almost equally astonishing:

RLC

Blue Eyes

Science Daily reports that new research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

This is an odd report inasmuch as on any view of human origins, whether you prefer Darwin or Genesis, we're all descended from a common ancestor at some point in our lineage. It's still an interesting article, though.

RLC

Sub-Prime Greed

What's fueling the sub-prime mortgage crisis? Apparently, it isn't just that home owners' interest rates were adjusted up, but it's also the fact that some people who took out very low interest mortgages to buy their house then proceeded to take out home equity loans on the house in order to buy things that they wanted. Their cumulative debt is now far more than the house is worth, and they're apparently hoping that the rest of us bail them out.

Instapundit has this note from a mortgage broker:

Speaking as a mortgage broker, I can assure you this is the case in the vast majority of instances. I spoke with a woman today who has a credit report that looks like a train wreck, including a bankruptcy fours years ago and numerous chargeoffs and collections since. Her gross income is less than $850 a week -- but she drives a car with a $700 payment.

She called me up because her adjustable rate mortgage payment is going up. When I told her that the only way she could qualify for a loan is to pay off the car with her mortgage, she threw a fit. Apparently me saving her $500 a month isn't good enough, she wanted to tap her home equity one last time for $30,000 to spend on "home improvements" rather than paying off the car. She then asked if anyone would really check to see if the money went into home upgrades.

This is the behavior that some in our government and media want the rest of us to subsidize. Geez.

RLC