Addressing Illegal Immigration

Yesterday the local Sunday paper ran the fourth column in the series they've invited me to participate in. I re-worked some material from earlier Viewpoint posts on illegal immigration, and the result can be read at the link or here:

Prior to last week's Senate vote the White House insisted that there was no alternative to the ill-fated immigration bill. It was that bill or nothing we were told by its supporters, but I doubt that most people believed that. I think the American people would've been willing to accept a two-stage measure which looked something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border fence be built and the border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking. Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living. To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens would be required to apply for a government identification card. After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc. They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes the workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This would, unfortunately, require a constitutional amendment), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, or earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any criminal activity, past or future, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation, as would any serious infraction of the motor vehicle code.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of the INS.

This is just an outline, of course, and there are details to be worked out, but it's both simpler and fairer than the Senate bill. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear. The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants. It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems a more simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem than most other plans that have been suggested.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as the Senate bill would have. The "amnesty" is contingent upon first stopping the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, the conditions for being allowed to work in this country sound too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

RLC

Suicide by Political Correctness

The Brits have discovered that at least eight radical Muslims work for their police, but they can't be fired. Apparently, the fear is that firing Islamists will cause offense in the Muslim community. I guess I'm just an unsophisticated redneck on these matters, but my response is to ask, "Who cares?" Anyway, here's the gist of the story:

Up to eight police officers and civilian staff are suspected of links to extremist groups including Al Qaeda. Some are even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Their names are featured on a secret list of alleged radicals said to be working in the Metropolitan and other forces. The dossier was drawn up with the help of MI5 amid fears that individuals linked to Islamic extremism are taking advantage of police attempts to increase the proportion of ethnic staff.

Astonishingly, many of the alleged jihadists have not been sacked because - it is claimed - police do not have the "legal power" to dismiss them.

We can also reveal that one suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating Internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq. He is said to have argued that he was trying to "enhance" debate about the war.

Classified intelligence reports raising concerns about police staff's background cannot be used to justify their dismissal, sources said. Instead, the staff who are under suspicion are unofficially barred from working in sensitive posts and are closely monitored. Political correctness is blamed for the decision not to sack them.

Read the rest of this absurd tale at the link. Things have come to a pretty pass when the police force is compelled by political correctness to retain in their employ people who sympathize with those who commit the most horrid crimes against the people the police are sworn to protect.

The charge of racism makes even brave men cower, but it shouldn't. It's time the allegation cease to be taken seriously by intelligent people and that those on the receiving end of it greet it with the derision it almost always deserves. Scorn and ridicule are the best tools for defanging this rhetorical snake.

Let's worry about doing what is right and not about what will offend those whose umbrage sensors are set on a hair trigger. In England they can start by getting rid of any police employee who demonstrates a sympathy for terrorists and terrorism. If the mullahs in the mosques think that's racism they should be told that they're welcome to call it whatever they like but that it won't change a thing.

RLC

Is Iran Collapsing?

John Mauldin has an interesting piece of analysis of Iran's future at Forbes.com. He asserts that Iran, a country with the second or third largest oil reserves in the world, will be unable to export any oil within the next seven years due largely to its reckless economic policies and the amount of revenue it spends on subsidizing global jihad.

Read the essay for the details. Mauldin concludes it with this sentence:

"Iran looks to me like Russia did in 1988. They were in the process of self-destruction, although few recognized it at the time. Iran is a matter of time."

If the West could muster the will to impose sanctions on Iranian oil and cut off Iranian imports of gasoline, the government of the mullahs would likely collapse overnight without the need for a bomb to be dropped to destroy its nuclear facilities. Shutting off Iranian gasoline imports may well be the reason why we have moved three carrier battle groups into the Persian Gulf region, and may be sending a fourth.

RLC

Summer Reading

Summer is a great time to catch up on the books one has wanted all year to read but never had the time. So far this summer I've managed to finish three books each of which I enjoyed very much:

The Edge of Evolution by Michael Behe: Most of the hostile reviews of this book have been long on ad hominem and short on substantive criticism. That may be because one of the favorite criticisms of any book on intelligent design, i.e. "Whatever it is it's not science," simply doesn't stick to this one, so critics like Richard Dawkins are reduced to pathetic exercises in personal insult. Behe makes a strong case that random mutation is a very limited mechanism for producing viable genetic novelty. Those interested in following the controversy surrounding this book can find plenty of links here (scroll down). I also commented on the book here.

A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson: This 1976 tome by the prolific British historian has been sitting on my shelf for about fifteen years waiting for me to work up the resolve to commit to its 500+ pages. Well, last May I finally started it, and finished it at the end of June. Johnson directs much of his attention to the Roman Catholic church which means that we learn not as much as we might have liked about Orthodoxy or some of the pre-Reformation movements. The book is also almost obsessively concerned with highlighting the negative aspects of Christianity's history, and, of course, there's much ore in that vein to mine. There's also a great deal in its history that redounds to Christianity's credit, but Johnson doesn't seem much interested in exploring this terrain. Even so, I found it a rewarding read and would recommend it to anyone who has a some knowledge of European history and who wants to enrich his/her understanding of the development of the Christian church.

Erasmus and the Age of Reformation by Johan Huizinga: This past week I, my wife, and youngest daughter joined my oldest daughter and her two children on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas and thereabouts. The flight down and back, as well as a day spent on the beach at Castaway Cay afforded much opportunity to read, and I spent the time with Huizinga's classic biography of the 16th century reformer Desiderius Erasmus, who in several respects I found to be a man after my own heart. Erasmus was a scholar and lover of ancient texts who once said that "When I get a little money I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food and clothing." He was also a theological minimalist who was distressed by the violence wrought over what, to him, were trivial matters of doctrine. He was not without his faults, of course, but compared to some of his contemporaries, like Luther and Calvin, his life and spirit were estimable and every Christian would profit from learning a little bit about him.

Having completed the above I'm working now on Escape From Evil by Ravi Zacharias, Are the Gospels Reliable by Mark Roberts, and a reread of Del Ratzsch's Nature, Design, and Science.

Waiting on deck are Journey to the Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O.Wilson and the formidable 800 pages of Joakim Garff's Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Unfortunately, that last one might be another book that sits on the shelf for fifteen years before I muster up the courage to take it on.

RLC

Davies Must Be Desperate

Physicist and science author Paul Davies tries hard to explain the incredible fitness for life of the cosmos without invoking either an intelligent designer or a multiverse:

We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships. I propose instead that the laws are more like computer software: programs being run on the great cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the big bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker's mark.

Davies is much too smart to be proposing something like this as an alternative to an intelligent designer. If the laws of physics are to be compared to computer software then the question shouts itself at us: Who do you think wrote the software? Software does not arise from non-rational, non-intelligent sources. It doesn't just appear ex nihilo. It must be designed by a mind.

He goes on:

Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light. Seth Lloyd, an engineer at MIT, has calculated how many bits of information the observable universe has processed since the big bang. The answer is one followed by 122 zeros. Crucially, however, the limit was smaller in the past because the universe was younger. Just after the big bang, when the basic properties of the universe were being forged, its information capacity was so restricted that the consequences would have been profound.

Here's why. If a law is a truly exact mathematical relationship, it requires infinite information to specify it. In my opinion, however, no law can apply to a level of precision finer than all the information in the universe can express. Infinitely precise laws are an extreme idealisation with no shred of real world justification. In the first split second of cosmic existence, the laws must therefore have been seriously fuzzy. Then, as the information content of the universe climbed, the laws focused and homed in on the life-encouraging form we observe today. But the flaws in the laws left enough wiggle room for the universe to engineer its own bio-friendliness.

Gosh, this sounds positively marvelous. Information - which in our experience is always the product of mind - pervades the universe, constructing it in such an astonishingly precise way that life can exist in it. But, you must remember, it all happened totally by accident - like a million monkeys fiddling with the parts of a computer for billions of years somehow serendipitously producing a fully functional PC, only almost infinitely more improbable.

Somehow the universe in the first nano-seconds of its existence, "wrote" the laws that would subsequently govern it. This raises the question of what laws were operating in the early cosmos that enabled it to "write" the laws of physics as we know them and where did they come from?

Anyway, distinguished scientist Dr. I.D. Finetunski - no doubt an untenured university prof who doesn't want to lose his job - is unimpressed by Davies' theory and proceeds to shred it into little pieces here.

RLC

Among the Great Unwashed

George Packer, writing for The New Yorker, is appalled at the new Creation Museum in Kentucky. He can't believe people really believe what many Christians, including some of the greatest scientists in history, commonly believed up until about 100 years ago. He's especially upset that children might be brainwashed to accept this awful tripe:

Many of the quarter of a million people expected to visit the Creation Museum by the end of the year will be children. They will be indoctrinated into an ideology that systematically warps their understanding of the physical world and fills them with hostility toward the facts and concepts of modernity.

Well, one can hope. Modernity has certainly not been a uniform blessing as even Mr. Packer must know. At the very least, our children should be trained to have a healthy skepticism toward the assumptions of the modern era, particularly its metaphysical claims, and especially its simultaneous deification and debasement of man.

The Creation Museum, a combination of a natural-history museum and a Communist Party propaganda center, will help to arm and arouse the next generation of Christianists in the ongoing war against secular and scientific America.

Mr. Packer apparently believes that museums which indoctrinate youngsters in materialism and naturalism are just fine, but museums which challenge those worldviews are evil Communist propaganda centers for nefarious Christianists. Perhaps Packer also found Count Dracula lurking in the shadows of the Creation Museum waiting to pounce on the kiddies.

The mass of ordinary visitors were every bit as alien to me as the few Mennonite families in their nineteenth-century bonnets and long beards. We might speak the same contemporary American dialect, wear the same T-shirts, and eat the same fatty foods, but our basic beliefs are so incompatible that it's hard to know what political arrangement could ever satisfy us both.

Exactly so. Mr. Packer, unlike most of his fellow travelers on the left, evidently grasps the reason why there is a culture war in this country. There are millions of people out in the hinterland who don't think at all the way he and his friends do. The visitors to the museum believe, with good reason, that Western elites made a serious wrong turn when they abandoned traditional religion, and they don't want their children making the same mistake.

I had the sense of being a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state, and I kept my reactions to myself.

A sentence like this leads us to wonder if Mr. Packer has a background in paleontology or evolutionary biology that enables him to recognize the lies perpetrated by the boneheads at the Creation Museum. But no. Mr. Packer is a journalist. A distinguished journalist, but, alas, just a journalist. Nothing in his background suggests that he has any expertise at all on the issues which he finds so offensive to his intellectual sensibilities. Nothing in his background suggests that he has any way of knowing exactly why the Young Earth Creationists are wrong.

Perhaps that's why he kept his reactions to himself.

RLC

Artful Insults

My friend Byron sends along a sampling of historical quotes that raise the act of insult to the level of art. In light of our post the other day on "Civil Discourse" I thought sharing these might be somehow appropriate:

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." -- Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -- Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend .... if you have one." -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one." -- Winston Churchill's response

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." -- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." -- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." -- Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy." -- Walter Kerr

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae West

"Winston, if you were my husband, I would poison your coffee!" -- Lady Astor to Winston Churchill at a dinner party

"Madam, if I were your husband, I would drink it!" -- Winston Churchill, in response

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar Wilde

Reading the quotes from Churchill, one can only admire a wit so quick and keen that it can, in a moment, think of such devastatingly clever retorts.

RLC

An Independence Day Meditation

I thought it would be worthwhile on this July 4th to rerun a post we did last year on this date. It's just as relevant today as it was then, maybe moreso:

In a time of terror and war, when the demands of security seem sometimes in tension with freedoms we've enjoyed for over two centuries, it's good to take a moment to reflect on what is at stake in the conflict in which we find ourselves.

The Islamic world, or at least that part of it that has embraced Wahhabism, is comitted to an eternal war against those whom they believe to be infidels. They see this as a war that Allah commands them to wage, and they believe themselves enjoined by God to fight until either the infidels are no more or until we have all converted to Islam. The Islamists believe that Allah has blessed them in this struggle and that he will ultimately give them victory. They have the resolve of men convinced that they walk in the will of God.

There is then no negotiating with them, no persuading them that they should give up the fight. Our only options are to fight them or surrender to them. Our choice is between constant vigilance and more 9/11s.

There are those who think that the Islamists are driven by oppression, or poverty or grievances against the United States for its policies in the Middle East, and they argue that if we could mitigate these conditions the Muslims would relent. This is a grave mistake.

The Islamic terrorists are driven by an amalgam of religious fanaticism, an inferiority complex, and hatred for Western societies which have historically surpassed them in every way. They see the war they are waging as the continuation of hostilities that failed at Tours in France in 732 and again at Vienna in 1683. After each unsuccessful invasion the Muslim tide receded in order to regather its strength for another assault. In other words, for them this is the resumption of a 1300 year long war that began within a century of the death of Mohammed and will continue as long as there are infidels left on the earth. We can be thankful that President Bush seems to understand this even if many who oppose him do not.

In light of the long struggle in which we are engaged, and the alternatives which are set before us, it is appropriate on this July 4th that we pause to reflect upon what it is we hold precious, what it is we fight for, and whom it is that we fight against.

RLC

Tall Order

Newt Gingrich has an excellent piece of analysis in the Washington Times on the challenges that global jihad confront us with and the type of leadership we need to guide us through the rest of this century.

Newt's right, unfortunately, that our current leadership has failed to really lead and do what needs to be done to defeat jihadism. President Bush's instincts have been good, but he has failed to explain to the American people exactly what is at stake and what is demanded of us. Good leadership requires good policies and the ability to articulate those policies to the people. Bush has certainly not done an adequate job of the latter, as his approval ratings show.

Gingrich lays out what must be done, specifically in Gaza, if we can have any hope of ultimately prevailing against those who are committed to our destruction:

The West will sooner or later have to confront several hard realities if it is to defeat its enemies.

First, terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah will have to be rooted out and destroyed. We do not today have the strategy, the doctrine or the techniques for defeating these kinds of organizations. In Iraq, after more than four years of effort, our current doctrine for population control and for effective local policing and intelligence is pathetic. To defeat ferocious committed and enthusiastically violent organizations like al Qaeda and the Taliban will take new energy, new drive and new determination on our part.

Second, the indirect strategies of propping up corrupt dictatorships have to give way to direct people-to-people help, securing private-property rights and direct financial assistance so we can improve their families' lives and they can be empowered to defend their neighborhoods from evil men. Hernando de Soto will be vastly more effective in designing this than all the bureaucrats at AID and the United Nations combined.

Third, the U.N. camp system of socialism with unearned anti-humanitarian charity has to be replaced with a totally new system of earned income and earned property rights to restore dignity and hope to every Palestinian.

Fourth, the current system of schools under both Fatah and Hamas control have to be replaced in their entirety with a system dedicated to genuine education and to teaching human rights rather than jihad and hatred.

Lastly, mosques can no longer be allowed to preach hatred and violence. The de-Nazification that seemed obvious in Germany in 1945 will have to be matched by a dehatred campaign today. The haters have to be defeated, disarmed and detained if the forces of peace and freedom are to win.

These steps are only the beginning, but the gap between our current pathetic reaction to the Hamas victory and the requirements of victory give some indication of how far the West has to go before it starts winning. In Churchill's phrase, we are not even at the end of the beginning. However, we may be at the beginning of recognizing that this will be a real war.

Churchill was not only a man of powerful intellect who possessed a clear-eyed view of human nature and realities, but he was also a soldier and fighter who believed in sacrifice and honor and refused to accept retreat or surrender. So where do we go to find another like him?

Certainly not the Democratic party which acts as if it is the fault of the U.S. and Israel that the jihadis hate us and that if we'd just retreat to our borders, and the Israelis would march themselves into the sea, peace would break out in the world. The Democrats offer us Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John Edwards. No Churchills there.

Perhaps the Republicans have someone who can lead us through the perils which lie ahead, but if so, the opposition media will try their best to ensure that his candidacy is stillborn. What's clear is that we need someone with Bush's instincts, Clinton's intellect and articulateness, and Reagan's ability to inspire.

Pretty tall order.

RLC

Return of the Eagles

Here's a great news report. The bald eagle, our national bird, is soon to be removed from the endangered species list:

In 1967, there were fewer than 500 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states. The national bird was in danger of disappearing from much of the United States.

Though the eagles were never in danger of extinction-the vast majority, over 100,000, were in Alaska and Canada-Americans understandably wanted to protect a national symbol.

Today, the bald eagle is doing well. On June 29 the bald eagle in the lower 48 states will be officially removed, or delisted, from the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Yet delisting the bald eagle from the ESA has been a decade-long process that shows how even the most well-intentioned policy can be overcome by politics and ulterior motives.

The bald eagle should have been delisted in the early-to-mid 1990s, when it surpassed the original goal of around 3,000 pairs in the lower 48 states. Since then, the population has continued to grow at the very healthy rate of about 8 percent annually, reaching at least 9,921 pairs in the continental U.S. this year.

Along the Susquehanna River near where I live, it's hard not to see an eagle these days. They are majestic birds, literally breathtaking to watch close-up, and their return to the lower 48 states is a wonderful success that makes all our lives richer.

Photo by Howard Eskin on Susquehanna river near the Conowingo dam, MD Bald eagles concentrate here in numbers that often reach into the fifties during the winter months.

Perhaps we might attach some metaphorical significance to the comeback of our majestic national bird on this July 4th.

RLC

Human Evolution

If the conclusions drawn from this research are correct, if Homo erectus was forming settlements 400,000 years ago, then on what basis is H. erectus considered a different species from H. sapiens (us)? It takes a lot of intelligence, and probably spoken language, to do what this article claims H. erectus was doing. Biologically speaking two populations are of the same species if they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. We don't know that H. erectus was "reproductively isolated" from H. sapiens and the evidence now is that it probably wasn't. Isn't it about time that we recognized that the evolutionary paradigm for human evolution needs to be revised:

The accepted timescale of Man's evolution is being challenged by a German archaeologist who claims to have found evidence that Homo erectus - mankind's early ancestor, who migrated from Africa to Asia and Europe - began living in settled communities long before the accepted time of 10,000 years ago.

The point at which settlement actually took place is the first critical stage in humanity's cultural development.

Helmut Ziegert, of the Institute of Archaeology at Hamburg University, says that the evidence can be found at excavated sites in North and East Africa, in the remains of stone huts and tools created by upright man for fishing and butchery.

Professor Ziegert claims that the thousands of blades, scrapers, hand axes and other tools found at sites such as Budrinna, on the shore of the extinct Lake Fezzan in southwest Libya, and at Melka Konture, along the River Awash in Ethiopia, provide evidence of organised societies.

He believes that such sites show small communities of 40 or 50 people, with abundant water resources to exploit for constant harvests.

The implications for our knowledge of human evolution - and of our intellectual and social beginnings - are "profound" and a "staggering shift", he said.

Yes, they are. The implications are that however long humans have been on the earth they have been the same species they are today.

RLC

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Michael Egnor continues his reflections on the problem that consciousness (or mind) poses for materialistic naturalism. The materialist argues that mind is merely an epiphenomenon of matter. Mind isn't a structure, the materialist insists, it's merely a word we use to describe the function of the brain, like the word "digestion" is simply a word used to describe the function of the stomach.

Egnor maintains that the materialist position is more than just a metaphysical stance. It's a hypothesis which can, in fact, be empirically tested.

The irony is that whatever the results of the test turn out to be the materialist loses.

You can read Egnor's argument here.

RLC

Et Tu, Richard?

The pseudonymous Galapagos Finch, founder of the BRITES, worries that some of his most revered Darwinian heroes are losing their faith, or at least compromising their convictions. Read his amusing editorial expressing his alarm here.

RLC

Civil Discourse

Brian McLaren has a very good post at God's Politics. He writes about the disappointing tone of much of the commentary he finds in the blogosphere and how it has driven a lot of people out of that arena:

A number of my friends have given up blogging, either temporarily or permanently. The reason? The blogosphere seems to indulge a certain kind of rhetoric that they don't want to be associated with anymore.

Although I continue to post here at the God's Politics blog on occasion, and I believe in the power and potential of the blogosphere, I share my friends' frustration with the kind of disrespectful dialogue that frequently ensues in the comments section of so many blogs. The majority want to have substantive and respectful dialogue, and they tolerate the static because they believe in the level playing field of the blogosphere. But the ambivalence is real.

Misleading labels, name-calling, innuendo, insult, cynicism, deception, even flattery can find their way into any of our communication and add another straw to the overweighted camel of civility and mutual respect. (I've already edited out some of my own rhetorical descents in this piece, and I imagine I've still failed to live up to the ideal I'm espousing.)

As if to put an exclamation point at the end of McLaren's post one commenter, speaking from the Christian left, takes to calling Jim Wallis (who didn't even write the post) a moral relativist and a coward for not speaking out on behalf of the poor(!), and another criticizes conservatives, almost all of whom, he/she alleges, are "shrill and ugly." Other commenters seem to think that merely disagreeing with or criticizing a person's ideas or behavior is itself uncivil.

Like McLaren, I sometimes find the line between civil and uncivil rhetoric a little blurred. What seems to me to be on the civil side of the line does not always seem so to some of our readers, and I regret this because one of the qualities I have wanted Viewpoint to consistently display is courtesy and respect. I confess, however, that it is sometimes difficult to criticize those who themselves are disrespectful, unfair, and vitriolic without coming close, in some readers' eyes, to that blurry line. That is our goal, however, and I appreciate it when our readers let us know when they think we haven't met it, even if, in some instances, I believe their judgment mistaken.

RLC

The Glasgow Car-Bombing

I know he's speaking English, but it's a completely different English than what I grew up with. In any event, Hot Air has video of an eyewitness report of the Glasgow airport bombing.

It sounds like the drivers of the car, two fine members of the Religion of Peace, were trying to get a bigger explosion than what they got.

How many more of these homicidal maniacs are there in Britain? How many are there here? Does anyone really think that the jihad will be over in a year or two? We are in a war for survival, and it will last as long as radical Muslims are still walking this earth or until they win.

RLC

Hammering Moore

I haven't seen Sicko and probably won't, but it's coming in for some blistering fire from those who are incredulous that Michael Moore actually lauds the Cuban health care system. Claudia4Libertad, for example, after sketching how Moore has wandered off the path of truth in past films, says this:

Ask any Cuban who has recently left the island (because they can't talk freely about this inside of Cuba) about their health care system and they will tell you that it is often a challenge just to get aspirin and they often have to get it on the black market. The run-down, dilapidated and unsanitary conditions in the facilities that the average Cuban must go to for care are a far cry from the hospitals and clinics reserved for high-ranking members of the communist party or the military. There are actually special facilities in Cuba that serve foreigners who can pay in foreign currency.

If the lauded Cuban healthcare system is so wonderful, perhaps someone can explain to me the following:

• Why some patients are taken to the hospital in wheelbarrows instead of ambulances?
• Why patients must bring their own linens for the hospital bed and often, a fan, to combat the stifling heat and lack of air-conditioning?
• Why cockroaches and other vermin are present in what is supposed to be "sanitary" health facilities? Why many common medicines are not available? If Cuba can export cutting-edge biotechnological products to other countries, surely the US embargo cannot be blamed for not allowing medicine to enter Cuba.
• Why, in a 185-bed cancer center in Santiago where some 6,000 people are treated MONTHLY, there is a shortage of basics such as codeine, anti-nausea drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, antibiotics, antacids, laxatives, high blood pressure medicine, antihistamines, anti-depressants, contraceptives, vitamins and minerals? This particular hospital, sadly, is the norm, not the exception.
• Why 41% of patients in Cuban hospitals are undernourished, particularly after surgery. Malnutrition risks increase with extended stays in the hospital, according to the U.S. National Institute of Health.

Was any of this mentioned in "Sicko?" Of course not! The reason why is one to which I alluded earlier-- Michael Moore is so anti-American, despite the fact that he makes millions off of the American people every time he makes a film, that he will do anything he can to exaggerate and distort the truth to make the Bush Administration look incompetent, evil and silly.

As devastating as this is it's mild compared to the review given to Sicko by Kurt Loder of MTV Movie News of all places. What Loder writes is too good not to read in its entirety, but here's the gist of it:

The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior - and they're free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not America."

That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada - which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation - a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list - this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery - and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care - and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts.

Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have." Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown - just installed this week as Britain's new prime minister - had promised to inaugurate "sweeping domestic reforms" to, among other things, "improve health care."

Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave - and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, S�gol�ne Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target." Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it's "free."

Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers - firefighters and selfless volunteers - who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people - there's no other way of putting it - have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore's faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people's lives have been devastated - wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.

However, there's never a moment when we doubt that he's also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba.

Fidel Castro's island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." He and his charges make their way - their pre-arranged way, if it need be said - to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to "give them the same care they'd give Cuban citizens." Then he adds, dramatically: "And they did."

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be.... What Moore doesn't mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of "health tourism" - a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that's unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal.

As the Caribbean sun sank down on Moore's breathtakingly meretricious movie, I couldn't help recalling that when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn't put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in - from Spain.

HT: Michelle Malkin who has more on Moore and none of it is flattering.

RLC

Just the Facts, Al

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute has a column in the Chicago Sun-Times which casts grave doubt on the credibility of Al Gore's global warming claims. Here's part of what Taylor writes:

Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea [in his latest book] for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

Not only is much of Gore's evidence that global warming is occuring suspect, but it has never been clear to me that there was a definite link between the warming of the earth and anything that humans were doing. For a man who makes much of his scientific rationality and cool logical analysis Mr. Gore sure seems to be way out in front of what both logic and evidence will support on his crusade to smite the environmental infidels.

RLC

Semper Fi

This is certainly one way to take a bite out of crime. A 27 year old pick-pocket tried to pick the pocket of a 72 year old ex-Marine, retired iron worker, and former boxer and got a good whuppin' for his trouble. A store camera caught some of the action and the accompanying news report gives the details.

RLC

Turn Off the Spigot

Iranians are rioting, sort of, in Tehran over the government's decision to begin rationing gasoline. Iran is awash in oil but because the government spends so much of its wealth on subsidizing world-wide jihad and its nuclear weapons program it has too few refineries to turn the petroleum into gasoline and must import 40% of its fuel.

Rationing has been imposed because Tehran fears that the West will soon impose sanctions on fuel exports to Iran. We hope their concern is justified.

Iran has been the driving force behind Hamas and Hezbollah. They've been manufacturing and smuggling IEDs into Iraq that are killing and maiming our troops. They've been a major source of instability in Iraq - instigating, training, and funding the insurgency there. They're also responsible for kidnapping and imprisoning a half dozen or so American citizens, and they're working on developing nuclear weapons which they have all but promised to use against Israel.

We can either allow Iran to continue their deadly course toward nuclear war or we can stop them now. If we choose to stop them it can be via economic collapse or military force. Military force might ultimately become necessary but it should be a last resort.

Right now we can impose an embargo on Iranian fuel and let the people of that country decide whether they want to support the path their leadership is leading them along or whether they want to replace them. We should do it now because waiting will gain us nothing. Iran is not going to change course unless they're forced to. The alternative, it becomes clearer everyday, is war.

Cox and Forkum

RLC

Stake Through the Heart

The call for cloture failed in the Senate today and the immigration bill, having been revivified earlier this week, is now completely dead. It will not be brought back to life until the Congress and administration give us a secure border instead of just empty promises. Once the door is locked then we can address the question of how to handle the crowd of people sitting in our living room. The vote was 46 to 53 to continue debate, which effectively prevented the bill from coming to a floor vote.

Michelle Malkin has an interesting recap of this morning's events from the time the voting began until the vote was over. Scroll to the bottom and work your way to the top.

Evidently, the advocates of the bill can't bring themselves to believe that the bill lost on it's merits. Senator Dick Durbin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a host of others are blaming bigotry, "ugliness" and hatred for their defeat.

This is amusing. These people failed to make a case for the bill, in many instances they failed to even read it, they put it together in secret, they could not tell us how much it would cost, or what its consequences would be. They just expected the American people to shut up and trust them, and because we didn't like what they were trying to foist upon us, they call us bigots, nativists, and haters. This despite the fact that the opposition to this bill cut right across ideological lines. Tom Harkin and Bernie Sanders voted against it for heaven's sake.

Anyway, the name-calling shows how much the Washington elites appreciate participatory democracy. We can now expect an all-out legislative war by these folks against talk radio and the blogosphere to try to shut down the voices of dissent that shine light on what they're trying to do to us.

RLC

Hunkering Down

The research of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, has led him to conclude what anyone who has spent any time on a college campus knows empirically: Diverse communities are often comprised of people who prefer to stick with people like themselves. Putting people in communities with others unlike themselves makes them less trusting, less sociable, less involved in their community than they are in more homogenous settings.

Actually Putnam's findings are more profound than this brief summary make make them sound because they bear on the problem of immigration and its short and mid-term consequences. Putnam describes these consequences in terms which sound pretty dire.

John Leo writes about Putnam's conclusions at City Journal. He says:

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. "Americans raised in the 1970s," he writes, "seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s." And the "hunkering down" occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.

Read Leo's whole column at the link.

RLC

Skeptical Skeptic

Famous skeptic Dr. Stan Scanton has recently grown skeptical of his skepticism and fellow skeptic Galapagos Finch is outraged at the betrayal. Indeed, Finch is skeptical that Scanton is really skeptical of his skepticism. Read all about it at The BRITES.

RLC

The Shape of Our Future

True or False: Free speech is a value embraced by all western countries. The answer, you may be amazed to read, is false. Consider Paul Belien's article in the Brussels Journal on what is currently happening in Europe:

Last week, a German court sentenced a 55-year old Lutheran pastor to one year in jail for "Volksverhetzung" (incitement of the people) because he compared the killing of the unborn in contemporary Germany to the holocaust. Next week, the Council of Europe is going to vote on a resolution imposing Darwinism as Europe's official ideology. The European governments are asked to fight the expression of creationist opinions, such as young earth and intelligent design theories. According to the Council of Europe these theories are "undemocratic" and "a threat to human rights."

Pastor Johannes Lerle compared the killing of the unborn to the killing of the Jews in Auschwitz during the Second World War. On 14 June, a court in Erlangen ruled that, in doing so, the pastor had "incited the people" because his statement was a denial of the holocaust of the Jews in Nazi-Germany. Hence, Herr Lerle was sentenced to one year in jail. Earlier, he had already spent eight months in jail for calling abortionists "professional killers" - an allegation which the court ruled to be slanderous because, according to the court, the unborn are not humans.

Other German courts convicted pro-lifers for saying that "in abortion clinics, life unworthy of living is being killed," because this terminology evoked Hitler's euthanasia program, which used the same language. In 2005, a German pro-lifer, G�nter Annen, was sentenced to 50 days in jail for saying "Stop unjust abortions in [medical] practice," because, according to the court, the expression "unjust" is understood by laymen as meaning illegal, which abortions are not.

Volksverhetzung is a crime which the Nazis often invoked against their enemies and which contemporary Germany also uses to intimidate homeschoolers. Soon, the German authorities will be able to use the same charge against people who question Darwin's evolution theory.

According to a report of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, creationists are dangerous "religious fundamentalists" who propagate "forms of religious extremism" and "could become a threat to human rights." The report adds that the acceptance of the science of evolutionism "is crucial to the future of our societies and our democracies."

Everyone who prizes freedom should read the whole article. Those who value free speech will be disgusted that in the 21st century, less than a generation after the fall of totalitarianisms in Germany and the Soviet Union, good people would be imprisoned for opposing abortion, homosexuality, Darwinism, and for homeschooling their children. They will also be frightened by the realization that there are many in the U.S., especially among left-wing atheists, who look to Europe as forging the path to our common future.

On the lighter side (somewhat) there's this take on the move to use legislation to enforce belief in Darwinism:

RLC

Dishonest or Incompetent

You have to wonder why any conservative would go on a network talk show. You know they'll do whatever they can to make you look bad. Take Ann Coulter, for instance. Coulter goes on ABC's Good Morning America the other day and among other tendentious questions gets asked about her reference a few months ago to John Edwards in which she used the word "faggot."

ABC edited Coulter's reply to show her saying that she's learned her lesson. "If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

Sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? But of course ABC edited her comment so as to completely distort the meaning of what she was saying. Here's the full context of her remark:

"But about the same time (as her "faggot" remark), you know, Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. So I've learned my lesson. If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

We here at Viewpoint have been critical of Coulter when we thought she deserved criticism, as she did in the John Edwards episode, but this time the criticism is deserved entirely by the dishonest or incompetent editors at ABC. Coulter was making the point that she was just joking about John Edwards when she used the slur "faggot," but that Bill Maher was not joking when he said that he wished Dick Cheney had been killed when he was in Afghanistan. Yet the media hammered Coulter and gave Maher a pass. So in the future, Coulter was saying, she should be safe from media criticism if she confines her remarks to the reprehensible sorts of things that Maher says about Republicans like Cheney.

Her point was well-made and she's exactly right. Anyone can say anything, no matter how vile, about a Republican and the media yawns, but they'll jump at the chance to distort a conservative's words in order to make them look cruel and mean-spirited.

As we said, the folks at ABC's Good Morning America are either dishonest or incompetent.

RLC

Sicko

Michael Moore's film on health care in which he endorses the complete eradication of private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal bureaucracy, puts Democratic candidates on the hot seat according to the LA Times:

Rejecting Moore's prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party's next standard-bearer. However, his proposal - wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program - could be political poison with the larger electorate.

At a special screening in Washington this week, politicians, lobbyists, media pooh-bahs and policy junkies flocked to see Moore's film. And its slashing demand for action on an issue that voters care deeply about, and Democrats hope to capitalize on, generated plenty of buzz. Moore hopes that, after its general release June 29, "Sicko" will exert significant influence on the presidential campaign.

Instead of greeting the film with hosannas or challenging it head-on, however, the leading Democratic presidential candidates have sidestepped direct comment on Moore's proposals.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of South Carolina all have staked out positions sharply at odds with Moore's approach. But none of them is eager to have that fact dragged into the spotlight.

If Moore's fire-breathing proposal catches on among party activists, who tend to be suspicious of the private sector and supportive of direct government action, the candidates' pragmatic, consensus-seeking ideas could look like weak-kneed temporizing - much the way their rejection of an immediate pullout from Iraq has drawn heated criticism from antiwar activists.

In "Sicko," the filmmaker calls for abolishing the insurance industry, putting a tight regulatory collar on pharmaceutical companies and embracing a Canadian-style government-run system.

One good thing about Moore's film, assuming that it's more honest than Fahrenheit 911, is that it should stimulate a lot of healthy debate about what kind of health care system is best for America. That's a debate we need to have.

RLC

Behind the Scenes

The Washington Post has a fascinating article on the evolution of the administration's policy toward detainees in the War on Terrror. The article will cause Cheney-haters to salivate, but more objective readers will find much to admire, as well as to question, in the piece.

Many of those who commented on the article are among the haters and they see Cheney as an evil, power-crazed, megalomaniac. A power-crazed man, however, would show far more political ambition than has Cheney. He did not seek the office he's in nor does he aspire to go higher.

He may be wrong about what he sees as the right course of action in handling detainees, though except for denying citizens the right to legal representation I think he's largely correct, but he's trying to do what he believes is best for the survival of this nation, and he has demonstrated a tremendous amount of personal strength and courage in the face of near universal vilification to do it.

Footnote: Those who think Dick Cheney is the incarnation of evil might reflect on how many evil men have ever done as much for charitable causes as has Cheney. As this article attests the V.P. has given more money to charity than perhaps any elected official in the history of the United States:

Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne gave away nearly $7 million last year [2005] to help the poor and for medical research.

According to income tax information released by the White House, the Cheneys' adjusted gross income in 2005 was $8,819,006.

The sum was largely the result of Mr. Cheney's stock options from Halliburton and royalties from three books written by Mrs. Cheney.

The Cheneys gave more than three-quarters of their income - $6,869,655 - to several charities, including George Washington University's Cardiothoracic Institute and a charity for low-income high school students in the Washington, D.C. area, Capital Partners for Education.

Doesn't sound to me like the sort of thing evil people usually do.

RLC

Round One

Unfortunately, the first opportunity to stop the Senate immigration bill was lost today on a 64-35 vote which allowed the measure to be reintroduced for debate. Apparently a number of Republican senators who said they were going to vote no were persuaded by the administration to change their vote. Who knows what they were offered to allow this bill to come to the floor.

Amendments that were added to it will be debated until Thursday at which time a cloture vote to shut off debate will be taken. This takes 60 votes to pass. If cloture is invoked then the immigration bill will pass the senate (The vote to pass the bill only requires 51 votes to prevail and is pretty much a foregone conclusion). The bill will then move to the House where the process of debating and voting will be repeated.

Meanwhile, the administration is working furiously to get Republicans on board, even though rank and file voters (of both parties) are jamming D.C. switchboards to express their opposition. If you're a Republican the next time you're sent an appeal for a donation to the party, cut this out and send it to them:

Meanwhile, you can find your senator's phone number here. The National Republican Senatorial Committee number is (202) 675-6000.

For an explanation of what's wrong with this bill read the Heritage Foundation's report on the results of their study of the bill last month.

RLC

Putin's Problematic Problem

Vladimir Putin can't be serious. He says in a recent speech that:

"Regarding the problematic pages in our history, yes, we do have them, as does any state."

"But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments."

"In any event, we never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometres of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam."

"Problematic"? Is that we he calls the deliberate starvation of 15 million Ukranians by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s? It's true the Soviets never dropped an atomic bomb (though they certainly threatened to do so often enough), but the U.S. nuclear attacks on the Japanese, who had initiated war with us in 1941, took some 200,000 lives. Uncle Joe killed that many of his own countrymen on an average afternoon in the 1930s.

As for dropping bombs on tiny countries, the Soviets didn't refrain from bombing people out of some moral scruple. They didn't bomb because they didn't have to. They destroyed the souls and lives of two generations of East Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians with their armored infantry forces in the fifties and sixties.

Moreover, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of political and religious dissidents languished and perished in the Soviet gulag during the thirties, forties, and fifties.

The Soviets were also responsible for the spread of communism throughout much of Europe and Africa in the fifties, sixties, and seventies resulting in the deaths of millions more.

In all, almost 100 million people perished in the 20th century at the hands of Soviet or Soviet-supported communists and countless other lives were strangled by their oppressive totalitarianism. Some 20 million of those deaths occured within the Soviet Union itself.

I guess that's a "problematic" history, but it's certainly not a history which should be compared favorably with that of the United States.

RLC

Evolution and Religion

Darwinian materialists Gregory Graffin and Will Provine of Cornell sent a detailed questionnaire on evolution and religion to 271 professional evolutionary scientists elected to membership in 28 honorific national academies around the world, and 149 (55 percent) responded. The results were interesting:

Religious evolutionists were asked to describe their religion, and unbelievers were asked to choose their closest description among atheist, agnostic, naturalist or "other" (with space to describe). Other questions asked if the evolutionary scientist were a monist or dualist-that is, believed in a singular controlling force in natural science or also allowed for the supernatural-whether a conflict between evolution and religion is inevitable, whether humans have free will, whether purpose or progress plays a role in evolution, and whether naturalism is a sufficient way to understand evolution, its products and human origins.

The great majority of the evolutionists polled (78 percent) [regarded] themselves as pure naturalists. Only two out of 149 described themselves as full theists, two as more theist than naturalist and three as theistic naturalists. Taken together, the advocacy of any degree of theism is the lowest percentage measured in any poll of biologists' beliefs so far (4.7 percent).

Most evolutionary scientists who billed themselves as believers in God were deists (21) rather than theists (7).

[The respondents] were strongly materialists and monists: 73 percent said organisms have only material properties, whereas 23 percent said organisms have both material and spiritual properties. These answers are hardly surprising given previous polls. But the answers to two questions were surprising to us.

Only 10 percent of the eminent evolutionary scientists who answered the poll saw an inevitable conflict between religion and evolution. The great majority see no conflict between religion and evolution ... because they see religion as a natural product of human evolution (emphasis mine). Sociologists and cultural anthropologists, in contrast, tend toward the hypothesis that cultural change alone produced religions, minus evolutionary change in humans. The eminent evolutionists who participated in this poll reject the basic tenets of religion, such as gods, life after death, incorporeal spirits or the supernatural. Yet they still hold a compatible view of religion and evolution....These eminent evolutionists view religion as a sociobiological feature of human culture, a part of human evolution, not as a contradiction to evolution. Viewing religion as an evolved sociobiological feature removes all competition between evolution and religion for most respondents.

These scientists believe religion is compatible with evolution in the same way they believe that vestigial structures like the appendix are compatible with evolution. It's not that they believe that any religious claims are true but rather that evolution gave rise to religion because it served a particular function in our racial history.

Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths.

Actually this last sentence is a non-sequitur. Even were it the case that religious awareness dawned slowly in man's evolutionary history, it doesn't follow that there's no truth to the beliefs that men came to hold. It's quite possible, perhaps even plausible, that men originally developed a belief in God because that belief conformed to the way the world really is. Indeed, it seems to me much more plausible to think that we evolved strong beliefs that were accurate representations of reality than that we evolved strong beliefs that were fundamentally illusory. If evolution is all about survival value then I think the former would better suit us for our environment than the latter.

Anyway, I have a question. If belief in God is a consequence of evolutionary forces why is not disbelief deemed also to be a result of evolution? How did atheism arise in a population of organisms (humans) that is so overwhelmingly theist? Is atheism a dysgenic mutation, like sickle cell, that coincidentally confers some sort of benefit upon those who have it? If so, what does that say about its truth value?

It would seem that truth has nothing to do with whether one is a theist or an atheist, our beliefs are all programmed by our genes, and apparently the genes for atheism are linked to the genes for studying biology so that those who have one often have the other. In other words biologists are atheists for completely non-rational reasons.

Aren't evolutionary explanations cool?

RLC

Free Speech in the Dock

Another left-wing assault on free speech has been launched by the infamous 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California. The sages who sit on this august body have handed down a ruling which, well, let's let George Will describe what has happened:

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city's government says those words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and can be proscribed from the government's open e-mail system and employee bulletin board.

When the McCain-Feingold law empowered government to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political campaign speech about government, it was predictable that the right of free speech would increasingly be sacrificed to various social objectives that free speech supposedly impedes. And it was predictable that speech suppression would become an instrument of cultural combat, used to settle ideological scores and advance political agendas by silencing adversaries.

That has happened in Oakland. And, predictably, the ineffable U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ratified this abridgement of First Amendment protections. Fortunately, overturning the 9th Circuit is steady work for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland's government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced with a flier describing their group as "a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values."

The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.

The city government said the flier was "determined" to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action "up to and including termination."

Effectively, the city has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a "hostile" environment. This, even though gay rights advocates used the city's communication system to advertise "Happy Coming Out Day." Yet the terms "natural family," "marriage" and "family values" are considered intolerably inflammatory.

The treatment of the GNEA illustrates one technique by which America's growing ranks of self-appointed speech police expand their reach: They wait until groups they disagree with, such as the GNEA, are provoked to respond to them in public debates, then they persecute them for annoying those to whom they are responding. In Oakland, this dialectic of censorship proceeded on a reasonable premise joined to a preposterous theory.

The premise is that city officials are entitled to maintain workplace order and decorum. The theory is that government supervisors have such unbridled power of prior restraint on speech in the name of protecting order and decorum that they can nullify the First Amendment by declaring that even the mild text of the GNEA flier is inherently disruptive.

The flier supposedly violated the city regulation prohibiting "discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation." The only cited disruption was one lesbian's complaint that the flier made her feel "targeted" and "excluded." So anyone has the power to be a censor just by saying someone's speech has hurt his or her feelings.

Unless the speech is "progressive." If the GNEA claimed it felt "excluded" by advocacy of the gay rights agenda, would that advocacy have been suppressed? Of course not -- although the GNEA's members could plausibly argue that the city's speech police have created a "hostile" environment against them.

There was a time back in the sixties when the left, headed by the likes of the late Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech movement, fought for everyone's right to say whatever they pleased, but nowadays they've become much more selective about who should have the right to speak and who shouldn't. They still campaign for the rights of pornographers and movie-makers to pollute the culture, of course, but if you wish to extoll traditional notions of marriage and family, well, then you better be prepared to be fired from your job.

At the next candidates' debate every Democratic candidate ought to be asked which side they support in this case, and they should be compelled to answer without waffling. It would be a far more enlightening line of questioning than asking the Republicans, as CNN did in the last debate, how many of them believe in evolution.

Meanwhile, Chip Bok offers his opinion of the state of free speech in America:

RLC

SloppyThinking from the Dawkster

Philosopher Francis Beckwith writing at First Things, points out an interesting inconsistency in the thinking of Darwinian atheist Richard Dawkins:

In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins laments the career path of Kurt Wise, who has, since 2006, held the positions of professor of science and theology and director of the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to that, Wise had taught for many years at Bryan College, a small evangelical college in Dayton, Tennessee, named after William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and associate counsel in the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial."

According to Dawkins, Wise was at one time a promising young scholar who had earned a degree in geology (from the University of Chicago) and advanced degrees in geology and paleontology from Harvard University, where he studied under the highly acclaimed Stephen Jay Gould. Wise is also a young-earth creationist, which means that he accepts a literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis and maintains that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. It is not a position I hold, and for that reason I am sympathetic to Dawkins' bewilderment at why Wise has embraced what appears to many Christians to be a false choice between one controversial interpretation of Scripture (young-earth creationism) and abandoning Christianity altogether.

At one point in his career, Wise began to understand that his reading of Scripture was inconsistent with the dominant scientific understanding of the age of the earth and the cosmos. Instead of abandoning what I believe is a false choice, he continued to embrace it, but this lead to a crisis of faith. Wise writes: "Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science." So Wise abandoned the possibility of securing a professorship at a prestigious research university or institute.

Dawkins is disturbed by Wise's judgment and its repercussions on his obvious promise as a scholar, researcher, and teacher. Writes Dawkins: "I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic - pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed."

So what's inconsistent about this? Beckwith continues:

But Dawkins, in fact, does not actually believe that living beings, including human beings, have intrinsic purposes or are designed so that one may conclude that violating one's proper function amounts to a violation of one's moral duty to oneself. Dawkins has maintained for decades that the natural world only appears to be designed. He writes in The God Delusion: "Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that - an illusion."

But this means that his lament for Wise is misguided, for Dawkins is lamenting what only appears to be Wise's dereliction of his duty to nurture and employ his gifts in ways that result in his happiness and an acquisition of knowledge that contributes to the common good. Yet because there are no designed natures and no intrinsic purposes, and thus no natural duties that we are obligated to obey, the intuitions that inform Dawkins' judgment of Wise are as illusory as the design he explicitly rejects. But that is precisely one of the grounds by which Dawkins suggests that theists are irrational and ought to abandon their belief in God.

So if the theist is irrational for believing in God based on what turns out to be pseudo-design, Dawkins is irrational in his judgment of Wise and other creationists whom he targets for reprimand and correction. For Dawkins' judgment rests on a premise that - although uncompromisingly maintained throughout his career - only appears to be true.

Dawkins holds that there is no basis for something like moral duty and then criticizes Wise for violating his moral duty to himself. This is yet another example of the propostion that people cannot live consistently as atheists unless they embrace a thoroughgoing nihilism. And any worldview that is impossible, or nearly impossible, to hold consistently is quite likely to be very wrong.

RLC

Alzheimer's Cure?

A news report out of England brings us wonderful news:

A revolutionary drug that stops Alzheimer's disease in its tracks could be available within a few years.

It could prevent people from reaching the devastating final stages of the illness, in which sufferers lose the ability to walk, talk and even swallow, and end up totally dependent on others.

The jab [injection], which is now being tested on patients, could be in widespread use in as little as six years.

Existing drugs can delay the progress of the symptoms, but their effect wears off relatively quickly, allowing the disease to take its devastating course. In contrast, the new vaccine may be able to hold the disease at bay indefinitely.

Early tests showed the vaccine is highly effective at breaking up the sticky protein that clogs the brain in Alzheimer's, destroying vital connections between brain cells.

When the jab was given to mice suffering from a disease similar to Alzheimer's, 80 per cent of the patches of amyloid protein were broken up.

The vaccine is now being tried out on 60 elderly Swedish patients in the early and middle stages of Alzheimer's. Half of the men and women are being given the vaccine while half are being given dummy jabs.

This would be an astonishing breakthrough, and we certainly hope the drug treatment works well on humans, but we have a question: We're frequently admonished that belief in Darwinian evolution has been absolutely essential for developments in modern medicine, so we'd like to know what role Darwinian belief played in the research leading to this vaccine. After all, one doesn't have to believe that we're closely related to mice to think that if a cure works on a disease in mice similar to Alzheimer's that it might also work on Alzheimer's in humans. But maybe I'm missing something.

RLC

Why Some Guys Are Liberals

There are lots of reasons why people lean toward the conservative or liberal side of social and political issues. There's little doubt that among them are intellectual considerations, but I suspect that one's temperament, the nature of one's religious commitment, and one's experience in life also play prominent roles in whether one tends to list toward starboard or port.

Be that as it may, these factors don't explain everything. A long time ago I read an essay that argued that there's another, more urgent, reason which accounts for why a lot of young men at least profess to be liberal and that is that they're profoundly interested in girls. I can't recall much about the essay except the general gist of it. It went something like this:

It is, from the perspective of some young men, an unfortunate fact of life that conservative girls often believe it is their duty to preserve their chastity until they are married. A young man, interested in exploring and exploiting a young lady's charms, could invest a great deal of time and treasure in such a girl only to have his investment come to naught. Thus conservatism has limited appeal for many men under a certain age.

Liberal girls, contrarily, are often convinced that such rules are remnants of an oppressive male patriarchy that must be rejected root and branch, and that they have an obligation to stand in solidarity with the sisterhood by liberating themselves through free expression of their sexuality. This, of course, is precisely the attitude that makes the eyes of oppressive males light up. They couldn't agree more. They, too, support a woman's quest to liberate herself from the shackles of puritanical prudery and male subjugation. The sooner she consummates her liberation the better, and he wants her to know that he will always be there for her to help her in any way he can to accomplish her emancipation.

Moreover, if a conservative girl gets pregnant she often feels it is her moral duty to bear and raise the child. This is a horrifying prospect for many a young man. Liberal girls, however, believe themselves to be sovereign over their bodies and that it is some sort of sin to let a baby ruin her life. This conviction is sweet music to the ears of said oppressive young men who dread the idea of child support or, worse, marriage. By all means, a woman should have the right, even the duty, to abort her child. Why should she, and by extension he, be tied to an unwanted child for the rest of their lives?

Thus it is in the interest of many young males, as they see it, to reinforce liberal beliefs about sexuality and abortion among their female friends and in society at large. To be credible, of course, they also have to adopt liberal poses on other issues as well, and so they do, not out of any principle, except perhaps the principle of pragmatic expediency: Whatever works is right.

So, for at least some young men, and you know who you are, their liberalism is simply a means to an end.

RLC

Homeschooling Is Child Abuse

When it comes to tolerance, choice, and diversity some lefties only find some choices and some diversity tolerable. If we're tolerating sexual heterodoxy or various marital permutations or the choice to kill the child in one's womb that's all just peachy, but if we're talking about choice and diversity in education and religion then the voteries of tolerance suddenly transmogrify into Robespierres.

Consider this example of left-wing tolerance from the pen of Darwinian atheist P.Z. Myers:

"I do wish we could arrest all those parents who use homeschooling as an excuse to keep their children ignorant."

Nice. No doubt if parents persisted in home-schooling their children despite having been arrested, Myers would have them carted off to Madame Guillotine.

Having taught lots of home-schooled children at the college level I can say that they're just as well-educated in all important respects as those who matriculate through most of our public schools. If Myers wants to arrest people for child abuse he should turn his attention to the people responsible for the sorry state of many of the public schools in this country.

But it's not education people like Myers are really concerned about. It's religious education that has their shorts in a wedgy. If the public schools aren't teaching kids history, literature, writing, and math that can be overlooked as long as they're indoctrinating them in materialist science and philosophy.

What cannot be permitted is the circumvention by homeschoolers of the materialist indoctrination students receive in many government schools. Escaping that indoctrination would be a crime in any world in which P.Z. Myers had any influence because, as Richard Dawkins asserts in The God Delusion, it's a form of child abuse.

RLC

Another Nifong Casualty

Kathleen Parker argues that one of the big losers in the Duke rape case will be ideological feminism. The sort of standard claim made, for example, by feminist law professor Wendy Murphy on CNN's The Situation Room, "I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth," will, if they are made at all, likely in the future be met with looks of astonished incredulity.

Parker also notes that another big loser will be actual rape victims:

Already we may be witness to Nifong's dubious offspring in Cupertino, Calif., where a nearly unconscious 17-year-old girl was sexually ravished at a party by a De Anza College baseball player while several teammates stood by watching. The girl's face was covered with vomit -- not her own -- by the time three other young women burst into the room, rescued her from a mattress on the floor and took her to the hospital.

To any sane mind, a drunk, semi-conscious girl on the receiving end of sexual intercourse doesn't sound like consensual sex, yet the Santa Clara County district attorney has decided not to pursue charges. The problem, she says, is that everyone involved was drinking, including witnesses -- and the girl remembers nothing -- making it difficult to prove lack of consent.

What any reasonable person knows, of course, is that anyone too drunk to wipe someone else's vomit from her face is too drunk to give consent. We also can assume that Nifong, given a similar scenario, would have prosecuted this case (with our blessings) and been declared a hero.

Instead, his abuse of the justice system, indicting three innocent men for his own political gain, may have set the stage for other guilty parties to walk free and at least one 17-year-old girl, thus far, to be denied access to justice.

HT: No Left Turns

RLC