No Place to Hide

According to the LA Times the Obama administration is continuing the Bush policy of attacking al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. The Bush policy underwent an important revision last summer and since then has been very successful in severely weakening al Qaeda.

Here are some excerpts from the Times' article:

An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say.

The pace of the Predator attacks has accelerated dramatically since August, when the Bush administration made a previously undisclosed decision to abandon the practice of obtaining permission from the Pakistani government before launching missiles from the unmanned aircraft.

Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign despite civilian casualties that have fueled anti-U.S. sentiment and prompted protests from the Pakistani government.

"This last year has been a very hard year for them," a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said of al Qaeda militants, whose operations he tracks in northwest Pakistan. "They're losing a bunch of their better leaders. But more importantly, at this point they're wondering who's next."

U.S. intelligence officials said they see clear signs that the Predator strikes are sowing distrust within Al Qaeda. "They have started hunting down people who they think are responsible" for security breaches, the senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said, discussing intelligence assessments on condition of anonymity. "People are showing up dead or disappearing."

But the Predator campaign has depleted the organization's operational tier. Many of the dead are longtime loyalists who had worked alongside Bin Laden and were part of the network's hasty migration into Pakistan in 2001 after U.S.-led forces invaded neighboring Afghanistan. They are being replaced by less experienced recruits who have had little, if any, history with Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

The offensive has been aided by technological advances and an expansion of the CIA's Predator fleet. The drones take off and land at military airstrips in Pakistan, but are operated by CIA pilots in the United States. Some of the pilots -- who also pull the triggers on missiles -- are contractors hired by the agency, former officials said.

The Bush administration had been constrained by its close ties with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who argued against aggressive U.S. action. But by last summer, after a series of disrupted terrorist plots in Europe had been traced to Pakistan, there were calls for a new approach.

The breaking point came when Musharraf was forced to resign mid-August, officials said. Within days, President Bush had approved the new rules: Rather than requiring Pakistan's permission to order a Predator strike, the agency was allowed to shoot first.

The success of the Predator campaign has prompted some counter-terrorism officials to speak of a post-Al Qaeda era in which its regional affiliates -- in North Africa and elsewhere -- are all that remain after the center collapses.

"You can imagine a horizon in which Al Qaeda proper no longer exists," said Juan Zarate, former counter-terrorism advisor to Bush. "If you were to continue on this pace, and get No. 1 and No. 2, Al Qaeda is dead. You can't resuscitate that organization as we know it without its senior leadership."

There are more details at the link. I believe President Obama is doing the right thing by pursuing this course of action, but I have to wonder - is this what the pacifist left had in mind when they cast their troth with the young Senator from Chicago?

RLC

Bailing Out the Rich

Thomas Sowell notes that the administration's mortgage bailout plan would rescue people defaulting on mortgages valued upwards of $729,000. Think about that.

Compassion is helping those less fortunate, but for the President compassion means you helping those much more fortunate, or irresponsible, than you. How many of us would even think of buying a house for three quarters of a million dollars?

Maybe you live in a modest home or in an apartment because you can't afford a home. No matter. You're required to help those who purchased a $730 thousand dollar house, but who defaulted on their payments, stay in their home. This is evidently the current administration's idea of sharing the burden.

Bush was severely criticized for giving tax cuts to people who pay taxes, i.e. the top 60% or so of wage earners. We were told that this amounted to a transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the rich. This was, of course, false. No wealth was transferred. People were simply allowed to keep more of what they earned.

To see a real transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper class one should look at Obama's mortgage bailout plan.

RLC

Atheism and the French Terror

We've sometimes argued here that a nation that spurns the Judeo-Christian God leaves itself no ground upon which to stand when making moral judgments. There may be the odd exception, of course, but a state whose moral pilings are not sunk into Divine law will sooner or later subside into dissolution and avarice and perhaps into violence and bloodthirstiness. Moreover, the more self-consciously secular or atheistic a nation becomes the deeper it will descend into this amoral mire. At least this has been the history of the twentieth century, but it's not just a phenomenon of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of the slide into degeneracy that results from a conscious rejection of a theistic foundation for morality is the terror that followed the French Revolution of 1789.

The revolutionaries were uncompromising atheists intent on fulfilling the hope attributed to the French philosopher Denis Diderot who was said to have exclaimed that he longed to see the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Inspired by men like Diderot and Rousseau the French set about trying to establish a state in which the influence of the Church was expunged and priests were executed. The horror that followed the Revolution of 1789 is hard to imagine. Lacking any transcendent constraint upon their hatreds and passions the French authorities wallowed in an orgy of horrific bloodshed.

In the course of nine months some 16,000 men, women, children, and even infants were sent to the guillotine. Some 40,000 more died as a result of being whipped, branded, broken on the wheel, mutilated, or otherwise abused. On one day 800 people were hacked to death, and on another 500 children were taken to a meadow where they were systematically clubbed to death. River barges were laden with people and pushed out into the river where they were sunk, drowning all on board.

The 20th century witnessed similar horrors perpetrated by communists who, in the name of state atheism, murdered over 100 million people, and atheistic or pantheistic Nazis who in the name of socialism and racial purity murdered another 6 million. The fruit of a consistent secularism is a "might-makes-right" ethic, which leads to the dehumanization of the other, which, in turn, leads to the guillotine and the abattoir.

Those who despise theism and the Church and wish to be rid of them need to give serious thought to exactly what would likely take their place.

RLC

Obamateur Hour

You'll recall, perhaps, that upon his recent visit to our shores British Prime Minister Gordon Brown presented President Obama and his family several gifts that fairly shimmered with historic significance and which evinced elaborate consideration and preparation. President Obama, for his part, presented the British Prime Minister with a set of classic movie DVDs that could have been purchased at Wal-Mart - and Brown doesn't even watch movies all that much.

Now we find out that the diplomatic gaffe is even worse than we thought. The DVDs, it happens, don't work in British machines.

Mark Steyn pokes a little fun at what he calls the "Obamateur Hour" crowd at the White House, and over at Powerline John Hinderaker asks the obvious question:

Can you imagine the Democrats' reaction if the Bush White House had given a European head of state a set of DVDs that can only be played on North American machines? It would have been conclusive proof of Bush's provincialism, lack of sensitivity to our allies' sensibilities, ignorance of the wider world, techno incompetence, failure to appreciate the superiority of European civilization, blah blah blah. That's how it would have been reported and editorialized on in every newspaper. So let's check tomorrow's papers and see whether that's how Obama's gaffe is covered. Or whether it's covered at all.

The media will doubtless downplay the blunder, just as they downplayed Secretary Clinton's embarrassing "reset" button blooper. This is, after all, no longer the Bush White House. No need, now that Bush is gone, to focus the country's attention on troubling signs of incompetence in the White House.

Actually, it's hard to fault the media for their inattention to the appalling lack of thought put into the Brown gift. The ongoing circus up the street on Capitol Hill is much too diverting to dwell on the administration's diplomatic lassitude. For sheer entertainment value it's hard to beat listening to the Democrats in Congress fulminating against corporate CEOs for handing out the bonuses the Democrats told them they could have in the first place. The "Obamateur Hour" is being played out at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, it appears, and lots of places in between.

Speaking of which, when is Treasury secretary Geithner going to get a staff?

RLC

Letter to the President

Somehow this letter to President Obama found its way into my mailbox:

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for helping my neighbors with their mortgage payments. You know the ones down the street, who in the good times refinanced their house several times and bought SUV's, ATV's, RV's, a pool, a big screen TV, two Wave Runners and a Harley. But I was wondering, since I am paying my mortgage and theirs, could you arrange for me to borrow the Harley now and then?

Richard Ford

Queen Creek, AZ

P.S. They also need help with their credit cards, when do you want me to start making those payments?

P.P.S. I almost forgot - they didn't file their income tax return this year. Should I go ahead and file for them or will you be appointing them to cabinet posts?

Pretty funny.

RLC

Arranged

If you're in the mood for a film that'll make you feel good, make you laugh, and make you wish the world were like the microcosm depicted in this story, rent the 2007 movie titled Arranged. It's the story of two young women, one a Muslim, one an orthodox Jew, who find themselves working together as school teachers in New York City. They also find that despite the hatreds and hostilities between Muslims and Jews on the world stage these two women have much in common, especially since both of their families are trying to arrange marriages for them. It's a beautiful and funny story of friendship, and it provides an interesting glimpse of what it's like growing up Muslim and Jewish in America.

The film is for the most part very well acted, though I think the portrayal of the school's principal is a little heavy-handed, and I'm confident that you'll find much in it to enjoy and think about. It's unrated, but should be PG.

RLC

Feedback

There are a couple of interesting submissions on our feedback page you might wish to check out.

RLC

Man-Caused Disasterists

Ace of Spades quotes this exchange between a Spiegel reporter and our Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano:

SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

NAPOLITANO: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

What an excellent idea. If we no longer call people terrorists then we'll no longer be afraid of them as they put the blade to our throats. Let Viewpoint be the first to adopt the new Orwellian phraseology. Suicide bombers and the 9/11 gang are no longer to be referred to as "terrorists" in our brave new world of Obamaspeak, they will henceforth be designated "man-caused disasterists."

I feel safer already. Don't you?

RLC

Academic Tyranny

Reuben Kendall, a mere freshman at the University of Tennessee, has the cheek to challenge the tenured dons of Darwinism to be more tolerant, open-minded, and to actually practice academic freedom. He's asking a lot of people who are among the most intellectually xenophobic dogmatists in our culture, but who knows, maybe some of them will be persuaded by his letter to change their minds about burning him at the stake and decide to just fail him instead.

Here's part of Kendall's letter to the student paper:

As a freshman, I haven't been at UT-Martin for very long. But some problems are so obvious that they don't take very long to notice.

In my studies I quickly realized that when it comes to the theory of evolution, Darwin is the only one who gets to answer questions-or ask them.

I want to question this theory - to test it; check its credentials. And I want honest, thoughtful answers to my questions, not pre-formulated quips and deflections. But I have learned that if I'm not an evolutionist, my questions don't get credited, or even heard.

When I ask why theories such as intelligent design are discredited so off-handedly, I typically hear, "Because intelligent design involves metaphysics, but evolution is based only on facts." Well, I am not so sure.

Obviously, Darwin observed mutation and selection processes within the finch species of the Galapagos. But was he really seeing the extreme mutation and selection that would be required to make a bird out of a dinosaur?

It seems to me Darwin's idea of increasingly specialized life descending from simple, single-celled creatures, was entirely conjectural....

The scientific community assures me that evolution will undoubtedly produce answers to all these problems. But in the meantime, nobody else is allowed to say anything. If you ask me, this isn't academic freedom.

True academic freedom would look like a variety of scientists, with differing opinions, having open and respectful debates about their ideas.

It would look like evolutionists actually being willing to learn what intelligent design advocates think, instead of dismissing them off-hand as religious fanatics or Creationists.

What a quaint idea, that.

What young Mr. Kendall is finding out is that many academics are only in favor of the free exchange of ideas and speech when their ideas are in the minority and out of power. Then they are all about the First Amendment to which they pay homage at every opportunity. Once they prevail in the political struggle, however, and obtain the power to stifle dissent, they'll do it faster than you can say "academic tyranny."

This is a time-honored tactic, especially among leftists. The left uses free elections to get their people ensconced in power and then ban meaningful elections. They use a free press to get their ideas propagated and then, once they're able, they shut down the free press. They employ public demonstrations to weaken the authority of the ruling bureaucracy, and once those rulers are toppled the left prohibits demonstrations. They use the law to erode the social structure they despise and once they're in power they pervert the courts and use them to punish political opponents.

But perhaps there's another, less malign, reason Mr. Kendall meets with silence and deflections when he poses his questions to his professors. Perhaps many instructors don't want a free and open discussion with a knowledgeable student because they simply fear their Darwinism will look lame to the rest of the class and, by extension, so will they.

It's a less malign reason for suppressing students like Mr. Kendall, but it's just as inexcusable.

RLC

Imprisoned in Your Body

I came across a report published last October that sent a chill up my spine. Researchers have confirmed something I had long feared. People in "comas" are sometimes minimally conscious and able to experience pain. They have no way, however, to communicate their suffering to those around them. It's thus quite possible that Terri Schiavo - and others in similar straits - suffered terribly when she was deprived of water and nourishment and essentially starved to death in 2005.

Imagine being aware, if only somewhat, of what is going on around you - imagine being in terrible discomfort - but also being unable to signal your discomfort to anyone or to do anything at all to alleviate it. You would be imprisoned in your body, and your body would be a torture chamber.

The report begins with this:

Do patients who survive a severe brain injury but fail to recover speech or non-verbal communication perceive pain? After their remarkable publication where they showed that a patient in a vegetative state in reality was conscious, scientists at the University of Li�ge (ULg) were able to tackle the very difficult issue of pain perception in coma survivors.

The Coma Science Group of the Cyclotron Research Centre and Neurology Department of the ULg used PET scanning to measure minimally conscious and vegetative patients' brain activation in response to noxious stimulation. After comparing results obtained in the different patient groups with those in healthy volunteers who could communicate it felt painful they concluded that minimally conscious patients must feel pain despite being unable to tell their environment. Hence, these patients should receive pain-killers, the authors concluded.

This study has major ethical and therapeutical consequences also with regard to end-of-life decisions in these challenging but vulnerable patient populations.

This last sentence is, of course, an understatement.

RLC

A New Counterculture

When I was coming of age in the sixties there was among the young a movement of estrangement from the established seats of authority in government, entertainment, education, and even in the family. It was called the "counter-culture," and it expressed the normal desire of the young to write their own Declaration of Independence from the "oppressive" regimes of previous generations. It was often incoherent and self-indulgent, but not always.

The counter-culture rejected what they saw (sometimes rightly) as the hypocrisies and phoniness of their elders, and they chafed at the attempt of the older generation to inculcate those values into the young without being able to give a plausible justification of the standards they sought to impose.

Today those who once fancied themselves as counter-cultural comprise, in fact, the establishment. They dominate the film industry, the major television networks, the schools, and newsprint outlets. They control the Congress, the White House and large swaths of the judiciary. It's now their values that are being imposed on the next generation. What are those values?

Paradoxically they're a blend of both libertarianism and authoritarianism. In matters of personal ethics the former sixties rebels endorse a kind of moral laissez-faire. Sex, family, drugs, religion are all matters of personal taste. At the same time, certain other matters require strict conformity to the prevailing attitudes of the establishment. On questions such as gay marriage, abortion, George Bush, Darwinism, illegal immigration, capitalism, the military, etc. there's enormous pressure to conform one's opinions to the consensus establishment views.

During the sixties the more thoughtful among the young rebels realized that taking over the country required patience, time and perseverance, but they also knew that the mass of Americans were too apathetic about anything that really mattered to take notice of what was going on in the culture around them. Thus, they were confident that, like the slowly boiling water gradually overcoming the frog, they could gradually gain hold of the levers of cultural power until it was too late for a torpid "silent majority" to do anything about it.

Jeffrey Kuhner gives us a concise adumbration of what happened:

Since the 1960s, the radical left has sought to transform America by its "long march through the institutions." It has succeeded.

In fact, antiwar liberals simply followed the program outlined by Italian Leninist Antonio Gramsci, who advocated the theory of "cultural hegemony." Gramsci argued for an incremental socialism. He stressed that the key to winning political power lay not in seizing the economic means of production, but in capturing society's commanding cultural organs. This way the left could relentlessly mold public opinion and indoctrinate the youth. He predicted that, once the left attained cultural hegemony, the state would fall into its hands - like a ripe fruit.

President Obama's electoral victory represents the culmination of the left's march to power. Mr. Obama deftly exploited numerous advantages - a weak opponent, a fawning media, a financial crisis and a demoralized, fractured Republican Party. But the cultural groundwork had been laid for decades.

Mr. Obama is an anti-capitalist, anti-family and anti-American leftist. And here is what most conservatives do not understand: Large swathes of the American electorate don't care.

Precisely so, but the time is auspicious for the emergence of another counterculture, one which opposes the established political power structure, one which challenges its values and forces it to defend its ideas. The modern counterculture, the modern underground, will embrace not the hedonism and nihilism of the sixties and seventies, but rather the traditional virtues and values upon which this nation was founded.

It took more than fifty years for us to get where we are, and it will take time to undo that history, but if you're young and passionate for a return to the principles of individual freedom, excellence, and achievement, if you're eager to work to return our culture to a position of respect for both faith and family, the years ahead could be very exciting.

RLC

Leftist Ideology Trumps Competence

There are dozens of excellent jurists out there that President Obama could nominate to various judgeships. Indeed, President Bush nominated many of them only to have them languish awaiting confirmation by a Democratic senate in no hurry to seat judges appointed by the nefarious George Bush.

So, who does Barack Obama, after having promised us that competency would be his chief concern in all his appointments, make his first pick to fill an appellate court vacancy? Let Wendy Long at National Review Online explain:

As reported by the New York Times this morning, the first Obama federal Circuit Court of Appeals nominee is "moderate" David Hamilton of Indiana, to be nominated this week to the 7th Circuit.

It's interesting that this is what Obama and the New York Times call a "moderate": Hamilton has a history as a hard-left political activist, and his choice signals that Obama does intend to push extreme liberals onto the bench and politicize the courts as we've never seen before.

Hamilton was a fundraiser for ACORN (nice ACORN payback, Mr. President) and served as vice president for litigation and a board member of the Indiana ACLU. In 1994, when President Clinton nominated him to the district court, the ABA rated him as 'not qualified,' apparently because of his almost purely political (as opposed to legal and judicial) experience.

Interestingly, he is also the brother-in-law of perhaps the hardest left radical Obama nominee to the Department of Justice, Dawn Johnsen.

Beginning to notice a pattern here?

Indeed. Let's hope that the appointment of Mr. Hamilton is an aberration and that with the President's future appointees judicial competence will not be trumped by far left political views. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has as yet given us little reason to be optimistic that this will be so.

RLC

Hypocrisy or Buffoonery?

If the antics of our congressional poobahs were made into a television series it would quickly become a comedy classic. Take the reaction to the $450 million of executive bonuses paid by AIG after they had taken $173 billion of taxpayer money. Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the gang are in high dudgeon, and Senator Dodd is threatening to levy a tax on the bonuses that would essentially confiscate them.

Set aside the dubious constitutional issues raised by threats by the state to legislatively target specific, individual, private citizens. Set aside the faux surprise of the President and congressional Democrats, many of whom knew these bonuses were coming for months if not longer. The part of this that earns our august leaders the Oscar for best comedy of the week is that it turns out that it's Chris Dodd himself who greased the skids for the bonuses in the first place.

Jim Meyer at Newsmax reports:

Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd on Monday criticized the bonuses given to executives of American International Group Inc. and suggested that the government could tax the recipients to recoup some or all of the payouts.

But it was Dodd who inserted language - known as the Dodd amendment - in the $787 billion stimulus bill that allowed all bonuses awarded before February 11, 2009, to be paid to AIG executives. That very amendment, which is now law, is now the chief hurdle to government officials who want to recover that money.

The amendment was meant to restrict executive pay for bailed-out banks, but it also included the exception for "contractually obligated bonuses agreed on or before Feb. 11, 2009."

Senator Dodd is, of course, denying that he ever did such a thing:

Dodd is telling reporters that his original language was changed in committee and he is not to blame. "When the language went to the conference and came back, there was different language," he told Fox News. "I can tell you this much, when my language left the Senate, it did not include it (the exception). When it came back, it did."

But his demurrals aren't persuasive. The bill went through so fast nobody had time to change much of anything in it:

Early Thursday evening, though, Democrats were at a loss to explain how and why the Dodd amendment was altered. Much of the stimulus bill was rushed through Congress with little opportunity to read or study exactly what was in it, despite frequent GOP requests to do exactly that.

No matter. When it comes to protecting our hard earned tax dollars few rush to the ramparts with more alacrity than Senator Dodd:

Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, thundered on Monday: "This is another outrageous example of executives - including those whose decisions were responsible for the problems that caused AIG's collapse - enriching themselves at the expense of taxpayers."

Incredibly, Dodd has now demanded a full briefing from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury on why "clauses weren't attached to the four AIG bailouts to halt bonuses," according to the New York Daily News. "Why wasn't the Fed putting conditionality [on the bailouts the] four different times they provided resources to AIG?" Dodd asked.

Well, it's because the Senator's amendment made it completely legal for AIG to do exactly what it did. Perhaps we can understand the Senator's motive for permitting those bonuses if we recall that:

Dodd is the largest single recipient of 2008 campaign donations from AIG, with $103,100, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was more than presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain got, and nearly three times the $35,965 Sen. Hillary Clinton received.

Does this sound familiar? Senator Dodd takes the money with one hand and inserts the amendment with the other. Now the bonuses are actually awarded and Senator Dodd acts as if he's shocked and scandalized that AIG did exactly what he empowered them to do.

This certainly smells like politics as usual here in this golden age of Hope and Change.

RLC

Do Conservatives (Or Liberals) Love People?

In his much ballyhooed speech before the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) a week or so ago, Rush Limbaugh made the claim that "conservatives love people" - and everyone cheered. Actually, they cheered or laughed every time Rush exhaled so that doesn't mean much, but I thought his statement was a bit odd - mostly, I guess, because I'm not sure what he meant by it.

Did Rush mean that conservatives love people as individuals or did he mean that they love humanity in general? Liberals, too, often profess a love for mankind, but it's hard to credit their professions of love for their fellow man after they spent the last eight years heaping enormous dollops of hatred and contempt upon George Bush, Dick Cheney and everyone else associated with their administration.

Anyway, I think both Rush and the liberals are blowing smoke when they talk about their love for people.

After all, how do they define love? Is it an affection or fondness they feel toward others? Or is it, as I think it should be defined, a commitment to treat the other with dignity, respect, and kindness regardless of how we feel toward them? If it's the former then the self-professed lovers of mankind are being disingenuous. No one feels affection for everybody. If it's the latter, then both Rush and the liberal humanists are just kidding themselves and us: Rush certainly doesn't treat Bill Clinton or Barack Obama with dignity, respect, or kindness and the liberals certainly don't treat George Bush in particular, or conservatives in general, that way.

Dostoyevsky puts his finger on the problem when in his masterwork The Brothers Karamazov he quotes Father Zossima recounting the words of an acquaintance.

The old priest recounts the story of a disillusioned doctor who had great dreams of universal love but bitter disappointments in dealing with the real thing. "I love humanity," he said, "but the more I love humanity in general, the less I love people in particular." While his dreams portray visions of saving humankind, in his daily life the good doctor can't stand the people around him. "I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom." The slightest irritation rattles the poor man's nerves. He bristles at the way someone talks, sneers at the way someone walks or wheezes and can barely tolerate the manner of someone's dress or bearing. "In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me."

French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre put the same idea somewhat differently in his play No Exit which he concludes with the claim that hell is other people.

At any rate, I think that any claim to a universal love for humanity should be greeted with a tincture of suspicion until we're told precisely what is meant by "love." I'm doubtless too much a cynic, but I really have difficulty believing that people who despise particular individuals really love humanity in general, even in the abstract.

RLC

Outrage

Senator Charles Grassley is so outraged over the AIG bonuses that he wants the execs to either "quit or kill themselves." Representative Barney Frank is fuming about "rewarding incompetence." The cause of their anger is that AIG gave millions in bonuses to top executives after receiving billions of dollars of taxpayer bailout money. We should all be outraged as well, but not just at AIG.

We should be outraged that congress irresponsibly wrote the TARP legislation in such a way as to put no restrictions on how the money would be spent.

We should be outraged that congress irresponsibly pressured financial institutions to make loans to people who had no way to pay them back, thus precipitating the mess we're in.

We should be outraged that congress votes themselves outstanding health insurance, retirement benefits (they're vested after only five years of service at age 62), and a hefty salary ($174,000 for rank and file members) with automatic pay raises, all from the public purse.

We should be outraged that congress puts hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful earmarks in appropriations bills that are often little more than ways to reward supporters back home.

It's certainly arrogant and disgraceful that AIG executives accepted those bonuses (The company was apparently required by contract to give them), but no more disgraceful than the behavior of our political leadership in Washington who abuse their power everyday by taking money from taxpayers and using it, either directly or indirectly, for their own personal gain.

Barack Obama promised he would end this sort of politics, but so far from ending it he's simply turned out to be an enabler of it. That should outrage us, too.

RLC

Rand's Villains

Yaron Brook, the president of the Ayn Rand Institute explains in the Wall Street Journal why he believes the late Ms Rand is as relevant today as ever.

Mr. Brook asks:

Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state? Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote "affordable housing," which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

The message is always the same: "Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good." But Rand said this message is wrong -- selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean exploiting others � la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness -- that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest -- she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism -- and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention -- and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

I think I'd want to quibble just a bit. I think Ayn Rand's atheism is simply wrong and thus the egoism and sexual morality she derives from it are wrong. Nevertheless, her analysis, especially in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, of the great harm done by a collectivist government bent on redistributing wealth by seizing it from those who create it and giving it to those who create nothing is as trenchant today as it was when her books first appeared in the late forties and fifties. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid could have been lifted right out of the pages of either of these novels. They're perfect avatars of Rand's villains.

RLC

Friendless

Jason writes to tell me that an essay by Matt Labash in The Weekly Standard reveals much in common between Labash and me. Labash says:

Look at the outer shell--the parachute pants, the piano-key tie, the fake tuxedo T-shirt--and you might mistake me for a slave to fashion. Do not be deceived. Early adoption isn't my thing. I much prefer late adoption, that moment when the trend-worshipping sheeple who have early-adopted drive the unsustainable way of life I so stubbornly cling to ever so close to the edge of obsolescence, that I've no choice but to follow. This explains why I bought cassette tapes until 1999, why I wouldn't purchase a DVD player until Blockbuster cashiered their VHS stock. Toothpaste? I use it now that it's clear it's here to stay.

So I'm not inflexible. But there is one promise I've made to myself. And that is that no matter how long I live, no matter how much pressure is exerted, no matter how socially isolated I become, I will never, ever join Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that like so many things that have menaced our country (the Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every crevice of society.

Labash's essay is pretty funny, but I empathize completely with his complaint. I just can't see the point of being "friends" with hundreds of people you don't know. It'd be different if you had something significant to say to each other, but Facebook dialogue is usually so banal it makes chat room conversation sound like a seminar at the Aspen Institute.

Besides, I don't get enough sleep as it is, I don't need to be up half the night trying to keep up with the goings on among five hundred of my closest friends. I'm perfectly happy to be the last person in America who is "friendless."

Gosh, I just realized this post sounds like something that was written on Facebook.

RLC

Good for the Goose

Michael Egnor corrects the muddled thinking of Timothy Sandefur. Sandefur argues that Darwinism should be taught in schools because it's science and intelligent design should not be taught because it's religion. Sandefur fails to see the special pleading in this, and Egnor points it out to him:

I believe that teaching public schoolchildren that the first two chapters of Genesis are literally true as science is unconstitutional, because it would constitute teaching a particular form of theistic religion on the public dime. I also believe that teaching public schoolchildren and students that...

The diversity of life [all life] on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments...

or

By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life superfluous. ... Darwin's theory of evolution, followed by Marx's materialistic (even if inadequate or wrong) theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism--in short, to much of science--that has since been the stage of most Western thought.

or

Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. This is unconstitutional, because it is teaching atheism on the public dime.

I believe that teaching schoolchildren about intelligent design (which is not young earth creationism) is constitutional, because it is intrinsically part of the scientific debate about biological origins. It is part of the debate because intelligent design and Darwinism are affirmative and negative answers to the same scientific question: is there teleology in biology?

The Darwinian assertion of unguided processes is meaningless unless lack of unguidedness - design - can be tested scientifically. If a scientific question can meaningfully be answered in the negative, then there must be the logical possibility of answering the question in the affirmative. If intelligent design isn't science, then Darwinism can't be tested empirically, and is merely dogma.

This is a point we've made here many times. If the claim that natural processes alone are adequate to explain living things is scientific then the denial of that claim is also scientific, and the denial of that claim is the core assertion of intelligent design.

It is, moreover, simply false to assume that intelligent design is religious because the designer it implies must be God. It certainly does not have to be God, but even if it did that does not make it religious. God-talk is not necessarily religious. Seeking to discover the nature of ultimate reality has religious implications, as does the claim that the ultimate reality is space, time and matter, but it's not itself religious. It's philosophical.

It is also philosophically purblind to try to keep ID out of public schools because it entails a designer which could be God, but to allow Darwinian theories to be taught which entail that a designer is not necessary. Surely, the claim that an intelligent designer is not necessary to account for the world is a religious claim and anything which implies it, as Darwinism does, has no place in a public school - unless the counterclaim that natural processes are inadequate, by themselves, to account for the world is also permitted.

RLC

Darwin's Unfortunate Racial Views

Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent wonders why people hold Charles Darwin in such high esteem. Of course he was hugely influential and gave us some wonderful insights into evolution, but the man was a racist, says O'Leary.

I sometimes think that Darwin's racism is a bit overstated, but then again he did say this:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."

It sounds like something one might read in Mein Kampf. Imagine if a seminal intelligent design theorist, say William Dembski, were found to have written something like that. Would we celebrate his birthday? Would those in the academy who called themselves "Dembskiists" not be energetically flagellated at every opportunity by their academic peers? How do you suppose the media would respond? Never mind, no need to answer.

Anyway, O'Leary has issued a challenge to Darwinists to "divorce" themselves from old Charles. I doubt she's holding her breath.

RLC

Fact-Checking the AG

Attorney General Eric Holder has taken a lot of heat for his speech in which he called the United States a "nation of cowards" about race. Not only was his speech regarded by many as insulting it was sadly misinformed, as when he said this:

On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.

Abigail Thernstrom points out that this statement just doesn't square with the facts. Writing at NRO she notes:

A little fact-checking is in order. Saturdays and Sundays looked quite different even less than 50 years ago. In 1964 only 18 percent of whites said they had black friends; the figure today is 87 percent. Raise the bar to "a fairly close personal friend" and the proportion jumps from a mere 9 percent in 1975 to 75 percent in 2005. The share of blacks with close white friends has soared from 21 percent to 82 percent over that same period.

We don't have much in the way of historical data on interracial dating because, not so long ago, the figure would have been too low for pollsters to bother tabulating. But we do know that in 1963 only 10 percent of whites approved of it. In 2006, however, a Washington Post/Kaiser poll found that 59 percent of black men and 41 percent of black women had dated someone who is white. And 41 percent of white women and 36 percent of white men had crossed the racial-dating divide. Today, the number of black-white marriages is up to almost half a million - still low, but a steep rise over the last 40 years. Presumably, these couples generally spend Saturdays and Sundays together.

Holder says that on the weekends blacks and whites lead separate lives. That's not so easy to do, given the racial composition of many American neighborhoods. Half a century ago, only 20 percent of whites reported having black neighbors; today the figure is above 60 percent. Blacks, on average, live in communities that are only half black. Do blacks and whites living in close proximity never chat about common concerns - the schools, the traffic, and the life of their kids in and out of school? Do the whites who voted for Barack Obama refuse to talk to the blacks who live on their street?

There's much else in her excellent essay to reward the reader. Those who nodded either in assent or dissent when they read Holder's remarks should read it.

RLC

Card Check

Jim Wallis at Sojourners draws the astonishing conclusion from the fact that corporate CEOs have obscene incomes, especially relative to their employees, that we should therefore rectify this unfairness by doing away with secret ballots in union elections. Or something like that. How the one follows from the other Mr. Wallis doesn't explain, but he supports "card check" (Employee Free Choice Act) which is essentially a system for preventing employees from casting a confidential vote on whether or not they want to organize a union. The EFCA would allow union organizers to know exactly which employees oppose unionizing a particular business, and what they would do with this information is not hard to imagine.

Card check is an abridgement of the common-sense principle that an election can be fair only if the votes are secret. Otherwise there is the ugly possibility of coercion, intimidation, and retribution. To give an idea of how radical and antithetical to basic freedoms the measure is, one of the most liberal Democrats in modern history, George McGovern, took out an ad opposing it.

The EFCA is being pushed by the Democrat-controlled congress, but it's beginning to look as if this particular assault on American freedoms will falter. At least for now and no thanks to Mr. Wallis.

RLC

Buyer's Remorse

Another victim of candidate Obama's seductions comes forward to announce her buyer's remorse. Here's Megan McArdle at The Atlantic:

Our sister publication asks analysts whether the administration's economic forecasts are too optimistic. They would have gotten a more interesting discussion if their query had been "Is the Pope Catholic?" Of course they're too optimistic. In fact, the word optimistic is too optimistic. A better choice might have been "insane". Like Greg Mankiw, I would love to find a sucker investor who is willing to take the other end of a bet that both growth and revenue will fall short of the administration's predictions.

Having defended Obama's candidacy largely on his economic team, I'm having serious buyer's remorse. Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. Meanwhile, the administration has clearly prioritized a stimulus package that will not work without fixing the banks over, um, fixing the banking system. Unlike most fiscal conservatives, I'm not mad at him for trying to increase the size of the government; that's, after all, what he got elected promising to do. But he also promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition of the stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut.

The budget numbers are just one more blow to the credibility he worked hard to establish during the election. Back then, people like me handed him kudos for using numbers that were really much less mendacious than the general run of candidate program promises. Now he's building a budget on the promise that this recession will be milder than average with growth merely dipping to 1.2% this year and returning to trend in 2010. Isn't there anyone at BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) who could have filled him in on the unemployment figures, or at Treasury who could have explained what a disproportionate impact finance salaries have on tax revenue? These numbers . . . well, I can't really fully describe them on a family blog. But he has now raced passed Bush in the Delusional Budget Math Olympics.

Like so many others who thought that, despite Obama's record as an extreme leftist, he would really govern from the center because he talked about "hope" and he "seemed" so reasonable and sophisticated and everyone governs from the center anyway, Ms McArdle is without excuse. Last November was like Spring Break for just over half of American voters. Normally sober and sensible people found themselves transmogrified into irrational, irresponsible, self-deluded hedonists, and elected a man with a r�sum� that could fit on the back of a postage stamp simply because he spoke well. Now as the voters emerge from the haze and torpor of their dionysian bacchanal they can't believe they could have been so stupid.

There'll be many more Megan McArdles to come, no doubt, and lots more reasons to feel "stupid."

RLC

Biology 101

Maybe the reason many Americans support embryonic stem cell research is because they have no more idea what an embryo is than does former president Bill Clinton. What the ex-president doesn't seem to grasp, and for all I know the current president doesn't understand either (though it probably wouldn't make any difference in his decision to rescind George Bush's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research even if he did), is that an embryo wouldn't be an embryo had it not already been fertilized:

How does it happen that people this benighted are allowed to make critical life and death decisions for millions? How did it happen that an ostensible "journalist," a medical man who had been considered for the post of Surgeon General in Obama's cabinet, didn't politely correct President Clinton after about the twentieth time he repeated the gaffe?

As an aside, can you imagine the media hilarity that would have ensued had George Bush said something this ill-informed?

RLC

The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design

Thomas B. Fowler has written an outstanding and disinterested analysis of Intelligent Design theory for Catholic Culture. It is, for the most part, very accessible to those with a modicum of philosophical and scientific background knowledge and I recommend it to anyone who wishes to gain a better understanding of the scientific status of ID and an appreciation its strengths and weaknesses.

Fowler also does a fine job of summarizing ID's chief competitors including Creationism, Neo-Darwinism, and Meta-Darwinism.

His conclusion gives us a good idea of the terrain he covers in the main body of the discussion:

Intelligent Design has been proposed as a new scientific hypothesis about the possibility of certain types of transitions occurring naturally. The thrust of its proposal is that biological (and other) entities may be partitioned into groups or classes within which transitions are possible, but between which they are not. This is an empirically testable hypothesis, one which contradicts a key assumption of Neo-Darwinism. As yet, only preliminary steps have been taken to formulate and test this hypothesis: Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's Design Filter. So no definitive statement about its truth can be made as yet.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Intelligent Design school will be able to reach its goals; nature may not be the way the theory postulates that it is. The notion of an "Intelligent Designer," for which the school is perhaps best known, is not part of its scientific basis, but rather an inference from it, or rather, an inference about reality based on the physical limitations in nature that the theory proposes. The school is, in some ways, its own worst enemy by not clearly distinguishing its scientific hypotheses from the extra-scientific inferences it draws.

Intelligent Design does not deny naturalism - that is, it does not require science to begin utilizing non-natural forces and entities. It does dispute metaphysical naturalism, which asserts that all phenomena can be explained by science and that there is no other reality. But the latter assertion is a metaphysical inference from the former, which is itself an extra-scientific assumption. The common attacks on Intelligent Design, accusing it of being Creationism in disguise, a Trojan Horse, and of injecting theology into science, are completely baseless. Its critics should therefore concentrate on the scientific issues raised, ignore the metaphysics and eschew the propaganda arguments, however satisfying these may be. But Intelligent Design must also deliver on the science.

Thanks to Bradford at Telic Thoughts for the link.

RLC

Heads Should Roll

Camille Paglia is a fiercely independent gadfly - usually. In this piece she gives us an inadvertant glimpse of an interesting phenomenon emerging among our chattering classes. People who are paying attention are growing increasingly disenchanted with the Obama administration, but they're aiming their barbs everywhere but at the man ultimately responsible for their distress. Like some Civil War general Obama sits tall in the saddle on the battlefield while the opposition directs its fire, strangely enough, at everyone in his army but him.

Those who fell in love with candidate Obama during the campaign cannot bring themselves to believe that they made a misjudgment. That would mean they'd have to admit that those rubes on right-wing talk radio were more politically perspicacious than they were.

So, rather than admit that to themselves, like a lovestruck teenager they simply refuse to see what was, and is, in plain sight about the guy. It was clear during the campaign that Barack Obama was a left-wing radical who was going to do precisely what he has done. The surprise is that people are surprised.

In the midst of their swoon a lot of people refused to believe that he could be anything but the best thing that's happened to this country since the Bill of Rights. They were so hostile to the Bush/Republican agenda McCain embodied that Obama was, by comparison, a demi-god in their starry eyes. They became so emotionally invested in him that now they find it difficult to think that anything he does is wrong, and they certainly don't believe that he might have misshapen motives for anything he does. Like the teenager whose boyfriend can do no wrong, no matter how much wrong he does, they're smitten with infatuation, and it's taking time for the pixie dust he's sprinkled in their eyes to wear off.

Paglia's essay is a good example. She faults everyone around Obama for the series of embarrassments he has suffered these first months of his presidency, but she doesn't fault him. Anyway, read her essay. Other than her eagerness to absolve the President of recent gaffes and clumsiness, it's a good summary of this administration's maladroitness.

Thanks to Jason for the link.

RLC

A Trillion Dollars

Bill sends along a link to a page that helps us grasp the sheer magnitude of the money our government is spending (and the debt it's piling up). Check it out.

RLC

Neither Rush Nor Frum

Patterico, a well-known conservative blogger, explains why neither Rush Limbaugh nor David Frum speak for him. It's a calm, cogent analysis and one with which I largely agree.

RLC

Unprincipled

Eight Republicans voted to pass the pork-laden $410 billion spending bill yesterday and seven of them had millions of dollars of earmarks in the bill themselves. This is really quite beyond loathesome. It's precisely the sort of unprincipled behavior that cost the GOP congressional control in 2004, and it's the sort of behavior which will prevent them from recovering the voter's trust in 2010.

The voters won't punish Democrats for this sort of recklessness because when Democrats vote to waste taxpayers' money they're just doing what Democrats do, and no one expects or demands of them that they behave responsibly. Republicans, on the other hand, are supposed to have a higher ethical standard and be more fiscally mature.

Kudos to the three Democrat senators who did vote against it - Russ Feingold, Evan Bayh, and Claire McCaskill bucked their party leadership and their president and voted nay. The bill passed nevertheless, on the strength of the support of the eight Republicans.

RLC

Creeping Secularization

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) results for 2008 have been released and the summary contains some interesting data. Those who suspect that our nation is growing increasingly secular will have their (pick one) hopes or fears confirmed. The survey collected answers from 54,461 respondents. Here's an overview:

The American population self-identifies as predominantly Christian but Americans are slowly becoming less Christian. 86% of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76% in 2008.

The historic Mainline churches and denominations have experienced the steepest declines while the non-denominational Christian identity has been trending upward particularly since 2001.

The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.

34% of American adults considered themselves "Born Again or Evangelical Christians" in 2008.

The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.

The "Nones" (no stated religious preference, atheist, or agnostic) continue to grow, though at a much slower pace than in the 1990s, from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, to 15.0% in 2008.

Asian Americans are substantially more likely to indicate no religious identity than other racial or ethnic groups.

One sign of the lack of attachment of Americans to religion is that 27% do not expect a religious funeral at their death.

Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).

America's religious geography has been transformed since 1990. Religious switching along with Hispanic immigration has significantly changed the religious profile of some states and regions. Between 1990 and 2008, the Catholic population proportion of the New England states fell from 50% to 36% and in New York it fell from 44% to 37%, while it rose in California from 29% to 37% and in Texas from 23% to 32%.

Overall the 1990-2008 ARIS time series shows that changes in religious self-identification in the first decade of the 21st century have been moderate in comparison to the 1990s, which was a period of significant shifts in the religious composition of the United States.

This chart shows that when asked about the existence of God less than 70 percent of Americans now believe in the traditional theological concept of a personal God. This question was not asked in 1990 and 2001 so it's hard to draw conclusions from it. Nevertheless, if it is the case that fewer people believe in the existence of a personal God today than did twenty years ago, I wonder if this isn't due to a failure on the part of many churches to teach their young that Christianity is a more rational and coherent worldview than any of the alternatives. In many churches young people rarely get much instruction, especially from knowledgeable teachers, after they move beyond their elementary years. Thus, when challenges arise many of these kids are as vulnerable as 17th century Native-Americans exposed to European diseases against which they had no immunity. Their "beliefs" just get wiped out.

RLC

Overwhelmed

This is not at all reassuring. The Telegraph U.K.,trying to put the best face on the administration's dissing of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week, tacitly concludes that the president is overwhelmed by his duties and is simply not up to the job. I don't know if their assessment is accurate, but if it is, it should surprise no one. President Obama came to the White House with zero executive and administrative experience. That he feels overwhelmed is perfectly understandable, even if dismaying, given that he's never been in a position where he's had to keep so many bowling pins in the air before:

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been "overwhelmed" by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama's inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president's surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk.

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama's inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to "even fake an interest in foreign policy".

The American source said: "Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.

"That was the gamble these guys made at the front end of this presidency and I think they're finding it a hard thing to do everything."

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment." The apparent lack of attention to detail by the Obama administration is indicative of what many believe to be Mr Obama's determination to do too much too quickly.

The Sunday Telegraph understands that one of Mr Obama's most prominent African American backers, whose endorsement he spent two years cultivating, has told friends that he detects a weakness in Mr Obama's character.

"The one real serious flaw I see in Barack Obama is that he thinks he can manage all this," the well-known figure told a Washington official, who spoke to this newspaper. "He's underestimating the flood of things that will hit his desk." A Democratic strategist, who is friends with several senior White House aides, revealed that the president has regularly appeared worn out and drawn during evening work sessions with senior staff in the West Wing and has been forced to make decisions more quickly than he is comfortable.

This all may be exaggerated or it may be accurate, who knows? We do know, though, that President Obama likes to compare himself to Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but both of these men struggled with much worse than Mr. Obama is facing, and FDR was further handicapped with the after-effects of polio. If it is true that President Obama feels overwhelmed now what will he feel like if a terrorist attack is thrown into the mix or if the media should turn on him and subject him to the same relentless daily criticism to which George W. Bush was treated. It'll doubtless be enough to drive him back to the cigarettes.

The nation's voters took an accomplished high school quarterback and put him directly into the Super Bowl. The results have so far been predictably unpretty. The White House is no place for on-the-job training - not even for a candidate who can seduce a nation with mellifluous promises of Hope and Change. Nevertheless, we're still only in the opening minutes of the game. Things might get much better for Barack Obama just as they did for Bill Clinton after a shaky start. Or, it may be that the President is indeed out of his depth, in which case we're in for a turbulent four years.

RLC

Credit Where It's Due

Want to know why it happened that the financial industry was allowed to conduct the massive ponzi scheme that eventuated in the collapse of both it and the rest of our economy? The no frills explanation can be found here.

As Steven Hayward says at No Left Turns, if the Republicans could turn this into a 30 second commercial they'd sweep the congressional elections in 2010.

RLC

Corruptocrats

Hot Air's Jason Mattera conducts another on the spot interview, this time with congressional "corruptocrat" Charles Rangel the chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, which writes the tax laws for the nation. Congressman Rangel writes the laws the rest of us must follow but doesn't pay taxes himself, at least not all of them.

Mattera asks him why, and Rangel's response is interesting. Apparently he doesn't think it's a citizens' business how his tax dollars are being spent by our congressional kleptocracy:

See the link for more examples of Mattera's fine work.

While we're at it you might want to watch how citizens get treated by their aldermen in Chicago. Warning: R-rated language from the alderman:

See Michelle Malkin for an explanation of what's going on here.

By the way, in the spirit of "moral equivalency" I should say that Republicans probably act the same way toward their constituents - or at least I should say it if I could find any examples of it. As far as I know, however, there aren't any. Can anybody help me?

RLC

Future Tech

Apparently this is on the way:

And I'm still stuck on trying to figure out how to use my cell-phone.

RLC

Take Your Pick

Charles Krauthammer believes that President Obama is intentionally deceiving the American public in trying to convince us that the root cause of our economic woes is the lack of nationalized health care, weak schools, and dependence upon petroleum. Here's the crux of Krauthammer's column:

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

So far from seeking to solve the current crisis, Krauthammer implies, the president is seeking to exploit it to promote an ideological agenda that destroys capitalism and establishes socialism. Whether this is true or not, it's certainly the case that our financial crisis has nothing to do with schools, health care, or energy. By focusing on these things rather than the banking and stock market collapse Obama exposes himself either to Krauthammer's withering charge of willful deceit or the more charitable charge of gross incompetence.

RLC

Mano a Mano

Two titans in the field of philosophy, Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett, squared off in an exchange at the recent meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Prosblogion has a minute by minute account of the exchange recorded by a philosopher in the audience. The account won't be of general interest but will be of interest to those acquainted with the work of either of these well-known scholars.

According to the anonymous and self-described biased recorder (his/her reasons for wishing to remain anonymous are interesting in themselves), Dennett embarrassed himself and Plantinga won the field.

The readers' comments are also worth perusing.

RLC

620 Fewer Hospitals?

A showdown is looming between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration over the pending Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).

When it last was introduced into the legislature, FOCA defined abortion as a "fundamental right" that no government can "deny" or "interfere with." That language, FOCA's opponents warn, would help overturn abortion restrictions such as parental notification, laws banning certain procedures and constraints on federal funding. It would also appear to require hospitals to offer abortions to their patients, even hospitals that believe that killing unborn children is a terrible evil.

There are some 620 Catholic hospitals in the United States. They will either refuse to comply with the law - if it has no exception for conscience - or they will close their doors.

How many jobs will this cost? How many suffering patients will be unable to find treatment if the hospitals close down? And for what? So that some leftist ideologues can shove their values down everyone else's throats?

This is not a pro-life/pro-choice issue. Pro-lifers will oppose FOCA, of course, but so, too, should every pro-choicer who has ever argued that a woman should have the right to decide on the basis of her own conscience whether to have an abortion. If the decision to have an abortion is a matter of conscience which should be respected then so, too, is the decision to decline to perform them. FOCA, as it is currently believed to be written, is indeed a flagrantly anti-choice bill.

The Obama administration has already seen the stock market plummet on its watch and with it the retirements of millions of people. Now it is poised to force Catholic hospitals out of business. These are not hopeful trends.

For more on the FOCA showdown see here.

RLC

Mutineers

The most brilliant satirist on the internet, or anywhere, is how the Weekly Standard describes Iowahawk, and surely his latest effort justifies the description. For those who may not be paying much attention a little background is in order. Last year a number of prominent right-leaning journalists spoke rather rapturously of Barack Obama's candidacy and disparagingly of people like Sarah Palin, Joe Werzelbacher (Joe the Plumber) and Rush Limbaugh. In the minds of these mutinous pundits such populist heroes are declassé and faintly disreputable. The newly-elected president then charmed some of them even further by joining them for an exclusive dinner at the home of columnist George Will.

Now Iowahawk takes up his pen to skewer the elitist pretensions of these writers and their mystification and alarm at the influence the "lower classes" have achieved in the party that was once the private domain of the "better breeds." It's an amusing parody and can be read here.

RLC

You're Getting <i>Very</i> Sleepy

Ralph Peters thinks that Obama's speech promising a pullout of all American combat troops from Iraq by the summer of 2010 is "all flash and no bang." Me too.

Peters writes:

Will the 50,000 troops he intends to leave in Iraq, the trainers and maintainers, be forbidden to defend themselves? Are they just going to hang out? If terrorists or the Iranians skunk us, are we just going to ask for more?

We're not going to leave 50,000 support troops in Iraq without combat units to protect them. We'll just ban the word "brigade" and call our shooters "task forces."

Why the rush to get out anyway? American troops are no longer dying in Iraq and they're doing much good preserving stability, training the Iraqis, and rebuilding the country. Perhaps the president simply wants to use them in Afghanistan (or, as is becoming increasingly likely, on the Mexican border), but, as Peters writes, he sounds like he's just trying to mollify the lefties who helped elect him because they understood that he was going to bring our troops home immediately.

Obama's dilemma is this: Iraq is all but won while Afghanistan had been won but is now beginning to slide back toward chaos. If either of those theaters in the war on Islamic terror goes sour there'll be no blaming Bush or the Republicans for the collapse. The American people will see the loss as Obama's fault. He certainly doesn't want that to happen, so his challenge is to appease the left-wing, some of whom would be delighted to see it happen, while doing what he can to preserve the gains made by the Bush administration. And he wants to do all this, presumably, while being careful not to give the Bush administration any credit for those gains.

It'll be interesting to watch how he navigates this tightrope. The trick will be to ignore what he says as he swings the watch back and forth in front of our eyes and soothingly tells us that we're getting sleeeepy. Instead, we need to focus on what he does. As with earmarks, the two could well be very different.

RLC

Re: Good Intentions

Byron has focused my attention on an error in a post on the $900 million that has been proposed for rebuilding Gaza. I assumed the money would be funneled through Hamas and that it would therefore be diverted, at least in part, to fund Hamas' war effort against Israel. I concluded from this that the Obama administration appears more concerned about doing something that looks compassionate than doing something that actually helps the Palestinian people.

As Byron notes, it's not yet clear that Hamas will in fact receive the money. They're apparently jousting with the Palestinian Authority for the funds and the outcome of that contest is still in doubt.

I was hasty to assume that Hamas would almost inevitably control the $900 million, and it was thus unfair, or at least premature, to have assumed that the administration was determined to give away the money regardless who gets it or to what purpose it's ultimately put.

RLC

Ethical Standards and the APA

The culture wars appear to have landed on the desk of the American Philosophical Association. Byron forwards this post by Keith Pavlischek at First Things:

A group of unhappy professional academic philosophers have submitted a petition to the American Philosophical Association. What are they up in arms about? The opening paragraph of the petition tells it all:

"Many colleges and universities require faculty, students, and staff to follow certain 'ethical' standards which prohibit engaging in homosexual acts. Among these institutions are Azusa Pacific University, Belmont University, Bethel College, Biola University, Calvin College, Malone College, Pepperdine University, Westmont College, and Wheaton College. All of these institutions advertised in 'Jobs for Philosophers' between 2006-2009. Further, none of these institutions were listed as censured institutions."

The petition calls on the APA either to "(1) enforce its policy and prohibit institutions that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from advertising in 'Jobs for Philosophers' or [to] (2) clearly mark institutions with these policies as institutions that violate our anti-discrimination policy." One can assume that "marking" these institutions would be to censure them.

But there is a counter-petition signed by a number of notable philosophers, including Alasdair McIntyre, Alvin Plantinga, Germain Grisez, Robert P. George, John M. Finnis, Roger Scruton, and many others. The petition argues:

"Institutions can require their faculty to agree to abide by ethical standards that forbid homosexual acts while not ipso facto discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. The conceptual distinction between a certain kind of act and a disposition to perform that kind of act is one that no philosopher would fail to acknowledge in other ethical contexts. We fail to see why it should be ignored in this one."

And then they turn the tables on the original petitioners accusing them of advocating a policy that itself would discriminate against religious institutions:

"But the policy recommended attempts to segregate and penalize religious institutions for abiding by their long-standing and coherent ethical norms. Moreover, this policy would foster an environment that would encourage discrimination against philosophers whose religious, political, or philosophical convictions lead them to disapprove of homosexual acts."

Most, if not all, of the colleges named in the first petition are religious schools. The signers of that petition are essentially demanding that these schools forfeit their religious convictions about right and wrong conduct or else be penalized by the APA.

This is illustrative of how the culture war works. The goal appears to be to intimidate by creating the expectation that one will be punished, either by law or other sanction, for saying (or even believing) that homosexual behavior is morally problematic. What will be punished next? Opposition to abortion? Euthanasia? Pederasty?

RLC

Mad Money

Jim Cramer is an Obama supporter and, indeed, advocates almost all of the President's agenda for America, but he writes nevertheless that Obama's economic plans are an unmitigated disaster. Cramer is the host of CNBC's financial show Mad Money, and argues that Obama's policies are destroying the retirements and life savings of millions of Americans. In Cramer's view, now is the worst possible time to try to implement Obama's economic agenda of higher taxes and massive spending and borrowing. Here's Cramer talking about his disillusionment on his show:

President Obama got elected because he had a lot of support from an obsequious media during the primaries and presidential campaign. The media rarely held the candidate's feet to the fire and scarcely asked questions which could embarrass him. He will continue to enjoy support from the mid to far left, but a lot of other MSM reporters and pundits are themselves heavily invested in the stock market. As they see the value of their own investments evaporate I suspect many of them are going to become increasingly antagonistic toward this administration and may well begin to ask those hard questions.

One they could start with is what ever happened to Timothy Geithner, the indispensable man we had to have as Secretary of the Treasury no matter how much of a tax cheat he is? Geithner was supposed to have a plan to get us out of this mess, but he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. Is anybody in the administration working on this problem? Does anyone there really care about the stock market?

Thanks to Hot Air for the video link.

RLC

Shattering Illusions

During the presidential campaign a number of left-leaning pro-life folks (Jim Wallis at Sojourners and Douglas Kmiec come to mind) made the argument that Barack Obama was the real pro-life candidate in the race. Despite his consistent record of support for even the most extreme pro-choice positions, Obama's policies, particularly universal health care, would actually result in fewer abortions because they would give poor women the economic means to see their pregnancies through.

Well, this remains to be seen, but his appointment of Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as his Secretary of Health and Human Services is hard to reconcile with the rosy scenarios Sojourners painted for us. My friend Jason links us to an article by George Weigel that illuminates Sebelius' radicalism on this issue. Here's an excerpt:

[Governor Sebelius] has routinely opposed or vetoed several abortion-accountability bills, including medically-supported clinic regulation legislation which she vetoed in both 2003 and 2005. The need for this critical legislation was predicated, in large part, on evidence of shocking conditions in Kansas abortion clinics. For example, two inspections of the same Topeka abortion clinic discovered fetal remains in the same refrigerator as food; a dead rodent in the clinic hallways; overflowing, uncovered disposal bins containing medical waste; unlabeled, pre-drawn syringes with controlled substances in an unlocked refrigerator; improperly labeled and expired medicines; carpeted floors in the surgical procedure room; and visible dirt and disarray throughout the clinic. Dr. Krishna Rajanna, who operated the unsanitary clinic, also consistently violated the practice guidelines for conscious sedation.

Recently, in 2008, she vetoed a measure that would have strengthened the state's existing parental notification law by 1) requiring that any adult accompanying a minor show identification, declare in writing their relationship to the minor, and identify the father of the unborn child; 2) require the minor to show some form of photo identification providing identity and place of residence; and 3) if the minor chooses to seek a judicial waiver, prohibiting any employee of an abortion provider or clinic from assisting her with the requisite court filings and proceedings.

More shocking, however, is her continuing and unyielding support for late-term abortions, including post-viability abortions. Over the past three years she has vetoed measures requiring explicit medical reasons for late-term abortions; requiring abortion providers to report the diagnosis or the nature of the condition which necessitated a post-viability abortion; and permitting injunctive relief for either a completed or about-to-be-performed illegal late-term abortion and adding certain prosecutors (in addition to the Attorney General) to prosecute violations of existing prohibitions on late-term abortions.

Whatever you think about abortion, very few people, other than those who get paid to perform them, wish to see the number of abortions increase. Yet it's hard to see how, with extremists like Sebelius in the president's cabinet, that will be avoided.

RLC

Income Inequality

I was reading Jim Wallis' thoughts on President Obama's budget proposal and was struck by these lines:

The growing inequality in America over decades is a sin of biblical proportions, and it's time to bring our principles of social justice to bear. As columnist E.J. Dionne wrote,

"The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade-long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth. Politicians will say lots of things in the coming weeks, but they should be pushed relentlessly to address the bottom-line question: Do they believe that a fairer distribution of capitalism's bounty is essential to repairing a sick economy? Everything else is a subsidiary issue."

It is that question that should guide our moral audit of the budget. The fundamental moral question in the upcoming budget debate is whether to begin to reverse the rapid and massive increase in American inequality which has grown over the past thirty years -- and has dramatically increased during the past eight. I believe it is time to stop helping the undeserving rich, under the now demonstrably false assertion that this will then benefit the rest of us.

I don't know what to make of this. I don't know how the disparity between today's rich and poor is relevant or meaningful or particularly disturbing. Wealth and poverty are relative. What difference does it make if one person has enough income to be comfortable, but someone else has a hundred times as much? What difference does it make if that gap widens every year as long as the "poorer" person is not regressing in absolute terms. The inequality that Dionne and Wallis should be talking about, and rejoicing in, is the inequality between our contemporary poor and those who were wealthy in almost every other period of human history.

I say they should rejoice because our poor are astonishingly wealthy, at least in material goods, compared to almost everyone else who has ever lived, even the wealthiest people.

A multi-millionaire from a hundred and fifty years ago actually had a lot less and in many ways had it a lot harder than most Americans living below the poverty line have today. They had more and bigger houses than do today's American poor, of course, and lived in safer neighborhoods, but that's about it. Those houses were not air-conditioned and often indifferently heated. The rich didn't have telephones much less cell-phones, so communication was much more difficult. They didn't have electricity, artificial light, refrigeration, television, radio, or reliable plumbing. They couldn't listen to music any time they wanted or watch movies or television news. They didn't have computers or the internet to facilitate communication and learning or video games to entertain them. Their clothes were certainly less comfortable and in many ways more poorly crafted. They couldn't get food, paid for by the taxpayer, by walking to the corner supermarket, where the choices and variety would astonish someone transplanted from the late 1800s. They could afford the best medical and dental care of the day, but the best care was nowhere near as good nor as convenient as what is available today, even to our poor, whose bills are paid by medicaid. The poor today have access to a plethora of medications undreamt of by the wealthy of the 19th century - aspirin, penicillin, novocaine, blood pressure medicine, depression medicine, etc. - all of which make life infinitely better than it was for the rich 150 years ago. Today's poor are much more mobile thanks to public transportation, than were the earlier rich who had to rely on carriages drawn by horses which needed to be maintained. The rich had houses at the beach, but it took lengthy train and carriage rides in hot, dusty uncomfortable conveyances to get there. Poor families today often have access to a car that can get them to the beach for a day's recreation in relative comfort, on excellent highways, and with relative speed.

Relative to the wealthier classes today our poor may seem to have little, but they're immeasurably rich relative to the unfortunate "wealthy" wretches who happened to be born a century and a half ago. Indeed, if somehow a contemporary member of the lower economic classes were transported back 150 years, but able somehow to live like they can live today, their neighbors would marvel at their extravagance and quality of life.

None of this is to say that modern poor people don't have needs that must be addressed, but it is to say that the claim that our system is unjust because there's a gap between rich and poor is hard to credit.

So, the next time someone in your hearing complains about the unfairness of the disparity between rich and poor in this country ask them what it is, exactly, that's unfair about it.

RLC

Diagnosing a Killer

Anyone who has known someone diagnosed with pancreatic cancer knows what a terrible disease this is. Among the most deadly forms of cancer, it has a five-year survival rate of just 5 percent. It's so deadly, in part, because early detection is difficult. There's a high risk of complications if the pancreas is examined directly, so routine inspections for at-risk patients usually are not an option. In fact, only 7 percent of people with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed in the earliest stages of the disease, when the cancer is still confined to the pancreas. More than half of all people with the disease are not diagnosed until the cancer has already metastasized.

Now a new technique is being developed that will help detect this terrible killer while it's still in the early stages and when treatment is more effective. This development could give hope to tens of thousands of people.

Let's hope and pray that it does.

RLC