Who Is He?

Who is Barack Obama? What does he really believe? What is his vision for the nation? Despite having written two books telling us about his life, most people still see him as an enigma and many are skeptical that he really is the moderate pragmatist he has sought to portray himself as since the November elections.

Perhaps he could do much to allay Americans' concerns about him by answering these two questions:

1. What ten books that you've read in the last ten years have been most influential in your personal and political life, and what is it about them that you found most significant to you?

2. What five persons alive or dead do you admire most and why?

We can learn much about a man by knowing the books which have influenced him and the people he admires. It would be very helpful in understanding Mr. Obama if we could see those two lists.

Oil and Water

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy is the latest in an expanding list of world leaders who are clearly disenchanted with the European multicultural experiment. British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also recently acknowledged that attempts to accommodate and integrate large numbers of immigrants have been unsuccessful:

"My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure," Sarkozy admitted in a television interview when asked about the policy which advocates that host societies welcome and foster distinct cultural and religious immigrant groups.

"Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want... a society where communities coexist side by side.

"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," the president added.

"The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women... freedom for little girls to go to school," he said. "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him."

It has been clear for some time that the left's vision of a nation consisting of a mosaic of identities rather than a melting pot in which all people are loyal citizens of the state to which they emigrant was going to lead to balkanization, resentment and tension between factions. Ethnic groups which wish to maintain their cultural identity by living in their own neighborhoods should certainly be free to do so, but this only works if the members of the group respect and share most of the principles upon which the larger society is founded and are willing to acknowledge the authority of the laws of the state.

A group which rejects the founding principles of a nation and refuses to submit to them, demanding their own laws instead, laws which are often completely contrary to the existing law, is on a collision course with the very people who have taken them in. It is as if you were to accept a guest into your home who then proceeded to impose his own ideas on how to manage your household upon you and gets truculent if you don't go along. This is what's happening in many European nations which have welcomed large numbers of Muslim immigrants to their shores. These and their descendents often refuse to assimilate into the larger culture, and wish rather to establish a state within a state in their host country.

Many Muslims and Westerners alike see Islam and Western culture as fundamentally incompatible, like oil and water, and throwing them together and pretending that the result is a beautiful, harmonious mosaic is an act of self-deception. It's more likely to wind up like Sarajevo. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, but that's the way it's turning out in Europe.

If a potential immigrant to this country is unwilling to submit to the United States Constitution, particularly the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, he really should look elsewhere to make his residence. If he finds those freedoms and the emphasis on equality and toleration to be in conflict with his religious beliefs why would he want to come here anyway?

Conceding Good Faith

Justin Paulette is a lawyer who has written a delightful piece on dialoguing with one's political opposites. The essay is titled Conceding Good Faith and is posted at First Things. Elsewhere he quotes Charles Krauthammer's observation that the problem with our political discourse is that conservatives come to the table convinced that liberals are stupid and liberals come believing conservatives are evil. Given that trenchant insight it's little wonder that our conversations so often quickly deteriorate into angry name-calling.

Paulette, though, recounts some instances where he turns those assumptions to rhetorical advantage, and in the process sets a fine example of how we should engage our friends and acquaintances with whom we find ourselves in disagreement.

Here's how he opens:

Meeting friends and family is part of the universally recognized progression of any relationship, and so it was for me while dating a fellow law student in Washington, D.C. Beyond our common career path, we shared very little—I was a conservative, Republican Catholic from the Midwest and she a liberal, atheist Democrat from Massachusetts.

My girlfriend also happened to be a former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, so every few months I tagged along for dinners, birthday parties and social events of the informal “El Sal. Peace Corps Crowd.” They were a well-educated, professional and civic-minded group of white, middle-class young adults. They pursued master’s degrees in international relations with third-world (or, as they corrected me, “developing world”) countries, worked in eco-conscious government agencies such as NOAA, or joined NGOs devoted to global female empowerment.

They were the vanguard foot soldiers of progressive liberalism.

I’d only met one friend-of-the-girlfriend prior to my first evening with the entire crew. She was charming, and found her calling in protecting women’s health by sending glass cooking pots to poor Central American villages in order to reduce open-fire food preparation. We pondered whether her desire for government-mandated price-capping, wage-setting and capital-regulation amounted to communism, and amicably agreed that she was not a militant “brown-shirt” communist, or even a full-blown “red” communist, but rather a befittingly “soft-pink” communist.

The first group dinner was predictably located in an ethnic restaurant in one of the more fashionably hip, socially dynamic quarters of the city. The atmosphere was jovial and the conversation freely swayed between friendly catch-up and political banter. It was early 2003, and I thought it wise to remain politely detached as they excoriated conservative policies, Republican rhetoric, and absolutely everything about George W. Bush. I’d struck up a nice conversation on nothing of significance with a quiet, reserved chap across the table.

The rest of the essay is a very enjoyable, and informative, read although one nagging question never got answered: How did his relationship with a girl with whom he had almost nothing in common turn out?

If you read it you should also read the comments.

Nobody Gets Married Anymore, Mister

In a sobering article in City Journal Gerry Garibaldi puts his finger directly on a major problem with our modern public schools. It's not that they're underfunded, it's not that teachers are not dedicated to teaching, it's that so many of our kids come from dysfunctional homes. To make the problem worse many of them consider the dysfunctionality to be utterly normal.

The specific manifestation of this problem that Garibaldi addresses is the phenomenon of unwed teenage motherhood. As one young girl told him, "Nobody gets married anymore, mister." If our politicians were serious about improving our educational performance and giving urban kids a shot at a decent life they would forget about all their flowery talk about "races to the top" and laptops on every lap and focus their attention on the problem of the disintegrating family. Until the families they come from are healed and healthy, expending money on a child's education will in many cases be a waste of resources.

Garibaldi, a former Hollywood screenwriter turned journalism teacher, sets the stage for his essay, which is hard to stop reading once you've started, with this:

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children — all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

My first encounter with teen pregnancy was a girl named Nicole, a pretty 15-year-old who had rings on every finger and great looped earrings and a red pen with fluffy pink feathers and a heart that lit up when she wrote with it. Hearts seemed to be on everything—in her signature, on her binder; there was often a little plastic heart barrette in her hair, which she had dyed in bright hues recalling a Siamese fighting fish. She was enrolled in two of my classes: English and journalism.

My main gripe with Nicole was that she fell asleep in class. Each morning—bang!—her head hit the desk. Waking her was like waking a badger. Nicole’s unmarried mother, it turned out, worked nights, so Nicole would slip out with friends every evening, sometimes staying out until 3 am, and then show up in class exhausted, surly, and hungry.

After a dozen calls home, her mother finally got back to me. Your daughter is staying out late, I reported. The voice at the other end of the phone sounded abashed and bone-weary. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sorry.”

For a short time, things got better. Nicole’s grades started to improve. Encouraged, I hectored and cajoled and praised her every small effort. She was an innately bright girl who might, if I dragged her by the heels, eventually survive the rigors of a community college.

Then one morning, her head dropped again. I rapped my knuckles on her desk. “Leave me alone, mister,” she said. “I feel sick.”

There was a sly exchange of looks among the other girls in class, a giggle or two, and then one of them said: “She’s pregnant, Mr. Garibaldi.”

She lifted her face and smiled at her friends, then dropped her head back down. I picked up my grimy metal garbage can and set it beside her desk, just in case. A moment later she vomited, and I dispatched her to the nurse. In the years since, I’ve escorted girls whose water has just broken, their legs trembling and wobbly, to the principal’s office, where their condition barely raises an eyebrow.

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

None of this is lost on my students.

When unwed motherhood confers status on both mother and father, when young parents see no need to marry in order to raise their children, when our pop culture continually reinforces these attitudes in our children, we have a much more fundamental problem than whether our students all have access to smart boards in their classrooms.

Read the rest of Garibaldi's poignant story at the link, and as you do ponder what a wonderful blessing the sexual revolution has been for so many of our kids.

Poverty in America: Another Story

We've posted a couple of very personal accounts lately concerning our welfare system. One was written by a young woman who has witnessed welfare abuse in her family and at her job and was rightly repelled by it. Another was submitted by a young single mother who's struggling to support a child and make it through college. I'd like to post one more from yet another young woman whose life situation differs from both of the previous writers. What we get from these three stories taken together, I think, is a pretty good look at the problems with, and the need for, a government safety net:

I know there are people out there that try to cheat the system (I live next door to the neighborhood drug dealer; trust me, I know), but there are also a lot of people who genuinely need government help. My family is in that category. I know from experience that people who form this view tend to become judgmental of everyone getting government help. Some people never get a chance to defend themselves, and being presented with a chance to do so, I can't help but explain my family's situation from the beginning. Here's my story:

I come from a long line of hard workers. My parents were married the fall after my mother graduated high school in 1988. She was 18 and my father was 20. They started college but both dropped out when I was born in 1990. My father went to work full-time for RESCAR and my mother worked full-time at a department store. My town is small (pop. of 405 as of 2009) and most people who grow up there marry young and don't go to college. My parents were average. They soon became prominent members of the community. Both served on the borough Council, and my father became fire chief.

When I was two years old my little brother was born, and shortly after my health became a problem. My mother quit her job in order to take of my brother while carting me back in forth to Danville, PA for surgery and doctor appointments. My father worked overtime in order to make up for the lost income from my mother. In 1994, my sister joined the family, making us a family of five on one income with a mass amount of bills to pay. My parents had horrible health insurance and the bills from my doctors began to pile up. My mother took up babysitting jobs (nine children in addition to us at once....I'm sure that wouldn't be allowed today) so that we could keep the house heated. We were on food stamps for a while, but my father hated it. Soon he refused to use them.

In 1998 my family's whole world was turned upside down. My father was climbing out of a train car when he slipped off a chemical-soaked ladder and fell to the bottom. For a year his employers sent him to chiropractors. Then, one night in early '99, my father was rushed to the hospital in excruciating pain. It turns out that the fall had broken his back and the chiropractic therapy had made it worse. He went into surgery in Pittsburgh to get rods placed in his spine. After many complications and 6 surgeries later, my father was left with severe pain and limitations for the rest of his life.

My mother picked up a full-time job and a part-time job on top of that. At nine years old I was left to take care of a father confined to a hospital bed for 6 months, a seven year old brother, and a five year old sister. My grandmother would stop by when we were at school to make sure my father ate and sometimes left meals for us. My father received workers compensation for two years while he healed from his surgeries.

Then came the lawsuits. Worker's comp. began sending people out to snoop around my neighborhood and interview neighbors. My grandparents had helped my mother in buying a hot tub for my father's physical therapy so that he wouldn't have to endure the long rides to Pittsburgh every week. They also bought a pool table for him for his birthday to try to bring him out of his depression (he loves playing). The people in my neighborhood began to ridicule my family. RESCAR tried to fire my father so they would no longer have to support my family. He hired a lawyer and finally settled, getting little money. We began to receive government benefits that year.

I knew people were still talking, but I didn't feel the full brunt of it until last year. I was home from college and my dog got loose. I yelled to a woman up the street to grab his collar, and she grabbed her arm and screamed, "He bit me!" When I laughed and explained he didn't bite; she snapped at me, "I know, I'm just faking it like your father." The doctors still refuse to release my father for work. He can't sit or stand for more than 30 minutes. He is in constant pain. For years he suffered from depression. Often I hear him mutter to himself about being worthless. He is no longer the "bread winner" and feels as if he has let everyone down. Their words cut deeper than they themselves will ever know.

To wrap up this long, long story, I have an access card. It's for medical purposes only. I go to college for free. My FAFSA placed my EFC at $0.00, so I receive thousands in grants, but make no mistake, it's not entirely government. I am the recipient of the national Spina Bifida Association $20,000 scholarship awarded for my involvement in advocacy for my own disability. I also hold a vast amount of academic scholarships, and even a Junior Borough Council Members of PA scholarship. I worked hard for that money. It was no hand out, and I am very blessed.

My mother has held the same full-time job since my father was injured. Because of that, my family now has health insurance, although we still have to use our access cards to get by. My brother graduated high school and works as a full-time auto mechanic, so there is now a second income once again in my household. I'll never forget the times my parents had to sell the hot tub or vehicles for coal to heat the house. My family still struggles sometimes to make ends meet, but we have each other. Right now, that's all that matters. So, not everyone [who receives assistance] is looking for a free handout.

There are some in our society who do everything in their power to get by, but because of the vicissitudes of life still need someone to help. There are others who are in difficult straits because of bad choices they've made in their lives, but who are trying to climb out of their predicament. And there are still others who are perfectly content to game the system in any way they can and exploit it for as long as they can.

Everyone wants to help the first group. Many want to help the second, and no one wants to help the third. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for a government bureaucracy to distinguish between them.

The War in Waziristan

The war against Islamist terrorists goes on largely out of sight. One aspect of it that does now and then seep into media reports is the war on Taliban forces in northwestern Pakistan. This conflict is waged using UAVs armed with satellite guided munitions and according to this report at Strategy Page, is taking a fearsome toll on the Taliban.

One of the troubling aspects of these attacks, however, has been the deaths of civilians. The article discusses why this is and what measures the military is using to minimize civilian casualties:

While there are more attacks, fewer civilians have been killed. It's difficult to tell who is an innocent civilian in these circumstances, but since the Taliban have rarely claimed, and identified civilian deaths from these attacks, there are apparently very few civilians killed.

There are several reasons for this. One is better intel, but there's a new weapon in use. The CIA controlled UAVs are now using a smaller missile; the Griffin. This enables targets to be destroyed with less risk to nearby civilians.

In the last three years, the UAV campaign in Pakistan has killed about a thousand people. Some 30 percent of the dead were civilians, largely because the terrorists use human shields, and try to surround themselves with women and children. Many of these civilians were wives and children of the Islamic radicals.

As the CIA intelligence got better, and the locals more insistent on not being human shields, more and more of the civilians were close kin of the terrorists, and at least aware of the danger they were in because of their husband's line of work.

Civilian deaths are minimized by trying to catch the terrorists while traveling, or otherwise away from civilians. Journalists visiting the sites of these attacks later, find few locals claiming lots of civilian casualties.

There's much else of interest in the Strategy Page report. Check it out.

Basic Economics

Perhaps you've heard media folks talking about debt, deficit, big government, etc. and not being particularly well-versed in economics you didn't really understand what they were saying or why you should care. Well, below, by way of Hot Air, is a video which in five minutes will answer a lot of your questions about the perils of big government.

It's a basic guide to why many people are dismayed by what our government has done over the last two or three years. I hope you'll take the time to watch it. It's important that every American understand the ideas this student presents:

Egyptian Moderates

There's been a lot of reporting from Egypt about what the people there want. Much of the reporting and media commentary would lead us to think that the mass of Egyptian people are moderates eager for Western-style freedom and democracy. Pew Research Center, however, has a report on the opinions of Egyptians and others in the Muslim world which gives a much different view of what the Egyptian people think, and it's not encouraging.

In Egypt 31% of Muslims see a struggle between moderate modernizers and hard-line fundamentalists and of that cohort 59% identify with the fundamentalists.

Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, as well as Jordan, Pakistan and Nigeria, say they favor imposing harsh punishments for adultery, robbery, and converting to another religion. Eighty two percent of Egyptians favor stoning people who commit adultery. Seventy seven percent favor whipping and cutting the hands off people who commit theft. Eighty four percent of the Egyptian people believe those who leave the Muslim religion should be executed.

Egypt and Pakistan were the two countries surveyed in which the percentage of people holding these views was highest. In some of the other predominantly Muslim countries surveyed – Turkey, Lebanon and Indonesia, for instance – most Muslims oppose these measures.

I suppose it's reassuring that something less than half of the people in these countries favor death sentences for those who convert from Islam. No wonder Muslim emigrants to Europe and elsewhere often have such a hard time assimilating.

Anyway, the take-away here is that, at least in Egypt, the overwhelming number of people are not at all what most people think of when they think of "moderates".

The President and the King

In the classic story by Antoine de Saint Exupery titled The Little Prince the prince meets a king who feels he must exert his authority even though no one heeds his orders. Thus the king orders people (and other things) to do what they were going to do anyway so that he would have the satisfaction of seeing his orders obeyed.

The little prince was tired so he yawned. "It is contrary to etiquette to yawn in the presence of a king" the monarch said to him. "I forbid you to do so."

"I can't help it. I can't stop myself, " replied the little prince, thoroughly embarrassed. "I have come on a long journey, and I have had no sleep..."

"Ah, then," the king said. "I order you to yawn. It is years since I have seen anyone yawning. Yawns to me are objects of curiosity. Come now! Yawn again! It is an order."

"That frightens me...I cannot, any more..." murmured the little prince, now completely abashed.

"Hum! Hum! replied the king. "Then I --- I order you to sometimes yawn and sometimes to ---." He sputtered a little, and seemed vexed.

I thought of this king while reading about President Obama's shifting demands to Hosni Mubarak. First the President demanded that Mubarak immediately begin the transition to a new government, i.e. resign, but Mubarak replied that he didn't think that would happen any time soon. So the President then demanded that Mubarak begin a gradual transition to a new government, but it looks now as if Mubarak will begin the transition when he's good and ready, which may be never:

In a shift on the crisis in Egypt, the Obama administration on Saturday gave its support to a gradual transition in government to prepare for new elections in September.

[This] was a departure from President Obama's demands as recently as Friday afternoon calling on the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, to make immediate changes and step down in the face of the 12-day-long popular uprising and violent clashes in his country.

Perhaps President Obama, like Saint Exupery's king, will next be demanding that Mubarak stay in office as long as he wants so as to keep Egypt stable.

Teaching Evolution

A recent article in Science Daily has received a lot of attention, mostly because it has revealed some surprising statistics about American high school biology teachers. The article, or rather the research the article reports, implicitly raises a lot of questions, most of which are left unanswered. I'd like to make some of those questions explicit because I think they're important. The article begins with this paragraph:

The majority of public high school biology teachers in the U.S. are not strong classroom advocates of evolutionary biology, despite 40 years of court cases that have ruled teaching creationism or intelligent design violates the Constitution, according to Penn State political scientists. A mandatory undergraduate course in evolutionary biology for prospective teachers, and frequent refresher courses for current teachers, may be part of the solution, they say.

"Considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms," write Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at Penn State, in the January 28 issue of Science.

Well, how are supporters of "reason itself" and "scientific methods" losing battles in America's classrooms? The article never says. It simply implies that since a lot of biology teachers are refusing to indoctrinate their students that therefore reason and science are taking a beating.

The researchers examined data from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors. They found only about 28 percent of those teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and craft lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology.

In contrast, Berkman and Plutzer found that about 13 percent of biology teachers "explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light." Many of these teachers typically rejected the possibility that scientific methods can shed light on the origin of the species, and considered both evolution and creationism as belief systems that cannot be fully proven or discredited.

There's something wrong with this? Evolution can be fully proven? Creation can be fully discredited? What do these words even mean? What is meant here by the words evolution, creationism, proven and fully discredited? The article doesn't tell us. It just allows the reader to wander in confusion through this thicket of imprecise and undefined terminology.

Berkman and Plutzer dubbed the remaining teachers the "cautious 60 percent," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives. "Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy," they said.

The researchers found these teachers commonly use one or more of three strategies to avoid controversy. Some teach evolutionary biology as if it applies only to molecular biology, ignoring an opportunity to impart a rich understanding of the diversity of species and evidence that one species gives rise to others.

More vagueness. What is a species, exactly? Is the evidence that species, whatever they are, evolve into other taxa unambiguous and dispositive? Is there no reason to question it? We're not told, but the answers to these questions matter if we're to properly assess the significance of the statistics the researchers are reporting.

Using a second strategy, some teachers ... "tell students it does not matter if they really 'believe' in evolution, so long as they know it for the test," Berkman and Plutzer said.

How many teachers do that? Many of them or just one?

Finally, many teachers expose their students to all positions, scientific and otherwise, and let them make up their own minds.

This is unfortunate, the researchers said, because "this approach tells students that well established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions."

Do the authors mean to say that we do our students a disservice when we show them both the pros and the cons of a particular explanation in science? What are the well-established concepts the researchers have in mind here? The concept that evolution is a purely natural process? The concept that evolution has been "fully proven"? The concept that change happens? What?

Berkman and Plutzer conclude that "the cautious 60 percent fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments." As a result, "they may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists."

This claim about undermining the authority of experts leading to hindering scientific illiteracy is very odd. Studies have shown that it's precisely those students who have strong beliefs in creation or intelligent design (they're not the same thing despite repeated attempts by the media to conflate them in the public mind) are often the students in any biology class who also have the best understanding of Darwinian evolution. The students who simply accept the evolutionary point of view without question often know the least about it.

Berkman and Plutzer say the nation must have better-trained biology teachers who can confidently advocate for high standards of science education in their local communities. Colleges and universities should mandate a dedicated undergraduate course in evolution for all prospective biology teachers, for example, and follow up with outreach refresher courses, so that more biology teachers embrace evolutionary biology.

Does this mean that deviant biology teachers will be subjected to some sort of aversion therapy, like the sociopath Alex in Clockwork Orange, or "reeducation" such as Winston Smith was forced to undergo in 1984? What if this doesn't work, do Berkman and Plutzer think we should employ electroshock treatments to correct the thinking of recalcitrant educators?

"Combined with continued successes in courtrooms and the halls of state government, this approach offers our best chance of increasing the scientific literacy of future generations," they conclude.

Indoctrination of students doesn't lead to scientific literacy. It merely makes them uncritical parrots of whatever their masters want them to say. What leads to scientific literacy is teaching them to impartially evaluate evidence, which is precisely what these researchers don't want. Perhaps they know that the more students are encouraged to sift the evidence and subject it to critical analysis the less inclined they are to buy into the Darwinian paradigm.

Asininity

According to No Left Turns a fifth-grader in California had to hire a lawyer last week in order to overcome the public school's unwritten prohibition on singing religious songs in a talent show. Meanwhile, a Michigan public school this week voluntarily amended their no weapons-in-school policy so as to permit Sikh students to carry daggers on their persons.

Let's try to understand this. A student talent show competitor is not allowed to sing a song with a Christian theme because expressions of religious sentiment are proscribed in our public schools, but a Sikh is allowed to bring a weapon to school because it's an expression of religious devotion.

This is the sort of wretched reasoning that contemporary liberalism has foisted upon us. Is it any wonder that politicians are embarrassed to identify themselves as liberals?

Multiculturalism Has Failed

British Prime Minister David Cameron, following the lead of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel's speech last year, declares that the doctrine of state multiculturalism has failed.

Cameron argues that we must distinguish between the religion of Islam and the ideology of Islamic extremism. A lot of people in the West hope that such a distinction, a distinction between liberals, moderates, and extremists in Islam, is realistic, but I wonder whether Muslims themselves see this as a legitimate distinction.

Reports like one at The Daily Caller offer hope that many do.

The Thrill Is Gone

BillT writes to call our attention to the recent Morning Joe segment in which Chris Matthews, the man who once said that listening to President Obama sent a tingle up his leg, expresses his anger over the administration's willingness to throw Hosni Mubarak under the bus. He states that the way the administration has handled the Egyptian crisis makes him ashamed as an American.

This, of course, doesn't mean that the White House is losing Matthews who speaks for a lot of liberal Democrats and independents, but I'm sure it gives them pause. In the exchange with Pat Buchanan at the end of the segment Matthews sounds like a neo-con:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Matthews is disturbed that President Obama seems to abandon so quickly and insouciantly a friend of thirty years, but he shouldn't be surprised. Mr. Obama has done it before. Ask Jeremiah Wright.

Obligatory Super Bowl Post

I don't wish to be a killjoy, but when people ask me who I think is going to win a pro football game I always answer that such prognostications are just guess-work and that I have no idea. Predictions amount to little more than a statement about which team a person thinks would win most often if the two teams played each other 10 times in a season. Trying to pick the winner of any particular game is futile given that many, perhaps even most, pro games are decided by four things, none of which have much to do with talent and coaching - turnovers, penalties, in-game injuries and biorhythms - and none of these are predictable.

I don't mean to suggest that talent and coaching are irrelevant, only that, unless the disparity between the two clubs is great, they're often of secondary importance in deciding the outcome of the game.

A team whose biorhythm is peaking will often clobber an equally talented team whose biorhythm is tanking. In fact, an inferior team at its biorhythmic peak will often defeat a more talented squad whose biorhythm is ebbing. That's why there are stunning upsets. That's why a team can lose badly to an opponent in one game and play them again later and beat them.

So tell me which team in today's Super Bowl will have significantly fewer turnovers, significantly fewer penalties, fewer injuries to key players, and a biorhythm on its upward swing, and I'll predict that that team will probably win. But who can tell those things?

Bishnu Shrestha and the Forty Thieves

Strategy Page has an amazing article about a retired Indian Gurkha soldier named Bishnu Shrestha. Shrestha was a passenger on a train that was set upon by a gang of some forty thieves (which sounds like a story out of The Arabian Nights). The odds, evidently, were still in Shrestha's favor. Here's the lede:

For the last five months, India has been celebrating and honoring a retired Gurkha soldier (Bishnu Shrestha) who, singlehandedly killed three bandits, wounded eight and drove off another 30. Snce then Shrestha has been given medals, cash and accolades for his outstanding valor and prowess. The Indian Gurkha regiment he recently retired from persuaded him to return to active duty so he could receive a cash award and a promotion. Bishnu Shrestha's father had also served with the same unit, and retired from it 29 years ago.

If you read the rest of Shrestha's story at the link continue to read about the Gurkha fighting in Afghanistan who was arrested by the British authorities who couldn't do enough to mollify the Taliban and demonstrate to them their eagerness to appease. Sadly, the British are not the people they once were. I can't imagine Winston Churchill or Maggie Thatcher being so obsequiously solicitous of Taliban sensibilities, although I guess I can imagine Neville Chamberlain doing it.

Repressing Dissent

David Klinghoffer over at NRO considers the alarming trend toward religious discrimination in taxpayer supported institutions. He notes that the recent case of Martin Gaskell, the eminently qualified astronomer who was denied a job supervising the University of Kentucky's astronomical observatory because emails showed that the committee charged with filling the position feared he was one of those nutty Christians who believed in intelligent design.

Gaskell sued and the university chose to pay a $125,000 settlement. Committee emails revealed that one of Gaskell's colleague's complained that Professor Gaskell was “potentially Evangelical,” a condign disqualification if ever there was one.

A supporter on the committee, an astrophysicist, protested that the committee was about to reject Gaskell “despite his qualifications that stand far above those of any other applicant.”

Klinghoffer writes:

This is no isolated incident. An enormous, largely hidden transformation has taken place in what we mean when we speak of “science.” For centuries, the free and unfettered scientific enterprise was fueled by a desire to know the mind of God. “The success of the West,” writes historian Rodney Stark in his important book The Victory of Reason, “including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.” Now, increasingly, voicing such a desire is likely to get you excluded from the guild of professional scientists.

He goes on to give some other egregious examples of how academia blacklists and persecutes those who demur to the scientific establishment's metaphysical orthodoxy:

Last month, a top-level computer specialist on the NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, David Coppedge, got fired after he sued JPL for religious discrimination. Coppedge had occasionally chatted with interested colleagues about the scientific case for intelligent design, which made good sense since JPL’s officially defined mission includes the exploration of questions relating to the origin and development of life on Earth and elsewhere. For this, his supervisor severely chastised him for “pushing religion” and humiliated and demoted him.

At Iowa State University, astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez was refused tenure, despite a spectacular research publication record, because of a book he co-authored arguing that life is no cosmic accident.

At the Smithsonian Institution, supervisors harshly penalized evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg for editing a pro–intelligent design essay in a peer-reviewed technical-biology journal. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel examined the 2005 case, finding that Smithsonian colleagues investigated his religious beliefs and created a “hostile work environment” aimed at “forcing [him] out.”

Similar incidents have occurred at the University of Idaho, George Mason University, and Baylor University.

Such heresy-hunting has the effect of intimidating skeptical scientists who are in increasing numbers growing doubtful of materialist dogma. The Darwinian materialists find the intelligent design arguments difficult to counter so they're seeking to stifle and repress them by making their proponents afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job or future promotions.

This is, of course, how the losing side, or at least the side that deserves to lose, always behaves. Like dictators in the Middle Eastern countries we read about in today's news, materialistic Darwinists have long managed to suppress opposition by exercising a kind of tyranny over what will be allowed to be said and taught. Now, however, they find their power and authority fading with almost every new discovery, and, like those Middle Eastern despots, they're striving desperately to stave off the collapse of their belief system by ratcheting up the repression.

It may work for a while, but eventually the despots and dogmatists will pass on and those who succeed them will wonder how their theories and arguments could ever have had such a tenacious hold on them.

Racism, Hate, and Violent Rhetoric

Progressives rallied recently in Palm Springs California to protest the billionaire Koch brothers who are strong supporters of libertarian causes. It was their support of the tea party in particular which presumably roused the ire of the gentle progressives gathered in Palm Springs. When next one hears from progressives, as we do from Van Jones in the prelude to this video, about right-wing hate it might be good to remember how at least some ordinary liberals talk when they think they're among friends:

I don't know how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas managed to get dragged into this, but no matter. It's amusing to hear lefties accuse tea party members, without a single shred of evidence, of being racist when there's ample evidence that there's plenty of racism circulating among your average progressive.

I wonder what the reaction would be if at a tea party rally there were calls to "string up" say, Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor. Given that we all know, of course, what that reaction would be why has this video not been shown on our cable news nets or dissected by the writers of the New York Times?

Never mind. It's a silly question.

Meanwhile, Robin of Berkeley explores the strange way of thinking that pervades the left on matters ranging from victimhood to infanticide to vitriolic rhetoric. Give her article a look and ask yourself as you read whether you don't agree that some of these people just seem to suffer from an empty soul.

Inhuman

Lest anyone doubt the cruelty of the people who would rule Afghanistan (and some of those jockeying for power in Egypt) if we are unable to accomplish our task there this report should quell their doubts. In a story that could have come right out of Kaled Hosseini's Thousand Splendid Suns we're told that:

Horrific video footage (the video is at the link but the violence is edited out) has emerged of Taliban insurgents stoning a couple to death for alleged adultery in northern Afghanistan.

Hundreds of villagers can be seen on the video standing around as the woman, Siddqa, is buried up to her waist in a four foot hole in the ground.

Two mullahs pass sentence before the crowd begins to throw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tries to crawl free.

But the 19-year-old collapses to the ground, covered in blood - but miraculously still alive.

At this point a Taliban fighter shoots her three times in the head with an AK-47. The crowd can be heard shouting allahu akbar as she is killed.

Her lover, Khayyam, is then marched in front of the crowd with his hands tied behind his back. He is blindfolded with his own tunic and crouches down close to the ground as he tried to protect his body from the stones.

But he is battered to the floor by a barrage of rocks. He can be heard sobbing before eventually falling silent.

The stoning - the first to be documented on film since the Taliban were ousted from power - took place in the district of Dashte Archi, in Kunduz, last August.

Officials said that Siddqa had run away after being sold into an arranged marriage for $9,000 against her will.

She ran away to be with Khayyam, who was already married and had two children, and the pair eloped to Pakistan.

But it is understood that they returned to their home village after being reassured by leaders that they would be unharmed.

It was a terrible mistake. They were dragged from their families' homes at 2 am by Taliban fighters and then put before a kangaroo court before being executed.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid defended the stoning.

He told the BBC: "Anyone who knows about Islam knows that stoning is in the Koran, and that it is Islamic law. There are people who call it inhuman - but in doing so they insult the Prophet. They want to bring foreign thinking to this country."

Heaven forbid that anyone should bring foreign thinking to Afghanistan. If they did the place might progress all the way to the 10th century.

Anyway, as you contemplate this horrifying execution of a 19 year-old girl think of Jesus' words to those who were about to stone a woman under very similar circumstances: "The one among you who is without sin should throw the first stone".

Adultery is a very serious matter, to be sure, but the Taliban spokesman is right. To execute people for it, and in such a cruel and savage manner, is indeed inhuman.

Elsewhere, Iran has hanged a Dutch-Iranian woman arrested for participating in the protests that followed in the wake of their phony election in the summer of 2009. If the demonstrations in Egypt inspire anyone else in the Mid-East let's hope they inspire the Iranians to try once again to rid themselves of a regime that's at least as bad as, and probably much worse than, that of Hosni Mubarak.

Looming Disaster

Brian Riedl at NRO explains why Congress needs to rein in spending and do it quickly. Relying on recent Congressional Budget Office projections, Riedl writes:

This more realistic “current-policy” budget baseline reveals a ten-year deficit of $13 trillion. The annual budget deficit never falls below $1 trillion, and reaches $1.9 trillion by 2021. At that point, the $25 trillion debt would exceed the size of the entire economy – and even that assumes a return to peace and prosperity.

These deficits are driven by spending. Even if all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent, tax revenues (historically 18.0 percent of GDP) would climb to 18.4 percent by 2021. Yet federal spending (historically 20.3 percent of GDP) is projected to soar to 26.4 percent by 2021. By that point, 100 percent of rising long-term deficits will result from above-average spending. There is no long-term revenue decline.

He also adds these very sobering notes:

* Between 2008 and 2021, the annual cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is set to rise from $1.2 trillion to $2.2 trillion (adjusted for inflation);

* Letting the tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 would close just 5 percent of the budget deficit over the next decade. The $736 billion price tag is a fraction of the $21 trillion cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid over the decade;

* Between 2009 and 2021, the national debt would increase by $150,000 per household. By 2021, net interest alone would cost $1 trillion – nearly one-half of all tax income revenues; and

* Over what would be President Obama’s eight years in office, baseline budget deficits are projected to total $9.9 trillion— triple the $3.3 trillion in deficits accumulated by President Bush.

These spending and deficit figures are unsustainable. In order to avert an economic crisis, Congress must substantially rein in non-defense discretionary spending, enact multi-year caps, and then begin fundamental Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid reform. Small budget tweaks and freezes are no longer sufficient. If this means also trimming the Pentagon then so be it. Having a first rate military will do us no good if we can't afford ever to use it when we need it.

If Congress fails to do this, and if President Obama fails to go along with significant spending cuts, they will be responsible for deliberately driving the entire nation over an economic cliff. There can be no question that entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare need to be reformed or eliminated. The only question should be about the best way to do this. Anyone in Congress or among the commentariat who seeks to obstruct reform and calls for maintaining the status quo should be considered to have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously.

UPDATE: Already Senate Democrats have announced that they are not interested in reforming Social Security in any meaningful way. Over the next decade Social Security will run up a deficit of a half a trillion dollars, and the President in his State of the Union scarcely mentioned it. Are these people simply in denial or do they actually want to turn us into an economic basketcase?

Wallace Vs. Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the principle of natural selection, but unlike Darwin, Wallace was not a materialist. He did not believe that everything could in principle be completely explained in terms of natural forces and processes. One of the qualities of human beings that he refused to reduce to material causes was human intelligence. Michael Flannery, author of a recent biography of Wallace, writes about his views and modern attempts, specifically a recent attempt by Steven Pinker, to refute Wallace.

In a piece at Evolution News and Views Flannery writes:

Alfred Russel Wallace Issues Fighting Words to Materialists in 1910: "Nothing in evolution can account for the soul [or mind] of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable." Steven Pinker to the Rescue?

Wallace made the above declaration in an interview .... in December of 1910. Much to the chagrin of Charles Darwin, this co-discoverer of natural selection had suggested as much even earlier in the April 1869 issue of The Quarterly Review. Despite maintaining cordial relations, this "heresy" would create a great divide between the two naturalists, and Darwin's disciples have been searching for an answer to Wallace ever since.

Recently Steven Pinker, the darling of evolutionary psychology at Harvard, proposed to rescue Darwinists .... Pinker points out that Alfred Russel Wallace "claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design." In a singular display of perspicacity, Pinker is right. Wallace felt that certain aspects of the uniquely human mind--love of music, humor, abstract reasoning, mathematics, etc.--were wholly inexplicable by Darwin's own principle of utility, which is the idea that no organ or attribute can exist in a species unless it is or has been useful to the organisms that possess it....

In other words, the problem Wallace puts his finger on is how nature could have selected for such things as a love of music and the ability to develop mathematics when these things offered their possessor no survival value. Evolution only conserves those traits that confer fitness upon the organism, but what fitness did an ability to solve difficult equations or appreciate music have before there were such equations to solve or music to enjoy?

The matter Wallace, and many others since, found to be so vexing is similar to the problem posed by the existence of human consciousness which has been a philosophical thorn in materialism's side ever since Darwin. Steven Pinker tries to grapple with Wallace's argument, but Flannery doesn't think his response is very persuasive. You can read Flannery's assessment of Pinker's argument at the link.

Poverty in America - Another Perspective

We recently featured a reader's response to an earlier Viewpoint post titled Poverty in America. There was a lot of reaction to the reader's opinions, most of which agreed with her critique of the welfare system. One, though, took a different view and I'd like to post it because it offers another side to the issues raised by the first piece.

Here it is:

I would like to start by saying that the response I read was an entertaining, and interesting perspective on welfare, however it was also, in my opinion, not very carefully thought about, or even investigated. Not that I disagree with the response entirely, I would just like to add some points that I believe were neglected to be considered.

For instance, "People have become dependent on the government to support them, and have lost all desire to achieve anything on their own." This statement can be looked at from so many different angles. Let's start with the obvious one, what timeline are you talking about here? Is it welfare at the present? or welfare in the past? The reason I ask such questions is because, back when I was growing up, in the eighties, the welfare system gave much more assistance, when it came to rental assistance, food stamps, and medical assistance.

Back in those days, it could have been looked at as easy to become dependent on the support welfare gave, there was no such thing as working for the assistance, it was just given to you based on financial status, and almost everyone I knew was on welfare.

However if you look at it from the present time frame, there is a more in depth screening process, and not everyone you know can get welfare assistance. There are income brackets you must fall into, and you must work, or go to school for your benefits, with small exceptions, that I believe should be put there for those who really fall into them.

There is no real way you can prevent all people from abusing the welfare system, however what is there really to abuse? The average person gets a total of $250.00 a month for cash assistance, a total of $186.00 in food stamps, and the medical has its restrictions when it comes to covering things like glasses, and many other things that I have not researched enough to feel comfortable opinionating on.

Now picture this, you get a total of $250.00 a month in cash assistance, but your average rental expense is just about $600.00 a month, not to mention utilities and cost of living expenses, such as toiletries, transportation, and child care. How can you become dependent on something that doesn't cover even the roof you sleep under?

"I feel that the welfare system should be completely modified, if not eliminated altogether!" Modified? hasn't it been modified enough? I suffer with hypertension, and worked in a clinic for an entire year, as a single mother, paying a total of $515.00 a month in rent, $520.00 a month in childcare, not to mention car insurance, gas, electric, and food, and was denied medical assistance to help cover the cost of my medication, because I had an income of over $300.00 dollars a month.

So which one should I eliminate? The rent and be homeless, the childcare, and be jobless, maybe insurance, which was only $50.00 dollars a month because the average cost of hypertension medicine is probably a few hundred dollars. Or maybe I could just live in the cold without gas and bundle my daughter in several blankets and feed her bread since I can't afford to keep my electric on. So you see which one of these is the viable option?

Now picture if they eliminated it [welfare] all together, with the ever increasing number of jobs being lost, and the hole in our economy so big it could cover the moon. Or maybe you were wondering where the father of my daughter was in all this, well let's just say he abandoned us, ran to another state and was pending child support, and still continues to do so till today. Or maybe you were wondering where the rest of my family was in helping me with child care, but what if like my case there is no family support? What if you moved out to PA to try and start a better life for you and your family, because you couldn't afford to live in NY?

So you see I believe, that people can sometimes become victims to our economy, specifically when you were already impoverished to begin with, it's not like we can choose what financial class to be born into.

We can however, choose to try and change what we were already giving. It is for this very reason welfare was created, so that the underprivileged people can stand a chance in a world that is built on financial class, and competition. Don't we as the people believe in the "American Dream" and the "Land of opportunity".

In conclusion, to assume that someone can become dependent on welfare, to the point where they no longer have a desire to achieve for themselves, varies from person to person, and situation to situation. If a person no longer wishes to thrive in this world, it could be for a number of reasons, depression, pure sloth, health, and sometimes even carelessness. To assume that welfare is the main reason is biased, because we can't speak for everyone.

After all, if we lived in a society where people practiced Social Solidarity, would people still continue to frown upon welfare? Just one of those very things I wonder.

Anyone else care to weigh in on this topic?

Presidential Principles

When in 2009 Hondurans acted constitutionally and properly via the military, Supreme Court, and the legislature to remove a president who gave signs of becoming a dictator and despot, the Obama administration was outraged and demanded that the president, Manuel Zelaya, be reinstated despite the wishes of the peoples' representatives.

When the Iranian people rose in protest of the fraudulent elections in 2009 which returned Ahmadinejad to power, the Obama administration justified their silence by saying that we shouldn't meddle in the affairs of other nations.

When the leader of China, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, visited the U.S. several weeks ago, President Obama, himself a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, feted his Chinese counterpart with a lavish state dinner while many Chinese, including another Nobel Peace Prize winner, languished in prison.

Now, when the people of Egypt rise to demand the resignation of a man who has been one of our best friends, President Obama throws in with the Egyptian masses and demands that Mubarak leave office immediately.

Set aside the unseemliness of Mr. Obama sounding as though he was dictating terms to Mr. Mubarak rather than advising him. Let's grant, moreover, that taking the side of the pro-democracy protesters is the proper thing to do.

The question I wish to pose is what principles guide this president in making decisions as to whom he will support in these conflicts? What guides him to side with the people in the case of Egypt, but with a likely despot in Honduras, and to remain silent while the people of China and Iran suffer under the crushing weight of tyranny?

It would be very interesting to hear him explain the principles, if any, which light his path in these matters.

The Egyptian Uprising

The American Thinker has a very good account of the events of the last several days in Egypt written by a politically astute young man who witnessed them close up. His report is at odds in several respects with what we've been hearing in our own media, and his insights are very helpful. Anyone interested in the history behind the present turmoil and what will come of it really should read his essay.

Here's the lede:

One week ago, Egypt was a stable authoritarian regime, prospects of change were minimal and every expert in Washington would have betted on the endurance of its regime. Today, Egypt is in a state of chaos. The regime, even after using its mightiest sword is not able to control the country and the streets of Egypt are in a state of utter lawlessness. As the world stands in awe, confusion, and worry at the unfolding events, perhaps it is important to write the evolving story that is happening in Egypt before any reflections can be made on them.

Contrary to pundits, it turns out that the Egyptian regime was neither stable nor secure. The lack of its stability is not a reflection of its weakness or lack of a resolve to oppress. It is a reflection of its inherent contradiction to the natural desire of men to enjoy their basic freedoms. Egyptians might not know what democracy actually means, but that does not make the concept any less desirable. Perhaps it is precisely its vagueness and abstraction that makes the concept all the more desirable.

For two weeks calls were made using new social media tools for a mass demonstration on the 25th of January. Observers dismissed those calls as another virtual activism that would not result in anything. Other calls in the past had resulted in very small public support and the demonstrations were limited to the familiar faces of political activists numbering in the hundreds. As the day progressed, the observers seemed to be correct in their skepticism. While the demonstrations were certainly larger than previous ones, numbering perhaps 15,000 in Cairo, they were nothing worrisome for the regime. They were certainly much smaller than the ones in 2003 against the Iraq War. The police force was largely tolerating and when they decided to empty Tahrir Square, where the demonstrators had camped for the night, it took them less than 5 minutes to do so.

But beneath that, things were very different. The social media tools had given people something that they had lacked previously, an independent means of communication and propaganda. Hundreds of thousands of young Egyptians in a matter of minutes were seeing the demonstration videos being uploaded on youtube. For an apolitical generation that had never shown interest in such events the demonstration was unprecedented. More remarkable they were tremendously exaggerated. At a moment when no more than 500 demonstrators had started gathering in that early morning, an Egyptian opposition leader could confidently tweet that he was leading 100,000 in Tahrir Square. And it stuck.

Read the rest of it. You probably won't find so much information on the Egyptian uprising in one place anywhere in the mainstream media.

Government Mandates

Some South Dakota state legislators are determined to make a point about Obamacare. They've introduced a bill that would require every adult in the state to buy a firearm for their own protection:

The bill, which would take effect Jan. 1, 2012, would give people six months to acquire a firearm after turning 21. The provision does not apply to people who are barred from owning a firearm. The measure is known as an act “to provide for an individual mandate to adult citizens to provide for the self-defense of themselves and others.”

The chief sponsor of the bill, Rep. Hal Wick, knows it won't succeed but that's the point. The government has no business mandating that citizens buy something. This is the rational for the decision of Florida Federal Judge Roger Vinson who ruled Monday that the entire Health Care Reform law is unconstitutional because it contains as an essential provision a mandate that everyone purchase insurance.

Wick is quoted as saying: “Do I or the other co-sponsors believe that the State of South Dakota can require citizens to buy firearms? Of course not. But at the same time, we do not believe the federal government can order every citizen to buy health insurance.”

If Vinson's decision is overturned by the Supreme Court next year there'll be no limit to what the government can mandate that you buy or not buy. They could mandate that you buy a Bible or a Koran, whether you want one or not. They could require you buy a car whether you need one or not. They could insist that you only buy cars made by American manufacturers and refrain from purchasing from non-unionized foreign companies. After all, that would, it could be argued, be helpful to the economic health of the nation, or at least to the UAW.

It's an interesting fact that this very same argument was made in 2008 during the Democratic primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It was made as a criticism of Ms. Clinton's health care proposal, ironically enough, by....

Of course, that was then and this is now. Some politicians believe it's permissible to say anything if it helps you get elected.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

Unthinkable

A terrorist has planted nuclear bombs in three cities in the United States. They are programmed to go off in just a few days. The terrorist has been captured and interrogated but refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the bombs. What do you do if you're the FBI? Your families are potential victims of the blasts. Time is running out. The terrorist remains obdurate.

This is the theme of a movie released last year titled Unthinkable. It raises difficult questions for both the one who believes that torture should never be used as well as the person who argues that there are situations, such as the one described, in which torture is justified.

If you are absolutely opposed to torture, as is an FBI agent in the film, the question for you is how many people are you prepared to see maimed and killed when their lives could possibly be saved if the terrorist is tortured? Would you think differently if you knew your spouse and children were in one of the target cities?

If, on the other hand, you're convinced that such a scenario justifies torturing the man to pull the needed information from him, how far would you be willing to go with such methods? In the film, the terrorist's wife and children are also threatened with torture in order to ratchet up the pressure on him to divulge the whereabouts of the bombs. Would such an "unthinkable" measure be justified if he refuses to cooperate? If not, why not? If so, how do you justify torturing innocents?

These are important questions given the fact that the film's premise is entirely plausible in our contemporary world and given President Obama's abjuration of all forms of torture in his Cairo speech shortly after his election. I should note, too, that the film adds complexities to the question that shake the certitude that many people bring to the debate. It certainly makes the position of those politicians who self-righteously grandstand before the public about this issue look pretty simplistic.

Unthinkable stars Samuel L. Jackson, Carrie-Anne Moss and Michael Sheen, and is tough to watch (R-rated for violence and language) so I don't recommend it for everyone. If you're squeamish take a pass on this one. If, however, the ethical questions mentioned above trouble and perplex you, you might want to try. I suggest that if you do, that you view it with people you disagree with on the issue. It'll be a great catalyst for conversation afterward. Be sure to select the extended version. It's important.

Those Stupid Republicans

Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly wants everyone to realize what a smart guy he is and what ignoramuses those Republicans are. In a recent column he recounts a response that a GOP congressman gave to a question from Bill Maher about evolution in order to roll his eyes at how stupid Republicans are:

"Real Time" host Bill Maher asked Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) a fairly straightforward question: "Do you believe in evolution?" Kingston not only rejected the foundation of modern biology, he explained it this way: "I believe I came from God, not from a monkey." He added, "If it happened over millions and millions of years, there should be lots of fossil evidence."

Seriously, that's what he said.

Let's pause to appreciate the fact that it's the 21st century -- and Jack Kingston is a 10-term congressman who helps oversee federal funding on the Food and Drug Administration.

As part of the same discussion, former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell tried to ask Kingston about the overuse of antibiotics. The far-right congressman had no idea how the question related to evolution.

What an embarrassment.

Well, what's embarrassing is that someone who writes for a prestigious journal like The Washington Monthly and who obviously prides himself on his own intellectual sophistication would think that Maher's question was "straightforward".

What did Maher mean, exactly, when he asked Kingston if he "believes in" evolution? Was Maher referring to belief in the theory of evolution? If so, precisely which theory of evolution was he asking about? If he was just referring to evolution in general was he referring to naturalistic evolution? Macroevolution? Microevolution? Theistic evolution? Progressive evolution? What, exactly, was he asking the congressman?

The question as posed by Maher is not "straightforward" at all, but apparently Benen lacks the wit to realize this. He's too busy snickering at Kingston who, like probably 95% of the nation's population, doesn't really know much at all about evolutionary theory.

As for the relationship between the overuse of antibiotics and evolution, Mr. Benen thinks it a disgrace that the congressman was apparently non-plussed by the question, so I propose that he put the same query to, say, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama and see what sorts of answers he gets from them. Indeed, I'd like to hear his own answer to the question.

In fact, I'd like to hear Mr. Benen explain the nuances between the various permutations of evolutionary theory mentioned above. I'd also like to see if Mr. Benen can give a coherent defense of whatever form of evolution it is that he presumably believes in. Has Mr. Benen read any of the significant scientific works critical of the claim that natural processes can produce salutary genetic change such as Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution or Darwin's Black Box? Has he read Stephen Meyer's powerful critique (Signature in the Cell) of the evolutionist's claim that undirected forces and chance can produce biological information?

It's unfortunate that Representative Kingston didn't think to ask Maher what kind of evolution he was talking about and didn't think to ask him exactly how he was defining the term evolution, but his answer wasn't all that different, I'll bet, from what most congressmen would have given. It's just that Democrat congressmen are never asked questions like this because people like Maher wouldn't dream of embarrassing them and people like Benen wouldn't notice if he did.

Shocker from Florida

Dave Weigel at Slate is reporting a real bombshell. A federal judge has struck down the entire health care reform law about which there has been so much political quarrelling over the past two years.

Judge Roger Vinson of the Northern District of Florida has ruled that because the individual mandate part of the law, the part that requires each person to purchase insurance, is unconstitutional, and because that part of the law cannot be severed from the rest of the law, the whole thing must be declared unconstitutional.

This is enormously significant news. If the ruling withstands appeal, the last two years, during which the Democrat party essentially invested all of their energy, focus and political capital to get this bill passed, and which effort ultimately cost them a historic defeat in last November's election, was all for nothing.

It's obvious that Judge Vinson ruled on the law's merits and not on what he wished were the case. Here's what he said:

Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications. At a time when there is virtually unanimous agreement that health care reform is needed in this country, it is hard to invalidate and strike down a statute titled "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

And also this:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Health care reform was the one thing President Obama could claim as a genuine accomplishment going into the 2012 campaign season. Now it appears that he has nothing. Events can change that, of course, but right now the Democrats must be feeling pretty empty.

Presidential Snoozer

Watching President Obama go through the motions in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday night made me think that if he could bottle his presentation he could make a fortune selling it to insomniacs. I know that it certainly gave me a serious case of the drowsies.

In light of recent events in Egypt the SOTU speech now seems almost irrelevant, but I want to share Peggy Noonan's take on Mr. Obama's snoozer just the same because she says so much that's worth reading.

Ms. Noonan is a former speech writer herself and currently an op-ed writer for the Wall Street Journal. I've copied her column in its entirety because the link is temporary, and the column may be replaced by her next piece soon. Here's what she says about Mr. Obama's speech:

It is a strange and confounding thing about this White House that the moment you finally think they have their act together—the moment they get in the groove and start to demonstrate that they do have some understanding of our country—they take the very next opportunity to prove anew that they do not have their act together, and are not in the groove. It’s almost magical.

The State of the Union speech was not centrist, as it should have been, but merely mushy, and barely relevant. It wasted a perfectly good analogy—America is in a Sputnik moment—by following it with narrow, redundant and essentially meaningless initiatives. Rhetorically the speech lay there like a lox, as if the document itself knew it was dishonest, felt embarrassed, and wanted to curl up quietly in a corner of the podium and hide. But the president insisted on reading it.

Response in the chamber was so muted as to be almost Xanax-like. Did you see how bored and unengaged they looked? The applause was merely courteous. A senator called the mood on the floor “flat.” This is the first time the press embargo on the speech was broken, by National Journal, which printed the text more than an hour before the president delivered it. Maybe members had already read it and knew what they were about to face.

The president will get a bump from the speech. Presidents always do. It will be called a success. But it will be evanescent. A real moment was missed. If the speech is remembered, it will be as the moment when the president actually slowed—or blocked—his own comeback.

The central elements of the missed opportunity:

• An inability to focus on what is important now. The speech was more than half over before the president got around to the spending crisis. He signaled no interest in making cuts, which suggested that he continues not to comprehend America’s central anxiety about government spending: that it will crush our children, constrict the economy in which they operate, make America poorer, lower its standing in the world, and do in the American dream. Americans are alarmed about this not because they’re cheap and selfish but because they care about the country they will leave behind when they are gone.

President Obama’s answer is to “freeze” a small portion of government spending at current levels for five years. This is a reasonable part of a package, but it’s not a package and it’s not a cut. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who called it “sad,” told a local radio station the savings offered “won’t even pay the interest on the debt we’re about to accumulate” in the next two years. The president was trying to “hoodwink” the American people, Mr. Coburn said: “The federal government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. It’s 27% bigger than it was two years ago.” Cuts, not a freeze, are needed—it’s a matter of “urgency.”

• Unresponsiveness to the political moment. Democrats hold the White House and Senate, Republicans the House, the crisis is real, and the next election is two years away. This is the time for the president to go on the line and demand Republicans do so, too. Instead, nothing. A freeze.

• An attitude that was small bore and off point. America is in a Sputnik moment, the world seems to be jumping ahead of us, our challenge is to make up the distance and emerge victorious. So we’ll change our tax code to make citizens feel less burdened and beset, we’ll rethink what government can and should give, can and should take, we’ll get our fiscal life in order, we’ll save our country. Right?

Nah. We’ll focus on “greater Internet access,” “renewable energy,” “one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” “wind and solar,” “information technology.” “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail.” None of this is terrible, but none of it is an answer. The administration continues to struggle with the concept of priorities. They cannot see where the immediate emergency is. They are like people who’d say, “Martha, the house is on fire and flames are licking down the stairs—let’s discuss what color to repaint the living room after we rebuild!” A better priority might be, “Get the kids out and call the fire department.”

• Unbelievability. The president will limit the cost of government by whipping it into shape and removing redundant agencies. Really? He hasn’t shown much interest in that before. He has shown no general ideological sympathy for the idea of shrinking and streamlining government. He’s going to rationalize government? He wants to “get rid of the loopholes” in our tax code. Really? That’s good, but it was a throwaway line, not a serious argument. And he was talking to 535 representatives and senators who live in the loopholes, who live by campaign contributions from industries and interest groups that pay protection money to not get dinged in the next tax bill.

On education, the president announced we’re lagging behind in our public schools. Who knew? In this age of “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery,” every adult in America admits that union rules are the biggest impediment to progress. “Race to the Top” isn’t the answer. We all know this.

As for small things and grace notes, there is often about the president an air of delivering a sincere lecture in which he informs us of things that seem new to him but are old to everyone else. He has a tendency to present banalities as if they were discoveries. “American innovation” is important. As many as “a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school.” We’re falling behind in math and science: “Think about it.”

“I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories. . . . I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans.” But our deterioration isn’t new information, it’s a shared predicate of at least 20 years’ standing, it’s what we all know. When you talk this way, as if the audience is uninformed, they think you are uninformed. Leaders must know what’s in the national information bank.

He too often in making a case puts the focus on himself. George H.W. Bush, always afraid of sounding egotistical, took the I’s out of his speeches. We called his edits “I-ectomies.” Mr. Obama always seems to put the I in. He does “I implants.”

Humor, that leavening, subtle uniter, was insufficiently present. Humor is denigrated by serious people, but serious people often miss the obvious. The president made one humorous reference, to smoked salmon. It emerged as the biggest word in the NPR word cloud of responses. That’s because it was the most memorable thing in the speech. The president made a semi-humorous reference to TSA pat-downs, but his government is in charge of and insists on the invasive new procedures, to which the president has never been and will never be subjected. So it’s not funny coming from him. The audience sort of chuckled, but only because many are brutes who don’t understand that it is an unacceptable violation to have your genital areas patted against your will by strangers.

I actually hate writing this. I wanted to write “A Serious Man Seizes the Center.” But he was not serious and he didn’t seize the center, he went straight for the mush. Maybe at the end of the day he thinks that’s what centrism is.

And here's Ramirez summing up in one picture everything that's wrong with both the speech and the President's agenda:

Be Careful What You Hope For

Americans need to be careful what we wish for in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world where massive protests are threatening to topple even well-established regimes like that of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.

Many of these Arab nations are ruled by authoritarians and despots who've been little concerned about the plight of the Arab people and the people have had enough (parenthetical question: Why aren't the Palestinians rebelling against Hamas?). The protestors are demanding more freedom and democratically elected governments. They want, to put it succinctly, what Arabs living in Europe and the U.S. have.

Americans are sympathetic to these desires, but here's the problem. Almost always revolutions initiated and led by democratic reformers at some point get co-opted by ruthless, brutal factions, and what starts out as a revolution for freedom winds up as a tyranny worse than the one it replaces.

This was the pattern throughout the twentieth century in the communist revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere. It's what happened in Iran when the Shah was deposed and the mullahs took over, and it's what very well could happen in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood has entered the fray. The Muslim Brotherhood is the group that sired al Qaeda and has inspired Islamic extremists around the world.

Mubarak's government was oppressive, but he was not interested in war with Israel and worked with the U.S. to prevent those who wanted to bathe that region in blood from realizing their dreams. He was also an ally in the war against terrorism. He was a good friend to the U.S. but not so much to the masses of his own people.

If Mubarak resigns it could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who takes over. If it's the Muslim Brotherhood, which it very well may be since they are organized and likely, despite their claim to have renounced violence, to resort to it, then Egypt will be the next Iran. Worse, if Egypt is taken over by the extremists, the rest of the Arab world will probably topple like dominos.

I don't think we should hope that Mubarak survives, rather I think we better hope that if he falls he's replaced by people who are willing to continue his opposition to extremist terrorism and war while keeping their boot off the throats of the people. History, though, gives us little reason to be optimistic that this will happen.

Best and Worst on Immigration

NumbersUSA is a group concerned about immigration policy, particularly illegal immigration. They've graded nine potential presidential contenders, including President Obama, on their declared positions on various immigration-related issues.

It will probably not surprise anyone that President Obama comes out with the lowest grade in the group, but it may surprise some that not faring much better are Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. The top score was a C+ which they gave to....well you should go to their website to find out.

Re: Poverty in America

Several years ago we put up a post titled Poverty in America that captured the interest of a reader who came across it while browsing the archives. She sent us the following thoughts:

I would have to say that I agree with this post for a number of reasons, as well as a few of my own personal viewpoints on the issue. I have very strong feelings about this, and they may sometimes come across as harsh and un-caring, but I can justify very strongly why I feel this way. In my opinion, the government of this country is too lenient on the welfare system. People have become dependent on the government to support them, and have lost all desire to achieve anything on their own. I believe that it is too easy to get welfare benefits, and there are too many ways to cheat the system.

Personally, I have a few family members who I have seen my entire life cheating the system. My aunt, for example, has a drug and alcohol addiction, and has never held a job a day in her life. She asks why she should get a job when the government gives her almost $2000 a month in food stamps, cash assistance, and disability to not work. In a way I see her point...I work full time and pay for my education (with no help from the government), and I make barely $1200 a month. She has to go to monthly psych visits, which is also paid for by the government, and tells them that she has a problem and can't function in the "real world". But knowing her personally, I know that she can, she just doesn't want to and lies so that she can continue to get support. This is just one of many examples that I can think of.

I also work in retail, so I see the abuses of the system there every day. Almost every customer that walks through the door has an access card in their wallet. I am not exaggerating. Probably 99%. I see them pull out cash from the ATM with their cash side of the benefit card to buy things like cigarettes and lottery tickets, and then use their cards to buy a soda. It frustrates me so much! I don't think that it is fair that MY tax money goes to these people so that they can make poor choices and buy cigarettes and lottery tickets, but can't afford to buy food. Why should I have to pay for their poor life choices? I watched a lady one time spend over $100 on lottery tickets in an hour, and then use her access card to buy a soda. Ridiculous!

Because of these reasons, and probably countless other examples that would probably take up 30 pages, I feel that the welfare system should be completely modified, if not eliminated altogether! If they need help, then they need help. But I think that they should monitor the people who receive help more carefully to determine if they actually need it in the first place, and while they receive it. I also think they shouldn't let them purchase "convenience" items (such as gourmet coffee and smoothie drinks like they do where I work), cigarettes, and lottery tickets.

If they can afford that kind of stuff, then they shouldn't need help to begin with. I also think that they should limit the food they can buy to healthy choices. I see people every day come in and buy nothing but junk food...what is the point? So that in 10 years when they are obese from poor eating habits and have cardiorespiratory disease from smoking the government can then pay for their health care? It seems like an endless cycle.

The bottom line is that these people will never have the desire to better themselves if the government continues to support them. They will do what is necessary to get by and that is all. After all, why work and get an education when you will always have a paycheck no matter what? Why worry about using condoms when the government will support any child born without a father? Why worry about anything at all when you know that all of your needs will be taken care of, leaving you to not have to work hard to support yourself or your family? Many of these people come from families that have been that way for a long time, and they learn from their families that they don't have to work hard. So they don't.

The reason I have such strong feelings about this issue is because, like I said before, I have a few members in my family that are on welfare and abuse the system. I could have easily gone down that same path, but I didn't. I made a choice to better myself and to work hard, and I feel that if I can do it, then anyone can.

The reader chose to remain anonymous, but I think she speaks for a lot of Americans who are just fed up with pulling a wagon full of people who refuse to get out of the wagon and help.