Obama's Choice

I guess this'll be tough to explain away:

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Obama's Pick

Obama has shown his gratitude to Joe Biden for having declared him "articulate, bright, clean and nice-looking" by selecting him for his running mate. Perhaps now the media can get about the important business of finding out whether the Chinese gymnasts were really old enough to compete.

RLC

Possible Cure

Here's good news on the medical front:

A new study conducted by researchers at Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland shows that a century-old drug, methylene blue, may be able to slow or even cure Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Used at a very low concentration - about the equivalent of a few raindrops in four Olympic-sized swimming pools of water - the drug slows cellular aging and enhances mitochondrial function, potentially allowing those with the diseases to live longer, healthier lives.

One of the study's co-authors, Bruce Ames, PhD, a senior scientist at Children's and world-renowned expert in nutrition and aging, says that, "What we potentially have is a wonder drug. To find that such a common and inexpensive drug can be used to increase and prolong the quality of life by treating such serious diseases is truly exciting."

Read the rest of the story at the link. If this drug pans out it would be an incredible development.

I wonder how a working knowledge of evolution led to the discovery.

RLC

The Other Front

Stephen Brown gives us an encouraging report on the war in Afghanistan at FrontPage.com. It's not the sort of thing you're likely to read in the MSM, but then the MSM isn't widely known for providing encouraging news about American attempts to keep people free from oppression.

After lamenting media negativism and recounting coalition successes and Taliban failures, Brown notes that the Taliban has achieved some success:

Indeed, just about the only area where the Taliban has enjoyed success is in its attacks on undefended schools. A German report shows that Taliban fighters staged 44 raids on schools last year alone and 440 such attacks have been registered since 2004. According to the report, such attacks have become a weekly occurrence. "It is better for my children if they live, even if they have to be illiterate," one fearful father was quoted as saying. Having failed to drive out coalition forces, the Taliban is training its sights on that other threat to its theocratic vision: schoolchildren.

These are the people we're fighting throughout the Middle East, people who murder children whose only offense is that they're alive. Come to think of it isn't something similar happening in Illinois hospitals with the complete connivance of the Democratic candidate for President (see following)?

Read Brown's whole essay at the link.

RLC

Change We Can Believe in

During the Saddleback interview with pastor Rick Warren Barack Obama quoted the passage from Matthew where Jesus says that "whatsoever you do for the least of these my brothers you do for me" in order to illustrate his view of social justice.

Unfortunately, while Democrats everywhere check their cell phones to see if the glorious text message has arrived heralding the senator's choice for running mate, and the television networks are giddy with speculation about who it will be, few among them seem to be able to find the time to ask the question how Obama has applied this verse in his own life. How does a millionaire who lectures us on alleviating the suffering of our brothers allow his own brother to live on a dollar a week? How does a man who expresses compassion for the least of us, the weakest, the most vulnerable, vote against a bill that would protect children born alive after a failed abortion? These questions don't seem to have occurred to those in the media whose hearts pound with excitement over The Text Message, but they have occurred to Andy McCarthy at National Review Online.

McCarthy lays out Obama's history of protecting the weakest among us in Illinois:

In the Illinois senate, he opposed Born-Alive [the bill that would have made it illegal to allow infants to perish from inanition] tooth and nail.

The shocking extremism of that position - giving infanticide the nod over compassion and life - is profoundly embarrassing to him now. So he has lied about what he did. He has offered various conflicting explanations, ranging from the assertion that he didn't oppose the anti-infanticide legislation (he did), to the assertion that he opposed it because it didn't contain a superfluous clause reaffirming abortion rights (it did), to the assertion that it was unnecessary because Illinois law already protected the children of botched abortions (it didn't - and even if it arguably did, why oppose a clarification?).

What Obama hasn't offered, however, is the rationalization he vigorously posited during the 2002 Illinois senate debate. When it got down to brass tacks, Barack Obama argued that protecting abortion doctors from legal liability was more important than protecting living infants from death.

McCarthy adduces into evidence the transcripts of the senate debate and concludes that Obama's rationalization then and now is indefensible morally and logically. Read the entire piece at the link, and ask yourself whether the media would be so disinterested had John McCain voted, say, to allow torture at Guantanamo.

Senator Obama offers hope and change for the weakest among our brothers but he offers little hope or change for his brother George languishing in a hovel in a Nairobi slum, and he offers no hope or change for children dying a slow death of thirst and hunger in hospital closets. Given the chance to choose to protect the lives of poor infants or the convenience of wealthy doctors he chose to sacrifice the children so that the doctors wouldn't have to miss their tee times and wouldn't have to be pestered by lawyers.

I suppose for his devoted followers that's the sort of change you can believe in.

RLC

Sloth or Gluttony?

Everyone has heard that we've become a nation of fatties, but what's the reason for this? Some say we're slothful layabouts who get too little exercise. Others say that it's our diet that's the culprit. It turns out that people burn as many calories, on average, today as they did twenty five years ago. The problem is, apparently, that we just eat too much.

I don't think it took a study to arrive at this conclusion, but there you have it.

RLC

Since You Bring it up

Senator Obama recently made merry over Senator McCain's apparent inability to recall how many houses he owns. Obama suggested in an ad that McCain was so wealthy as to be out of touch with the common man. Actually, it's his wife, Cindy, who owns their properties, and I don't recall Democrats thinking one's wife's wealth was a problem for John Kerry, but anyway here's the ad:

Well, Senator Obama might be sorry he brought up the matter of houses:

David Freddoso reminds us in a passage quoted at NRO that:

In October 1998, Obama wrote city and state officials, urging them to give Rezko $14 million to build an apartment complex outside of Obama's state Senate district. The Chicago Sun-Times noted last year that Obama's request included $855,000 in "development fees" for Rezko and for another developer, Allison Davis, who happened to be Obama's old law-firm boss. Obama's spokesman said it was just a coincidence that the state senator wrote letters to obtain millions of dollars for his two longtime friends.

In fact, Obama was a dependable ally of subsidized developers in the Legislature, giving Rezko and others broader help as well. In "The Case Against Barack Obama," I identify and parse six housing bills with which Obama was closely involved.

No wonder Rezko helped Obama get a house below market value.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Ouch

Some McCain supporters not affiliated with his campaign have obviously decided, rightly, in my view, that the American people need to know more about the man forty-some percent of them intend to vote for:

Obama aide Tommy Vietor calls the ad "despicable", but it's only despicable if it's in some way false. If it is false then the Obama campaign should explain exactly what about it is incorrect and what exactly Obama's relationship with Ayers is. As matters stand the records of the board on which they served together have been sealed and no one can get access to them. Why doesn't Senator Obama allow them to be released?

Speaking of ads, this one is getting some notice. It's kind of funny, actually:

According to Hot Air more such ads are on the way. Let's hope so.

RLC

Olby Daft on the Draft

Keith Olbermann strove mightily last night to make something significant out of an answer John McCain gave at a town hall meeting yesterday in which a lady made a lengthy plea to do something about the deplorable state of the Veterans' Administration. She concluded her petition by saying, almost inaudibly, that she doesn't see how we'll be able to attract enough young people to military service to get bin Laden unless we reinstate the draft. McCain responded to the woman that he didn't disagree with anything she said and then proceeded to give an equally long response to her complaints about the VA. In other words, he was clearly affirming her critique of the VA, not her coda about the draft, which he appears not to have even heard.

Nevertheless, Olbermann declared that McCain obviously plans to reinstitute the draft, and the MSNBC talk host wanted to be sure every young person and parent knew this so that they'd punish McCain on election day.

Well, here's the video of the woman's question and McCain's response. You decide whether you think McCain is saying he intends to resurrect the draft:

It's just bizarre that Olbermann would see this as anything more than something which might merit requesting a clarification. To assert in confident tones that he has espied in McCain's words an intention to reinstate the draft is absurd. It strikes me as an interpretation born of desperation to find some way to reverse McCain's rise in the polls. It also strikes me as fundamentally dishonest, especially in light of McCain's previous insistence that he has no intention of calling for a draft short of world war III.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Obama's Compassion

The controversy over Senator Obama's vote against a bill that would have protected infants from being allowed to die subsequent to having survived an attempt to abort them continues despite the fact that the MSM has had almost nothing to say about it.

Ramesh Ponnuru adds some thoughts in his column at NRO. He writes:

Nurse Jill Stanek said that at her hospital "abortions" were repeatedly performed by inducing the live birth of a pre-viable fetus and then leaving it to die. When she made her report, the attorney general said that no law had been broken. That's why legislators proposed a bill to fill the gap.

Obama did not want the gap filled. He did not want pre-viable fetuses/infants to have any legal protection. In the Illinois legislature, he argued that providing them with legal protection would both be unconstitutional in itself - a violation of the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence - and undermine the right to abortion.

Obama was wrong about these points. The Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence treats the location of the young human organism, not its stage of development, as the key factor in whether it can be legally protected.

It's not clear yet how many people are aware of Obama's stand on infanticide since the MSM seems disinclined to inform the public about it, nor is it clear how much the public will care even if they do know. One thing we can say for sure, though, is that the issue certainly won't help him.

Meanwhile, the candidate who reminds us that we are our brother's keeper turns out to have a brother living in abject penury in a six foot by nine foot shack on the outskirts of Nairobi. Surely, some of the ample proceeds from Obama's book could have been diverted to helping this suffering brother. Evidently they weren't.

RLC

The Mystery of Consciousness

Denyse O'Leary at The Mindful Hack relates an interesting passage from a book by philosopher Roger Scruton. Scruton, writing about the mystery of consciousness, says this:

Consciousness is more familiar to us than any other feature of our world, since it is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects - a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the 'subject of consciousness', the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside.

To be conscious is to be aware of a world outside oneself, but how does this awareness come about? What, exactly, is it? The brain is a lump of matter. How does such a thing give rise to the experience of green or of a sweet flavor? And the greatest mystery of all is how blind, purposeless processes could ever have conferred upon matter this astounding ability.

Materialistic atheism cannot give us even the beginnings of an explanation. Why then does it scoff at the hypothesis that our conscious minds are derivatives of another conscious Mind, a Mind that is the ontological ground of all reality?

RLC

Gentle Persuasion

Being armed certainly made a difference for this 85 year old lady:

An 85-year-old woman boldly went for her gun and busted a would-be burglar inside her home, then forced him to call police while she kept him in her sights, police said.

"I just walked right on past him to the bedroom and got my gun," Leda Smith said.

Smith heard someone break into her home Monday afternoon and grabbed the .22-caliber revolver she had been keeping by her bed since a neighbor's home was burglarized a few weeks ago.

"I said 'What are you doing in my house?' He just kept saying he didn't do it," Smith said.

After the 17-year-old boy called 911, Smith kept holding the gun on him until state police arrived at her home in Springhill Township, about 45 miles south of Pittsburgh.

In an ideal world there'd be no need for guns. Unfortunately, this isn't an ideal world.

RLC

Bangkok on the Pacific

This essay in the San Francisco Chronicle by Deb Saunders paints a grisly picture of where the sexual revolution is taking us. San Francisco voters will decide a ballot measure in November that would essentially decriminalize prostitution, but the wording of the measure would mean that children exploited for sex would be less protected than before and those who traffic in the sex trade will be more protected. Saunders writes:

Yet the San Francisco ballot measure completely ignores the prostitution of children. The measure simply states, "Law enforcement agencies shall not allocate any resources for the investigation and prosecution of prostitutes for prostitution." Astonishingly, there's no exemption that encourages police to enforce the law for minors.

If the measure passes, the city is likely to become an international haven for pimps who peddle girls and boys, and perverts seeking sex with minors.

The other big problem: The measure prohibits city law enforcement from applying for grants to prosecute human traffickers. That's right, this measure gives a free pass to the human sex-slave trade -- in a city that is a central stop for international sex-trade rings.

This may strike you as terrible news but look at the bright side. Think of what it'll do for tourism.

You can read Saunders' entire piece at the link.

HT: Byron

RLC

Never Forget

This ship, the USS New York, is designed for anti-terrorist operations and carries a crew of 360 plus 700 combat-ready Marines who can be delivered ashore by helicopter or assault craft. It's the fifth such ship in its class, but it's nevertheless unique. The USS New York was made with 24 tons of steel from the World Trade Towers. It's motto is "Never Forget".

HT: Carol

RLC

Ad Wars

The McCain campaign has put out this ad which hits hard at Obama's economic views:

Meanwhile, the Obama people have tossed out this subtle slam at McCain:

It seems inoffensive enough until you realize that the implication of it is that Barack Obama has been faithful to his family in contrast to you-know-who. Classy.

There are two kinds of negative ads. One kind criticizes an opponent on the basis of his or her record. These types of negative ads are perfectly acceptable in a political campaign. The other type of negative ad criticizes an opponent on the basis of matters mostly irrelevant to the campaign. Obama's ad, while ostensibly a positive look at Obama's character, is actually a swipe at McCain for the circumstances by which he came to be married to his current wife almost thirty years ago.

I leave it to the reader to decide which type of negative ads these two are.

RLC

Feedback

Byron writes to dissent somewhat from my portrayal of Jim Wallis in God's Politics. His letter can be read on our feedback page.

I also received from Caleb this question:

I have two very good friends here at college; one a pro-life Republican, and the other a pro-life Democrat. Both obviously stand in stark opposition to Senator Obama's stance on abortion. For the Republican, Sen. Obama's extreme pro-choice stance is but one of many reasons why he will be (albeit reluctantly) pulling the lever for Sen. McCain in November.

For the Democrat, while he strongly disagrees with Senator Obama's stance on abortion, he feels that he "cannot be a single-issue voter...and [neither] should other Christians." The question I have, therefore, is this. While there are serious doubts amongst conservatives that McCain is truly "conservative" enough, would his generally pro-life stance be enough of an issue to tip the balance in his favor? By extension, is it proper to be a "single issue" voter, or is that dangerous naivety, especially with an issue such as abortion?

I know I don't really have an answer to that; I hope you might?

Well, I don't know if I have a good answer, but here's basically how I replied to Caleb:

I don't see anything wrong with being a single issue voter as long as the issue is of paramount importance. There are a lot of people who will vote for Obama solely because he opposes the war. There are others who will vote for him solely because they know he'll keep abortion legal. These are single issues, and for those voters they trump everything else.

The question is whether a person thinks that protecting the unborn is of such great importance that it overrides all else. If they do, then there's nothing wrong with voting on the basis of the candidates' position on that issue.

People who complain about single issue voters are generally those who don't like the issue, or the position taken on the issue, that the single issue voters assign such significance to. In other words, they have no trouble with voting for a candidate on the basis of his stance on just one issue as long as the candidate is one they themselves would support and the issue is one they themselves feel strongly about.

You won't hear too much complaining from Obama supporters, for example, about the single issue voting of those who will vote for Obama simply because he's African American or because he's against the war in Iraq. It's only when someone says that they can't vote for Obama because he's willing to tolerate infanticide that his supporters intone about the shortcomings of being a single issue voter.

RLC

In God We Trust

MSNBC is conducting a poll asking whether the motto "In God we Trust" should be removed from our currency. You can vote on the question here, but I don't know how long the poll will be up.

It would be interesting to see how the results, which can be accessed at the link, break down according to liberal/conservative voting preferences.

RLC

Why We Should Study Evolution

Olivia Judson offers three reasons in a New York Times opinion piece why evolution should be taught in our schools. I agree with her conclusion, but her reasons are riddled with confusions.

First, she makes the same error that so many make by contrasting evolution and intelligent design. ID is not incompatible with evolution. It's incompatible with the belief that evolution is a purposeless, random process guided only by unintelligent forces. Perhaps the most prominent of ID theorists, Michael Behe, believes in descent by modification. So do many others.

Judson then makes the claim that because there's controversy over evolution, "[I]t's discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely."

I would certainly like to see the data she relies on to make this assertion. I can't imagine that there's a public school anywhere in America that has dropped evolution from the curriculum, nor do ID people want them to.

Having raised our suspicions about her reliability on this topic, Ms Judson goes on to offer three reasons why evolution should be taught:

First, it provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions.... Add evolution - and it becomes possible to make inferences and predictions and (sometimes) to do experiments to test those predictions.

Fair enough. Evolution provides a coherent framework for thinking about relationships, but evolution can be taught without the materialism, and despite what Judson says, biology can be taught from a creationist perspective with no reference to the idea of common descent at all. Indeed, most of the actual evidence we have of evolution fits both models equally well.

The second reason she gives for teaching evolution is that "the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve - and fast."

Hunting animals to extinction may cause evolution in their former prey species. Experiments on guppies have shown that, without predators, these fish evolve more brightly colored scales, mature later, bunch together in shoals less and lose their ability to suddenly swim away from something. Such changes can happen in fewer than five generations. If you then reintroduce some predators, the population typically goes extinct.

Thus, a failure to consider the evolution of other species may result in a failure of our efforts to preserve them. And, perhaps, to preserve ourselves from diseases, pests and food shortages. In short, evolution is far from being a remote and abstract subject. A failure to teach it may leave us unprepared for the challenges ahead.

This is rather fevered rhetoric. In the first place what she's calling evolution here is not evolution as it's understood by most people. No one doubts that small changes can occur in populations of organisms because of stresses in their environment. Nor does anyone oppose teaching what we know about such variation (usually called microevolution). The controversy is over whether natural unguided forces can produce the molecules-to-man kind of evolution (macroevolution) that most people think of when they hear the word "evolution".

The third reason to teach evolution, Ms Judson tells us, is more philosophical:

It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, "The Republican War on Science," the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence - or indeed, evidence of any kind - has permeated the Bush administration's policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry.

This is plainly ridiculous. The science classroom is often the one place in our postmodern world where evidence is actually honored. If anyone is impervious to evidence it's the evolutionary materialists who believe steadfastly in their theory despite the lack of evidence for it. By this I mean that there's no evidence that blind, undirected forces plus chance are capable of creating a universe fit for life, originating life, or evolving the complex structures and pathways that are ubiquitous in living things. Nevertheless, every materialist believes that it happened despite the enormous odds against it and the total absence of evidence that it did.

But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It's that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don't have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way. And if at first it seems so complicated that the evolutionary steps are hard to work out, we have an invitation to imagine, to play, to experiment and explore. To my mind, this only enhances the wonder.

Very well, but this is an aesthetic reason for studying evolution. Why couldn't someone reply that the mystery of nature fills him with far more wonder when he considers that these things were engineered just for our enjoyment by a loving Creator? If a sense of wonder and optimism is to serve as justification for teaching something should we not insist that the view that there is a purpose underlying the world we study also be taught?

It's interesting that Ms Judson nowhere argues that we should study evolution because it's true. This, of course, would be the salient reason for including it in the curriculum, but its truth is, despite the adamantine asseverations of its proponents, notoriously difficult to establish.

Nevertheless, I agree that we should study evolution but for a reason having little to do with those advanced by Ms Judson. It should be studied because most practicing scientists believe some version of it, and we should therefore examine the theory and the evidence both for and against it in order to be familiar with the current state of scientific thinking. If and when it falls out of favor and is no longer thought to be true then we should no longer spend time on it, other than as a historical curiosity, regardless of whether it still performs the functions adduced by Ms. Judson.

RLC

Say it Ain't So, John

John McCain could very well defeat Senator Obama in November, and he has certainly helped himself toward this end by being resolute on all the issues that separate him from his rival. One of those issues is abortion, concerning which McCain said Saturday at Saddleback church that, "As president of the United States, I will be a pro-life president and this presidency will have pro-life policies. That's my commitment. That's my commitment to you." Such assurances are catnip to conservatives, and they sound so much more robust than the rather weasely refusal of Senator Obama to answer Rick Warren's question Saturday night about the point at which a human being should have the right to life.

Obama bobbed and weaved and finally opined that such questions are "above his pay grade". The man is running for president, and such questions are matters that government leaders must decide. If he has no opinion on a question of human and civil rights then he should not be holding an office in which he must vote on legislation that involves such rights nor should he be running for an office in which he will appoint jurists who will rule on the matter. It's ironic that as an Illinois senator Obama felt it well within his pay grade to vote to allow born infants to be left to die, but now that he's running for president he suddenly finds himself unqualified to make such judgments.

The abortion issue is a winner for McCain, especially if he points out Obama's implicit support for infanticide. No one to the right of Peter Singer and Barack Obama thinks letting babies die is anything other than evil and when the American public finally learns that Obama voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act they'll no doubt lose a lot of their enthusiasm for him. So why then the talk in the McCain camp of selecting a pro-choice veep? McCain has mentioned both Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge as possible running mates and both have been accompanying him on his campaign town hall meetings (both spoke to the audience at York, PA last week).

McCain is beginning to not only win conservatives' votes but also their enthusiasm. He'll lose both, though, if he picks a liberal like Leiberman who is as far left as Obama on almost every issue besides the war, or Ridge who is moderate to liberal. If he picks a pro-choice running mate, how, conservatives will wonder, do we know he would keep his implicit promise to appoint pro-life jurists to the Supreme Court?

The safe choice for McCain is Mitt Romney, but anyone less conservative than he is himself would be a disaster. The election is within his grasp today only because of his efforts to allay conservative fears that he'd sell them out. If he turns around and sticks his thumb in the eye of his pro-life supporters millions of them will just stay home in November.

The editors at NRO agree that a pro-choice veep would be an epic political blunder.

RLC

Who's Telling the Truth?

We have repeated here claims made by others that Barack Obama voted against a bill in the Illinois state senate that would have prevented abortion facilities from treating infants who survived abortions as though they were medical waste. The bill was in response to a case where a facility was discarding living children and allowing them to die.

Senator Obama was asked about this on Saturday evening by a reporter and claimed that those making this allegation are simply lying about his vote.

Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker adduces the record of the vote, however, and states that it's Obama who's lying. Lifson certainly seems to have the goods to back up his claim. He links the reader to the bill, the amended bill, and an almost identical bill that even NARAL supported that passed the U.S. Senate and which Obama says he would have supported had he been in the U.S. Senate at the time.

Lifson also shows the record of Obama's committee vote on the bill in the Illinois senate. It shows him voting for the amendment that would have granted protection for Roe v. Wade, a protection he insisted on, but after the amendment passed he voted against the bill itself, in effect denying protection to born infants.

The video of Obama insisting that the National Right to Life Committee is lying about his record is astonishing if in fact it is Obama who is misrepresenting the facts. Such convincing prevarication, if that's what it is, must make even Bill Clinton envious.

Despite Lifson's evidence, though, I'm still not prepared to conclude that Obama is consciously lying. It's possible, I suppose, that despite his degree from Harvard he's really not too bright and didn't know what he was voting for. It's also possible that the senator simply forgot this vote (although having voted "present" so much of the time one would think he'd remember the votes he actually did take a stand on). Nevertheless, if he sticks with his story that pro-life groups are lying about his vote against protecting new borns, he's either going to have to explain why the paper trail only seems to support his accusers or else forfeit altogether the presumption of integrity.

RLC