Civic Duty

Say Anything blog has an interesting statistic that reflects well on the civic virtue of the good people of Indianapolis. It turns out that 105% of eligible persons in that patriotic town and the surrounding county are actually registered to vote. The region has 644,197 people and 677,401 of them are registered to exercise the franchise in November. This is a very impressive feat.

We're sure it's a mere coincidence that the group ACORN, which is currently being investigated all across the country for voter fraud, has an office in Indianapolis, and that the Obama campaign's contribution of $800,000 to ACORN to help them get out the vote is an innocent misjudgment. Just saying.

RLC

No Life for Young Men

Back during the heyday of the debate over capital punishment opponents of the practice argued strenuously that offenders should be given life in prison without parole rather than be put to death. Advocates of the death penalty, on the other hand, argued just as fervently that once we end executions of murderers in favor of life in prison the "reformers" will next argue for imposing less draconian sentences so that ultimately no one will even get life in prison.

Jeff Hawkes, staff writer for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal offers an excellent illustration of how the debate over how to punish killers will evolve. He argues that juvenile murderers should not be sentenced to life in prison, but all of his reasons apply just as much to killers as old as thirty five. Hawkes writes that:

Pennsylvania has 444 juvenile lifers, according to a May report by Human Rights Watch. That's not only more - far more - than any other state, it represents nearly one-fifth of all juvenile lifers in the United States.

Considering that no other country sentences children to life without the chance for parole, Pennsylvania's Senate Judiciary Committee is appropriately taking a second look at whether life without parole for juveniles is just.

Family members of murder victims implored the senators at a hearing last week to keep teenage killers locked up forever. But juvenile law advocates and researchers argued that the right thing to do is give an adult who committed a horrible crime as a teenager a chance to show he or she is no longer a danger.

Hawkes thinks that as long as a killer is no longer a danger to others he should be let loose, but if we accept this logic why impose a sentence at all? As soon the inmate convinces a panel of "experts" that he's rehabilitated why not release him forthwith? Indeed, those who have killed others in crimes of passion or revenge are probably not a threat to the general population in the first place so why incarcerate them at all?

He goes on to write that:

Beatriz Luna, associate professor of psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said research suggests that teens should not be held as accountable as adults for their actions because the juvenile brain, particularly the region for impulse control, is not fully developed.

Research further suggests, Luna said, that the brains of people in their 20s and 30s continue to develop new pathways, indicating "great possibility for rehabilitation."

"...the fact is the adolescent brain is at the peak of risk-taking behavior, and it can be rehabilitated. My opinion as a scientist and as a member of society is that life without parole is quite uninformed (and) seems vindictive."

Well, if this is a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on juveniles then it's equally a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on anyone under thirty-five. Is that where Hawkes is headed with his argument?

Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of "Rethinking Juvenile Justice," said brain processes responding to pleasure and reward are especially active in early adolescence, explaining why teens see the rewards of risky behavior and ignore the costs.

"The engines are running at full throttle," Steinberg said, "but there's not a skilled driver behind the wheel yet."

Hawkes concludes that "science and compassion are on the side of giving a lifer hope of showing a parole board he's not who he was at 13".

Of course the killer's not who he was when he was thirteen. No one is. No one at thirty is who they were when they were twenty. Everybody changes. Hawkes' argument is really a brief for doing away with life sentences altogether. First we stop executions, then we end life terms. What's next on this particular slippery slope? Doing away with prison?

RLC

ZZZZZZZZ

In what was otherwise a snoozer of a debate last night the most startling revelation to emerge was Senator Obama's statement that he would go to war with Iran to keep them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the clear implication of his assertion that we cannot let Iran have nuclear weapons and that, though we should try sanctions, etc., etc., he would not take the use of military force off the table.

Add this to his stated policy of surging troops in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban/al Qaeda who threaten to undo all that has been accomplished there, and his claim that we should invade Pakistan to get bin Laden, and those who saw Obama has the great anti-war hope must be seething with disappointment and frustration. Obama presented himself early on in the primaries as an anti-war progressive and garnered a lot of support from the constituency to which that position appeals. Now he turns out to be something quite other than what he originally appeared. In fact, with his threat to attack Iran, he seems to be a proponent of the "Bush doctrine" of striking an enemy who is preparing to strike us.

I have a word of encouragement, though, for those who may be feeling betrayed by Obama's willingness to bomb a nation that has not attacked us: Don't worry. I doubt very much if the senator really means what he's saying. He may think he does, but I believe the real Obama is the Obama of the early primaries, not the Obama of the campaign's homestretch.

As for the rest of the debate, the candidates were simply treading water. No one did badly, but not doing badly does not help McCain. McCain simply lacks the instincts necessary to wage a come from behind race. To be sure, he was hindered by the blandness of the questions selected by the moderator, Tom Brokaw who apparently turned aside any questions about illegal immigration, abortion, Obama's unsavory associations, or judicial appointments.

Even so, McCain needs to show the country what Barack Obama and the Democratic party will do to the nation should they get the power, and he doesn't seem to have the stomach for that. He didn't seem interested, for example, in explaining to viewers that the worst financial crisis this nation has experienced since the depression of the 1930s is due almost entirely to Democrat malfeasance. Maybe he should have Sarah Palin pinch hit for him at the last debate as a sort of designated debater. At least she won't go gently into that dark night of political defeat and oblivion.

RLC

SNL

Saturday Night Live did a funny skit on the financial crisis which pretty much puts the blame on everyone, but especially congressional Democrats, bad credit risks, greedy yuppies and liberal moneybags. The skit was pulled from the SNL website, evidently because of pressure from somewhere, but it was caught by patdollard and can be viewed there. It's pretty good.

RLC

Obama and Ayers

This story by Dinitia Smith on William Ayers appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks on New York and Washington. It gives us good look at who Ayers is, and although both he and his wife try in the article to soften the ugliness of some of their earlier pronouncements, one wonders if this is out of genuine regret or if it's simply a public relations move. Here are a couple of the most salient paragraphs:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article also gives us insight into Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn:

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

Other reports recount how Ms Dohrn flashed a three finger salute to the crowd to symbolize the fork.

Ayers and his wife are past associates of Barack Obama. Among other things, they hosted him in their living room when he launched his campaign for the Illinois senate and served on several boards with him. Obama's campaign is trying to minimize the connection, while admitting that they were friendly, but the relationship seems to have been closer than they're letting on.

This is important, not because it suggests that Obama is sympathetic to terrorism, but because it reflects on his judgment, the sort of people he is drawn to, and the sort of people who might find their way into his administration.

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were learned that John McCain was supported by, and worked closely with, an unrepentant abortion clinic bomber. I feel quite certain that the media would go ballistic and insist that this association alone would disqualify him from being president of the U.S. Yet much of the media seems completely unconcerned that Obama was involved with Ayers and Dohrn who bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

UPDATE: CNN, of all people, has done a piece which pretty much shows that Obama and Ayers were pretty tight back in Chicago. I'm sure that this kind of reporting is not going to be popular with CNN's viewership, but Drew Griffen is to be commended for doing real investigative journalism. He'll probably be looking for a new job next week:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

Religulous

Christianity Today reviews Bill Maher's polemic against religion and finds it amusing but ultimately frivolous.

Here's an excerpt from the review:

Honestly, it's not the hardest thing in the world to make a religion look silly when you only focus on the kitschiest, most grimace-inducing practitioners of it. Sure, we have to own up to these unfortunate (but fortunately fringe) elements within our ranks, but Maher shores up little credibility for his cause by refusing to talk with any opponent with an ounce of nuance of theological rigor.

Like schoolyard bullies who always pick on the kids least able to defend themselves, people like Maher always seem to mock those who are least able to articulate their beliefs or whose beliefs are the most outlandish. They never seem to have much appetite for engaging those who are their intellectual betters because they doubtless realize at some level the damage that would do to their project of embarrassing religious belief. Indeed, the Bill Mahers of the world probably realize that were they to pick on those who've actually thought about their religious convictions they themselves would be the ones who'd wind up looking silly.

RLC

Racism!

Did you know that any criticism of Senator Obama's former associations is a form of racism? It's true, at least if Douglass Daniel of the AP is an authority on such matters. Writing of Sarah Palin's reference to Obama as having palled around with terrorists the racially sensitive Daniel espies racism lurking in the weeds:

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

Most troubling, however, is how allowing racism to creep into the discussion serves McCain's purpose so well. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

This is absurd, of course, but what better way is there to discredit someone than to accuse them of racism? Whites, especially white liberals, generally cower in fear at the charge, but though it may have McCain's advisors trembling, I don't think it'll deter SarahCuda.

The fact is that Obama has mingled with an unsavory cast of characters (a Weatherman terrorist, an Islamic terrorist financier, a felon, a bigoted preacher), and these are facts of which the electorate should be made aware. If we're known by the company we keep the American public should be informed of what kind of people Obama has gravitated toward. If calling these associations to attention be racism then the word no longer has any meaning.

Patterico has more examples of the promiscuous use of the incendiary term against critics of the man who is the leftmost candidate for president since 1946.

RLC

Any Questions?

Why we are where we are:

Now let's all turn out in November and reward the people who caused this mess by putting their party in the White House. That makes sense, doesn't it?

RLC

With Friends Like This...

Barney Frank deserves to be pilloried for his role in the financial crisis we're now facing, but people like Bill O'Reilly are obviously not the ones to do it. This video is an embarrassment to those who agree with O'Reilly's point but think that a much more effective case could be made against Frank and the Democrats by calmly and rationally explaining it rather than acting like a three year-old having a tantrum in the sandbox:

The lesson here is that we need to carry on our discourse in ways that are polite, courteous, and calm. We persuade no one by yelling at them and calling them cowards. Nor do we impress our listeners if they're repelled by our belligerence and name-calling, which any decent person would be. It's disgusting when the left does it, and it's no less so when it comes from the right.

This is not to say that there's no place for anger. There is, but if we want to persuade others to our point of view our anger should be controlled. Anyone who doesn't understand the issue in this video, and who doesn't know the players, is going to find Barney Frank a much more sympathetic character than Bill O'Reilly, and that would be unfortunate, at least it would be if you believe that conservative ideas must prevail if our nation is going to survive.

People like O'Reilly (and Michael Savage) succeed only in making the task of conservatism's opponents that much easier.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff (Pt. III)

In his essay titled Without God physicist Stephen Weinberg says this:

[I] do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes. Anyway, belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications-it's still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands.

Set aside the pomposity and self-righteousness implied by his claim to be a moral exemplar. He's being hopelessly naive when he says that belief in a transcendent creator has no moral implications. Unless there is a transcendent moral authority there simply is nothing that obligates or binds us to act in any way beyond how we feel like acting. There's nothing that makes kindness better than cruelty. Both kindness and cruelty are simply things some people prefer, like they prefer a particular flavor of ice cream. We may like or dislike the behaviors we label kind and cruel, just as we like or dislike a particular flavor of ice cream, but as with the ice cream, there's nothing wrong with them.

Weinberg then adds this:

As religious belief weakens, more and more of us know that after death there is nothing....Living without God isn't easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation-that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking-with good humor, but without God.

So atheism amounts to this: We are like a lone man lost in a wilderness and facing certain death. We can face our predicament bravely or not, but which we choose isn't going to change anything and doesn't much matter. And why worry about bravery? What makes bravery a virtue? The fact that other people admire it? People admire a lot of things in others that are not virtuous, what makes bravery different?

Atheists like Weinberg adjure us to face the absurdity of life with a smile on our face, but it's the smile of a clown. It's there but there's an incongruity between the smile and the emptiness and despair that lurks behind it. The smile is a mask that tries to send the message that one's life means something when in fact anyone who thinks about it knows that it doesn't.

Thanks to Logan Gage at EN&N for calling Weinberg's essay to our attention. See here and here for additional posts on Weinberg's Without God.

RLC

Hezbollah?

Senator Biden is often praised for his extensive foreign policy experience but that experience is of little moment if he doesn't know what's going on in the world's hot spots. In his debate with Governor Palin the senator took some swipes at the Bush policy in Palestine and along the way delivered himself of the asseveration that we and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon and that he and Senator Obama urged that NATO fill the void.

I haven't a clue as to what he's talking about, and neither, I suspect, did he. Lots of other folks are wondering about it, too. It's as if Biden just made this up on the spur of the moment.

He made a number of other erroneous statements during the debate, but this one is perhaps the most bizarre. Check out the link.

Maybe he was thinking of something else and got confused in the spotlights, but the point is that after this debate there should be no more gibes at Sarah Palin's relative lack of knowledge about the world.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff (Pt. II)

In his article Without God which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Physicist Stephen Weinberg paints a bleak and depressing picture of a life without God, but seeks to redeem that portrait by urging us to enjoy a drop or two of honey before we dissolve into the void of nothingness. Weinberg urges us to be brave, but his prescription is really a form of denial. He tells us that human life is pointless and absurd so we should embrace...poetry. He adds that poetry doesn't need God for its inspiration:

We see already that little English-language poetry written in the past few decades owes anything to belief in God, and in some cases where religion does enter, as with poets like Stevie Smith or Philip Larkin, it is the rejection of religion that provides their inspiration.

Perhaps, but whether the poet loves God or hates him he is still fascinated by him and this fascination is what inspires his art. If it weren't for God what would these poets write about? Weinberg seems to think that a culture can produce great art without God and perhaps it can produce some, but if the art and literature which has been inspired by God, either positively or negatively, directly or indirectly, were removed from our museums and libraries, there would be precious little of value left.

Moreover, we are justified in wondering, where are the great artists from those countries which are officially atheistic? Who are the men and women of genius in those countries whose work is completely indifferent to God and yet rises to the level of greatness? Most of the great writers who emerged behind the iron curtain, for example, were religious dissidents. The record of official state atheism does little to inspire optimism that Weinberg's assessment of atheist art is correct. If history is a guide, it seems more likely that atheism stifles and impedes creativity and artistic genius.

I'll have a little more to say about Weinberg's essay tomorrow.

RLC

Sarahcuda

Last night's debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin was remarkable. Biden seemed the more knowledgeable and yet, according to some analysts, he made at least ten misstatements of fact. Palin may also have made some errors but, despite having to rely frequently on her notes, she turned in a stunning performance. She was up against a man who has been involved in such debates in three different presidential campaigns, including the recent Democratic primary. Palin has been on the national stage for about five weeks, yet she not only held her own against the 35 year veteran of Congress, but she came across as a very appealing candidate.

Biden had only to avoid embarrassing himself in order to pass muster (though he certainly exceeded that minimal requirement,) but Palin had to show the country that she was smart, knowledgeable, charming and competent. She had to show that she belonged on the stage with Senator Biden. She did all of that, and by so doing she probably pulled McCain's bacon out of the fire for a second time within a month.

His campaign was beginning to falter going into the convention and Palin's speech at that event turned it around. Then, after McCain moved into a slight lead, the financial crisis hit and the attacks on Palin piled atop her distressing appearances with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, began to sap the original excitement she generated. McCain could not overcome these problems in his debate with Obama, which was considered an approximate draw, and it looked as if his campaign was about to fade into oblivion. Indeed, NBC analyst Chuck Todd just yesterday declared the race essentially over.

But after last night I'm not so sure. It's not that Biden lost, rather it's that Palin seemed to reassure a lot of people that the calumnies leveled against her abilities were unwarranted, and her disappointing performances in her interviews with Gibson and Couric were correctable stumbles. She re-energized a lot of Republicans last night and probably wooed more than a few independents and undecideds to her side.

We'll have to wait to see what the polls show to be sure, but I'll be surprised if McCain doesn't get a bit of a bump from Palin's performance last night.

A final thought: It occured to me as I watched the debate that the country would be better served if the two debaters, Biden and Palin, headed their respective tickets. Isn't it ironic, for instance, that we may elect in November a man to be commander-in-chief who, because of his past associations with terrorists, would probably otherwise be denied a top security clearance by the CIA or FBI?

RLC

What If

In a fun parody, Victor Davis Hanson at NRO puts all of Joe Biden's howlers and other goofy utterances in the mouth of Sarah Palin and tacitly invites the reader to wonder what her treatment from the media would be like if she had said half the dumb things that Biden has said.

Tonight Sarah Palin will debate Joe Biden (in an event moderated by Gwen Ifil who has a big financial stake in a Biden win). I was thinking about this debate today and the treatment that Palin has gotten from the media and the left-wing blogs, and the thought occurred to me that it's a wonder that any good person runs for elective office in this country. Fine people like Palin are ridiculed and treated with contempt by the Charles Gibsons of the world while crooks, scam artists, buffoons and perverts like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, William Jefferson, Nancy Pelosi and many others get a complete pass from the media. Why do good people subject themselves to the abuse and humiliation they must endure to serve the people when others who have no business being seated in Congress are never examined, never questioned, never exposed because they happen to be members of the correct party?

I suppose it's true that when the people in a democracy don't take the time to find out what their political leadership is doing, and who they are, they wind up with the politicians they deserve.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff

I have on many previous occasions argued here at Viewpoint that an atheistic worldview leads to nihilism, or it would if the atheist were consistent with his fundamental assumption that there is no God. Our worldview is like a train which, once we climb aboard, heads off toward a particular destination. The terminus toward which the atheistic train is bound is a yawning abyss of despair and nihilism. If one stays on the train all the way one inevitably plunges into the chasm. Few are willing to go all the way, however, so, once they see the abyss looming ahead, they jump off the train.

Atheistic physicist Stephen Weinberg, in an article in The New York Times Review of Books titled Without God, looks down the track and espies clearly the cliff over which his atheism will plunge him:

[T]he worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. What, then, can we do?

Weinberg is about to jump off the train. He won't give up his atheism, but he can't bear to follow it to its logical endpoint either.

So he urges his readers to embrace humor, beauty, pleasure, and moral virtue despite the fact that there's no non-arbitrary reason why anyone should do so and no reason to think that these could inject any real meaning into the otherwise dreary ordeal of life. Weinberg's answer reminds me of a parable that Leo Tolstoy tells in his Confessions:

"There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler in the steppes who is attacked by a furious wild beast. To save himself the traveler gets into a waterless well; but at the bottom of it he sees a dragon with its jaws wide open to devour him. The unhappy man dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, and dares not descend for fear of the dragon, so he catches hold of the branch of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the well. His arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon perish, death awaiting him on either side, but he still holds on; and he sees two mice, one black and one white, gradually making their way round the stem of the wild plant on which he is hanging, nibbling it through. The plant will soon give way and break off, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish; but, while still hanging, he looks around him, and, finding some drops of honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he stretches his tongue and licks them.

"Thus do I cling to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand why such tortures have fallen to my lot. I also strive to suck the honey which once comforted me, but this honey no longer rejoices me, while the white mouse and the black, day and night, gnaw through the branch to which I cling. I see the dragon plainly, and the honey is no longer sweet. I see the dragon, from which there is no escape, and the mice, and I cannot turn my eyes away from them. It is no fable, but a living, undeniable truth, to be understood of all men...."

Weinberg, like many atheists, is like the man in the well about to die but somehow persuading himself that licking the honey has some point to it.

RLC

Sowell on the Bailout

Thomas Sowell explains why the collapse of Freddie and Fannie is not a failure of free market economics but rather a predictable consequence of government involving itself in the marketplace. He says, for example, that:

[V]oters [don't] deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were free market institutions they could not have gotten away with their risky financial practices because no one would have bought their securities without the implicit assumption that the politicians would bail them out.

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Sowell also explains briefly why it's wrongheaded to try to blame this crisis on the Bush administration. It's a good op-ed but the page on which it's found seems to take a while to load. Nevertheless, it's worth the wait.

RLC

Dissing the Classics

Eleanor Bourg Donlon laments what she sees as a growing disinterest among the young for reading the classics, particularly Dickens and Shakespeare, and she places the blame squarely on classroom teachers, both secondary and college:

The true stage for the anti-Dickens crusade is the classroom. The uninspired pessimism of high-school teachers blights the young receptacle, already numbed into thinking that the Harry Potter series is "quality literature." Jack thinks Sydney Carton is a sap, and Jill doesn't have the foggiest idea what is wrong with Miss Havisham. They agree, however, that the assignment is boring, and they wait longingly for the day when they can escape the class altogether. And so the teachers say, "No one really likes Dickens but we have to read him." Or "Dickens is depressing, but that was because all the Victorians were repressed." Or "Dickens was paid by the word, that's why he wrote such long books." (The last is not only an appalling misunderstanding of Dickensian prose, it is apocryphal. Dickens was paid by the installment, not by the word-a fact that does illuminate much of the structure of the novels.)

Meanwhile, in the universities, Dickens and his characters are accused of homoeroticism, incest, misogyny, and so on: an infamous parade of unseemly sins. Beyond these torrid projections, Dickens is condemned as too sentimental for cynical modernity, too preachy for tolerant modernity, and too prosy for innocent undergraduate eyes. Young students are distracted with Woolf and Joyce and oversexed interpretations of Shakespeare.

I suspect Donlon exaggerates her case at least a little. The teachers of literature that I know best love the classics and teach them with a contagious verve and affection. Even so, those closer to the literature class, whether teacher or student, would be in a better position than I to assess the accuracy of Donlon's indictment.

Her essay is worth reading in its entirety.

RLC

Conflict of Interest

Suppose you were running for high office and were to debate your opponent in front of the entire nation. Would you think it fair that the moderator of the debate stands to make a great deal of money if your opponent wins the election but earn nothing if your opponent loses? Probably not, but this is the situation Sarah Palin will find herself in during tomorrow night's debate with Joe Biden.

The moderator, Gwen Ifil, has written a book about Barack Obama which is due to be released in January right around inauguration day. If Obama is the man being inaugurated, Ifil will probably sell a lot of copies. If Obama has lost the election no one is likely to be interested in her book. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which invited her to moderate, committed a gross error in judgment and, for her part, she should have declined their offer.

The fact that she will be asking the questions means that she is in a position to influence the outcome of the proceedings. Her tone, her inflection, the kind of questions she asks, can all work to the advantage or disadvantage of one or the other debater. A moderator is supposed to be disinterested, but Gwen Ifil is surely not disinterested.

No one who has a financial stake in the outcome should be permitted to be in this position any more than a basketball official who has bet on the game should be allowed to officiate it.

For more on this go here.

RLC

Thoughts on a "Crisis"

Yesterday's events provoke a few desultory thoughts:

How long will it be before the rest of the media starts informing viewers of the facts surrounding our financial crisis (see video below)? And why, if it truly is such a crisis, did Congress take the next two days off for Rosh Hashana? If the situation is as dire as we've been told that it is wouldn't we expect Congress to work on Christmas day, if need be, to get it resolved? Why are Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank blaming Republicans for not getting the bailout passed when 40% (95) of House Democrats voted against it? If only 11 of those Democrats had voted for the measure instead of against it it would have passed. I'm not saying that that would have been a good thing, understand, but it's hard to blame the other party when so many of one's own party didn't vote the way one thinks they should have voted.

The fact that neither Pelosi (nor Obama) seemed to work very hard to get her caucus to support the bailout plan and the fact that the Democrats adjourned for a two day holiday suggests to me that this "crisis" is more a political ploy than a serious immediate threat to our economy. Either that or the Democratic leadership is even more irresponsible than I thought they were.

Here's an interview you can expect never to see on MSNBC:

RLC

Obama's Gestapo

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned Senator Obama's attempt to intimidate and squelch free speech by prosecuting those who produce ads that the Obama campaign doesn't like. Now comes an organized attempt in Missouri to use police and prosecutors to respond to ads the campaign deems to be unfair.

This is unconscionable, and, as we said in the earlier post, it reveals something truly frightening about the Obama mindset and what an Obama presidency would be like. No politician has any business recruiting law enforcement personnel to serve as truth squads. The only purpose this could have would be to frighten people away from voicing their opinion. By threatening people with litigation or police scrutiny for speaking their mind, Obama is bringing gestapo tactics into the political arena. This is precisely what totalitarian governments do, it's a first step on the road to tyranny, and it has no place in our politics. It's amazing to me, or would be if I hadn't come to expect it, that the liberal media is letting him get away with this. Where are the media guardians of free speech?

Watch the news clip about this here, and go to Hot Air for more.

It seems to me that Obama has handed John McCain's people a tremendous gift. This news clip should be turned into an ad and played around the clock in every battle ground state in the nation so that voters see that, as Jonah Goldberg says, liberalism really is fascism with a smiley face.

RLC