Drastic Education Reform

National Review's John Derbyshire has a plan for reforming education. Fed up with the fleecing the educational establishment and their political enablers have administered to the public, Derbyshire delivers himself of the following proposal:

Here is my prescription for a reform of the nation’s education system. First, destroy all the schools. Cart away the rubble for landfill and sow the ground with salt. Abolish the federal Department of Education and all state equivalents. End all education funding from public sources. If the inhabitants of any district then wish their kids to be educated in schools, let them raise the necessary funds themselves. Then let them build the schools themselves, like zeks. There should be just one federally approved model: an unheated wood-and-tar-paper structure with plastic sheeting for windows.

Any person above the age of twelve who wishes to attend school should have to stand outside the school gate for a month, in all weathers, pleading to be admitted. There should be a constitutional amendment banning any community from employing non-teaching staff in its schools at any ratio to teaching staff higher than one percent. And let’s have a federal penalty of 25-to-life for anyone attempting to form a teachers’ union.

Crazy, you say? No: Spending half a billion dollars you don’t have on a school to educate 4,200 students, some high proportion of whom are in the country illegally, is crazy. Shoveling seven hundred million dollars into the public sector of a state whose private sector is withering on the vine is crazy. Pretending that by spending enough money you can turn every child into a bookish child is crazy.

The proposal is satire, of course, but like all good satire it conveys a lot of truth. There is much waste in public education. The taxpayers are being squeezed to throw a lot of money on needless programs and hopeless causes. If Tea Party folks want to do something really constructive in their local communities they might publicize a line item breakdown of their school district's budget. It'd be an eye-opener.

Tolerating Terror

Andy McCarthy offers a test for distinguishing between moderate adherents of Islam and extremists: Simply ask them whether they agree with the Obama State Department that Hamas is a terrorist organization. If they refuse even to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist group, much less condemn them for it, they are implicitly condoning terrorism and can hardly be considered "moderates." It's not unlike someone refusing to condemn the KKK lynchings during the Jim Crow era. One would have to wonder why someone couldn't bring himself to renounce such atrocities.

It turns out, by the way, that when Feisal Rauf, the promoter of the Ground Zero mosque, was given this test he failed:

During a WABC radio interview, Aaron Klein three times pressed Rauf to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Rauf bobbed and weaved in classic Islamist style. “I’m not a politician,” he replied, as if only politicians trouble themselves over whether terrorists are terrorists. “I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” Avoid the issues? You don’t say!

I'm reminded of the young college student who, at a David Horowitz lecture, stood up and, sounding very reasonable, asked for a clarification about something Horowitz had written. In the course of his response Horowitz asked her if she would condemn Hamas. She refused. He then cited the statement by a leader of Hezbollah who said that he hopes all Jews return to Israel because it'll save Muslims the trouble of hunting them down and killing them. They can just kill them all in Israel. Horowitz asked the young lady whether she agreed with that statement, and her immediate, straightforward reply was that she did. Pretty chilling:

Surely there are pious, peaceful Muslims who are aghast at this young student's reply to Horowitz and who will not hesitate to speak out against terrorism and violence and those among their co-religionists who employ it, but unless they rise up and seize their faith back from the extremists and those who abet them, non-Muslim Americans will more and more come to think that the concept of the "moderate Muslim" is really just a myth. When all one hears are the radical voices it's inevitable that one begin to think that radicals are the mainstream.

Whites Need Not Apply

It wasn't long ago that the lament was frequently heard that minorities and women had to be twice as good as white men just to have the same opportunities as white men enjoyed. The complaint might still be heard today, but it certainly doesn't have the resonance it once did. Indeed, it could with justification be turned on its head.

According to a column by Pat Buchanan,  being a white applicant to Harvard is a real liability to a prospective student. Minority students have an enormous competitive advantage just because they're not white:

Being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white ... equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1,600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310-point SAT advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points. To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.

Buchanan goes on to ask:

Was this what the civil rights revolution was all about -- requiring kids whose parents came from Korea, Japan or Vietnam to get a perfect SAT score of 1600 to be given equal consideration with a Jamaican or Kenyan kid who got an 1150? Is this what it means to be an Ivy League progressive? What are the historic and moral arguments for discriminating in favor of kids from Angola and Argentina over kids whose parents came from Poland and Vietnam?

Of course there are no historic or moral justifications for this. When liberals decide they're going to promote diversity, morality and fairness become expendable. Buchanan concludes with this:

Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers at the elite schools. They are rarely accepted. Lower-class Hispanics and blacks are eight to 10 times more likely to get in with the same scores. Many of these elite public and private colleges and universities benefit from U.S. tax dollars through student loans and direct grants. The future flow of those tax dollars should be made contingent on Harvard and Yale ending racial practices that went out at Little Rock Central High in 1957.

There's much more in the column to make you wonder what ever happened to the idea that a just society is one which does not discriminate on the basis of the color of one's skin.

What's the Difference?

One of the criticisms leveled at the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally held today was that it was at best insensitive of Beck to hold the rally on the day and at the place where Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech 47 years ago. That place and that date are sacred in the minds of African-Americans, the complaint goes, and for a white conservative talk show host to hold his rally at that venue on August 28th was an affront to the memory of Dr. King.

Set aside the silliness of this objection and consider instead its similarity to what we heard in the Ground Zero mosque debate. Liberals think Beck is sullying the site of one of the greatest moments in civil rights history and are overwhelmingly sympathetic with those who oppose his rally. Yet those Americans who believe that placing a mosque in proximity to the sacred ground of the most heinous crime ever committed on American soil, a crime committed in the name of Allah, is an affront to the memory of the almost 3000 who died there, these people are called intolerant bigots.

If opponents of the mosque are bigots why are not opponents of the Glenn Beck rally also bigots? What's the relevant difference between the two cases? Or is this not about reason and rationality at all, but rather about political and ideological demagoguery on the part of the left? Unfortunately, this is not a tough question.

Beat Whitey Night

Have you heard anything about this in the mainstream news? Me neither, but had it been "beat blacky night" you can bet that it'd be all over the MSM. You can also be sure that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be everywhere they could find a microphone and a camera to remind us how sick and racist white America still is. There would be interviews all across the cable tv broadcast day with sociologists and psychologists scrutinizing the deep-seated flaws in the white soul. But, since the perps were, as they almost always are in these kinds of attacks, black youth, neither the media nor our professional race hustlers seem interested:

In the media subconscious, apparently, white savagery is news, but black savagery is not. This is another example of what's been called the bigotry of low expectations. It's an insidious form of racism. We need not publicize black crime against whites, the thinking goes, because, well, it's not really surprising, and besides we can't expect blacks to behave otherwise. After all, a hundred and fifty years ago their ancestors were slaves.

If ever we're going to achieve the racial comity dreamt of by those who struggled and sacrificed in the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, all of us are going to have to realize that blacks, whites and browns must be held to exactly the same standards of behavior and merit. We can expect no less of one group in our society than we do of another and we must treat the actions of each group the same way we'd treat them were they being done by another group. To do otherwise, to give one group preferential treatment, only fosters bitterness and resentment and just keeps picking at the scabs of the old wounds, keeping them from healing.

Missing the Point

Here's a question for those who think that everybody who opposes the Ground Zero mosque is a right-wing hate-monger and bigot:

Do you believe opponents of the war in Afghanistan have a constitutionally guaranteed freedom to exercise their opposition by demonstrating against the war at funerals of fallen soldiers?

If you answer yes, then do you also think that they should conduct their demonstrations at those sites? No matter how you answered, do you think that those who believe they should not, who think it's insensitive and insulting, who believe they should take their demonstrations to other venues, do you think those people are cowardly right-wingers filled with hatred and bigotry and animated by the basest of political motives?

Frank Rich of the New York Times does. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post does. So do some of the prime time hosts on MSNBC. They don't say exactly this, of course, but it's the logic of their position.

These pundits have made it clear that they consider everyone who opposes the GZ mosque to be disreputable people, either hate-filled demagogues themselves or useful idiots easily manipulated by the right-wing extremist media. It doesn't matter to them that opponents of this mosque do not deny that its backers have a legal right to build their cultural center near the site of the 9/11 attack - one of the most horrific crimes ever committed in the name of Allah. It doesn't matter that their opposition, in the main, stems from their belief that it's just insensitive and offensive for them to do so.

Members of Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist church flaunt signs at the funerals of fallen servicemen and women saying things like "God Hates Fags" because they believe that the deaths of these soldiers and Marines are God's judgment on a military and country that tolerates homosexuality. Should they have the right to express these views? Yes. Do the families of the dead have the right to be offended and to demand that they be kept at a distance from the place where they grieve for their loved ones?

The logic of the position held by Robinson, Rich and the MSNBC hosts, leads to the conclusion that to object to Mr. Phelps' presence, as the families of the deceased loved ones invariably do, is a symptom of an underlying ugliness in the character of those family members and their sympathizers. It is an expression of appalling ignorance, intolerance and prejudice. It manifests a disdain for the first amendment.

But of course this is all nonsense. What opposition to Mr. Phelp's protests manifests is a contempt for his boorish insensitivity. It may also manifest a contempt for his beliefs, but it doesn't signify anything at all about the attitude toward the first amendment held by those who want Mr. Phelps nowhere near the site of their grieving.

This is, however, a distinction apparently too complex for columnists like Robinson and Rich, and commentators like Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann to grasp. Or maybe they grasp it but ignore it because they think there's some political advantage to be gained by smearing as "right-wing Republicans" the almost 70% of Americans who oppose the mosque.

Liberal Hate Speech

Quick quiz: When you think of nasty, cruel, hate-filled political rhetoric who do you think of, liberals or conservatives? If you answered "conservatives" I challenge you to come up with an example of anything said by any conservative that's even remotely as contemptible as some of what Media Research Center has documented from the Left:

Since late 2007, the Media Research Center has collected numerous examples of the outrageousness of left-wing radio hosts. And, unlike the Left — which attempted to smear Rush Limbaugh with phony quotes — readers can find an audio or video of every one of these quotes posted at our Web site: www.MRC.org.

This report includes examples of over-the-top rhetoric from left-wing hosts Mike Malloy, Stephanie Miller, Randi Rhodes, Ron Reagan, Jr., Ed Schultz and Montel Williams, all of whom currently or at one time broadcast to a national audience on either the Air America network or via XM and/or Sirius satellite radio. Among the lowlights:

Conservatives Want to Kill Barack Obama: “I really think there are conservative broadcasters in this country who would love to see Obama taken out.” (Ed Schultz)

Conservatives Are Terrorists: “Do you not understand that the people you hold up as heroes bombed your goddamn country? Do you not understand that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are as complicit of the September 11, 2001 terror attack as any one of the dumbass 15 who came from Saudi Arabia?” (Mike Malloy)

Conservatives Want You to Die: “If, in fact, the GOP doesn’t like any form of health care reform, what do we do with those 40 to 60 million uninsured?...When they show up in the emergency room, just shoot ’em! Kill them!...Do we have enough body bags? I don’t know.” (Montel Williams)

Conservative Congresswoman Would Have Liked the Holocaust: “[Representative Michele Bachmann is] a hatemonger. She’s the type of person that would have gladly rounded up the Jews in Germany and shipped them off to death camps....This is an evil bitch from Hell.” (Mike Malloy)

Dick Cheney Eats Babies: “Cheney, by the way, looks very ruddy. I couldn’t get over that. Like, he must have feasted on a Jewish baby, or a Muslim baby. He must have sent his people out to get one and bring it back so he could drink its blood.”(Mike Malloy)

Dick Cheney Should Die: “He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion. Dick Cheney is an enemy of the country....Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you? See, I don’t even wish the guy goes to Hell, I just want to get him the hell out of here.” (Ed Schultz)

Rush Limbaugh Should Die: “I’m waiting for the day when I pick up the newspaper or click on the Internet and find that he’s choked to death on his own throat fat, or a great big wad of saliva or something, whatever. Go away, Limbaugh, you make me sick.” (Mike Malloy)

Michele Bachmann Should Die: “So, Michele, slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean, you know, why not? I mean, if you want to — or, you know, do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.” (Montel Williams)

From a somewhat different corner of the same putrid cesspool, there's a story out today about threats to tea party activists:

One of Washington's principal supporters of the Tea Party movement, former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, has been receiving death threats and profanity-laced phone calls as it gets involved in the fall elections. The number and intensity have reached such heights that the organization is leaving its downtown location near the FBI and moving to a high-security building near the U.S. Capitol.

FreedomWorks provided some of the recordings of the threatening calls to Whispers and they include physical threats and profanity aimed at the group, Tea Party spokesmen and even conservative talkers. "You guys better watch it," says one caller. "Now, we are going to destroy and obliterate Rush [Limbaugh] and Sean Hannity," said another. "Those two guys are dead."

This sort of thing might be considered just an unpleasant aberration were it not so common on the Left. Vicious, violent, hateful rhetoric has been a hallmark of those who call themselves progressives ever since the early Marxists (including Marx himself). It reflects not only upon their character, but upon the reliability of their opinions, discrediting both. If civil discourse and disagreement dies out in this country it will be largely because the progressive Left decided long ago that their arguments cannot stand on their merits and that they can prevail only by destroying not their opponents' arguments but their opponents themselves.

The Mystery of Consciousness

David B. Hart begins a fine meditation on the mystery of consciousness by recounting the story of a personal tragedy:

I was fairly close to both Angela and Jacob throughout our teens; at least, we were all part of the same circle. I briefly entertained the hope of something closer between Angela and myself, and for a few weeks she was more or less my girlfriend; but Jacob “swept her off her feet,” and they were at one school and I at another, so I had no chance. It made no difference to our friendship, though.

Unfortunately, I largely lost touch with Angela when I started attending university. Over the course of the next six months, we crossed one another’s paths only three times or so. On the last occasion, she had just returned from a visit to Paris, from which she had brought home, among other things, the Pléiade edition of Montaigne she proudly showed me.

And that was that. Two and a half years later she was killed when a drunk driver struck her car in an intersection; she was alive for several hours after the collision, but never regained consciousness. That was twenty-five years ago tomorrow.

Be sure to read the rest of his essay at First Things. His review of Marilynne Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind, is also worth checking out if one is interested in the question of consciousness and the implications it holds for the materialist's belief that all we are is a lump of atoms arranged in a particular pattern.

There are at least five facts about human beings that militate against this view. Philosophers refer to them as intentionality, qualia, incorrigibility, exclusive access, and freedom of the will. A brief paper by Michael Egnor will be helpful to those who wish to explore exactly what philosophers mean by these terms.

The Chimera of Mideast Peace

Every president thinks it incumbent upon him to at least try to bring peace to the Middle East. This is a noble aspiration but a fool's errand. There never will be peace in the Middle East until either the Israelis or the Palestinians cease to exist. Every concession forced upon Israel is simply seen by the Palestinians as a sign that victory is in the offing. The Palestinians don't want peace as the West understands the word. They want the complete destruction of Israel as a state and the Jews as a people.

This is the point of a recent article in Strategy Page:

The goal of the peace talks is to work out how to establish an independent Palestinian state. Israel agrees with that goal, but the Palestinians don't, at least among themselves. That's why these peace talks tend to go nowhere. The latest talks are doomed by the fact that many Palestinians in the West Bank openly oppose them, and the Islamic radical group Hamas that runs the Gaza Strip (which contains 40 percent of Palestinians) refuse to cooperate in the talks. Hamas and Fatah-controlled media both talk of destroying Israel, not making permanent peace. Any peace deals are strictly tactical moves to further the ultimate goal of wiping Israel off the map. All Palestinian maps of the area already do that.

For the last two generations, it has been Palestinian policy to preach the destruction of Israel, not coexistence. Increasingly, over the last few decades, Palestinians have been indoctrinated with anti-Semitic propaganda, which encourages the young to become suicide bombers and terrorists. This is a very public campaign, and the terrorist killers are showered with praise in the media. In the Palestinian territories, there are hundreds of places (streets, squares, buildings) and events named after terrorists.

Anyone who has killed an Israeli is a hero, and anyone who died trying is worthy of admiration. This goes beyond honoring "war heroes." The propaganda campaign portrays Palestinians as in a life-or-death struggle with "the Zionist entity" (what Palestinians like to call Israel). Since God is on their side, the Palestinian propaganda pushes the idea that it's only a matter of time before Israel is destroyed. It's tough to negotiate a peace deal when one side has this attitude.

It's also tough to sell your fellow Palestinians on a genuine peace settlement that allows Israel to continue to exist when so many of their loved ones have willingly sacrificed their lives in the cause of eradicating Israel.

As long as there are Jews living in the midst of Palestinian Muslims any peace between them will be ephemeral and chimerical. The sooner our politicians recognize what everyone in the region already knows, the better it will be for everyone involved.

Creating Jobs

The worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, the Gulf oil leak, appears to itself be history, and its impact on the environment looks to be relatively minor compared to what was feared. For this we can thank mother nature which evidently gobbled up the oil via rapidly reproducing carbon-consuming microbes.

On the other hand the economic damage wrought by the Obama administration's reaction to the leak may haunt the Gulf for a long time. The moratorium he declared on American oil drilling in the Gulf, according to the Wall Street Journal, is believed to eventually cost as many as 23,000 jobs, many of which will never return.

Deliberately putting thousands of people out of work seems an odd way to create jobs during a recession, (so, by the way, does this), but that's what the wise men in the White House chose to do. One wonders which will turn out to have been the bigger disaster, BP's leak or Mr. Obama's handling of it.

Twilight of al Qaeda

According to Strategy Page the news from the front in the war on terrorists and Islamic radicalism is mostly encouraging:

Intelligence agencies are at odds over how many al Qaeda are in Afghanistan. The estimates vary between a "hundred or so" and "less than a thousand." There is also some dispute as to who exactly qualifies as a "member" of the terrorist organization. For example, do local Afghans, hired for security or support jobs qualify? Or only non-Afghan terrorists who were chased out of places like Iraq, Yemen or Chechnya? The CIA tends to go with the experienced terrorists being the only true members, while other intel outfits are inclined to include local hires and trainees. All agree that the al Qaeda footprint in Afghanistan is small, and isn't much larger in Pakistan. Al Qaeda has become more of an idea (and not a very good one) than an organization.

Meanwhile the "Taliban comeback" keeps getting headlines in the media. But it's the Taliban who are increasingly under attack. There hasn't been a "Taliban Spring Offensive" for the last two years, and the key Taliban financial resource, heroin in Helmand province, has been under attack as well. The opium crop declined over 25 percent this year. The Taliban hoped that drug gang profits, al Qaeda assistance and Pakistani reinforcements would turn the tide. But al Qaeda is a very junior, unpopular, and shrinking partner, and the Pakistani Taliban are sending refugees, not reinforcements. With all that, violence nationwide was up, mainly because there are more foreign troops in the country, being more aggressive against the Taliban and drug gangs.

There's more on this story at the link. All I can say is it's a darn good thing we elected Barack Obama to lead us in fighting this war. Who knows how bad off we'd be had Bush's generals been implementing his policies of surging troops and winning the hearts and minds of the indigenous people for the last two years.

99ers

Glenn Beck raised an interesting question the other day. How long should Americans continue to pay unemployment compensation to those who are not working? As it stands the unemployed can get compensation for 99 weeks. Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced a bill that would extend benefits for another 20 weeks, but to what purpose? Many people simply choose to live off unemployment until a few weeks before it runs out before they bestir themselves to look for work. Giving them another 20 weeks of leisure seems rather counterproductive and unfair to taxpayers:

After explaining the plight of the 99ers [a group of people whose 99 weeks of unemployment compensation are soon up] and showing footage of a recent 99er demonstration on Wall Street, Beck offered the unemployed workers his two cents.

"Don't spend your remaining money on travel to get to a protest," he said. "Go out and get a job. You may not want the job. Work at McDonald's. Work two jobs. There has been plenty of times in my life I've done jobs I hated, but I had no choice. Two years is plenty of time to have lived off your neighbor's wallet."

"How many weeks of unemployment are enough? Really," Beck asked. "If 99 weeks is not enough, how much is? 100, 200? A lifetime? Or is a job a right?"

Here's the video footage from the segment:

No doubt there are people who struggle assiduously to find work but can't and who deserve some help. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the responsible thing to do is to provide assistance only to those who are really trying to help themselves. To simply dole out cash without monitoring the effort made by the recipients isn't charitable, it's foolish. Beck is right. Two years is more than long enough for those who refuse the jobs available to them or who decline to even look for work.

The Palestinian Refugees

City Journal's Sol Stern has written a marvelous piece on the genesis of the Palestinian refugee problem. The history he recounts has been obscured and forgotten in the current debates over who bears what responsibility to whom in the Middle East, but it's crucially important that we understand how the Palestinian refugees came to be, and why the camps still exist 62 years after the refugees' grandparents fled Israel.

These paragraphs are just two of the many which help us to understand what happened in those turbulent days following WWII:

During the 1948 war and for many years afterward, the Western world—including the international Left—expressed hardly any moral outrage about the Palestinian refugees. This had nothing to do with Western racism or colonialism and much to do with recent history. The fighting in Palestine had broken out only two years after the end of the costliest military conflict ever, in which the victors exacted a terrible price on the losers. By that, I don’t mean the Nazi officials and their “willing executioners,” who received less punishment than they deserved, but the 11 million ethnic Germans living in Central and Eastern Europe—civilians all—who were expelled from their homes and force-marched to Germany by the Red Army, with help from the Czech and Polish governments and with the approval of Roosevelt and Churchill.

Historians estimate that 2 million died on the way. Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two new countries, India and Pakistan; millions of Hindus and Muslims moved from one to the other, and hundreds of thousands died in related violence. Against this background, the West was not likely to be troubled by the exodus of a little more than half a million Palestinians after a war launched by their own leaders.

For anyone who cares about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict this article is a "must" read.

A New Twist on Birthright Citizenship

One element of the illegal immigration debate that raises hackles is birthright citizenship, i.e. the idea that the 14th amendment to the constitution declares that children born on U.S. soil to parents of illegal aliens are ipso facto United States citizens.

Some legal experts, however, are claiming that the assumption that such children have what is called "birthright citizenship" is actually based on an erroneous reading of the 14th amendment.

Section 1 of that amendment states that:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

To the layman the intent of this passage certainly seems to be pretty straightforwardly declaring any children born on our soil to be citizens, but Law School Dr. John C. Eastman, Donald P. Kennedy Chair in Law and former Dean at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California thinks not.

Eastman makes the case that the words "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" actually deny birthright citizenship, not just to children of illegals, but also to anyone in the country legally but temporarily:

That text has two requirements: 1) Birth on U.S. soil; and 2) Being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States when born. In recent decades, the opinion has taken root, quite erroneously, that anyone born in the United States (except the children of ambassadors) is necessarily subject to its jurisdiction because everyone has to comply with our laws while physically present within our borders. Those who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment had a different understanding of jurisdiction.

For them, a person could be subject to the jurisdiction of a sovereign nation in two very different ways: the one, partial and territorial; the other full and complete. Think of it this way. When a tourist from Great Britain visits the United States, he subjects himself to our “territorial jurisdiction.” He has to follow our laws while he is here, including our traffic laws that require him to drive on the right rather than the wrong (I mean left!) side of the road.

He is no longer subject to those laws when he returns home, of course, and he was never subject to the broader jurisdiction that requires from him allegiance to the United States. He can’t be drafted into our army, for example, or prosecuted for treason for taking up arms against us.

In the balance of his essay Eastman looks at the jurisprudential history of the relevant phrase and concludes that granting citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are themselves not citizens is not warranted by that history.

It's an interesting, and surprising, development in the controversy over illegal immigration.

Atheism's Good News

Media talkers at MSNBC and elsewhere are incredulous that so many people (24%, apparently) persist in believing that President Obama is a Muslim. How can these rubes be so benighted, the media mavens ask each other.

Something similar is happening in terms of the number of people who refuse to accept the Darwinian version of evolution. Despite all the efforts of Darwinians in the academy and the media to inculcate Darwinian materialism in the last three generations of students the American people stubbornly refuse to believe it. Marvin Olasky comments on this in a brief essay at Patheos.

Olasky writes:

The results of Gallup polls over the past three decades are consistently extraordinary. Picture a Gallup pollster reading this statement: "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Would you think that year after year since 1982 some 44-47 percent of Americans have agreed? If you remove the number of years, which some "old earth" Christians do, the number of anti-evolutionists jumps to 53 percent.

And that's not all. Another 35-38 percent of Americans say that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided the process." Only 9-14 percent support Darwinist materialism: "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process." All the atheist best sellers of recent years -- Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great -- have not greatly enlarged the beachhead.

It's ironic that soon after Alister McGrath wrote a fine history, The Twilight of Atheism, the "new atheists" came out in force. But don't be fooled. They bring not a new dawn but a night of the living dead. Their honest advocates are biologists like Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, who announced, "We have come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined." If that's an insufficiently winning statement for you, hear Charles Zuker, biology professor at the University of California at San Diego: "In essence, we are nothing but a big fly."

If this is the Darwinians' notion of glad tidings, is it surprising that Darwinism and the materialist worldview which it presupposes haven't gained more traction among the American people? Any view of life which entails that we are deluded if we think that there's anything special, meaningful, or significant about being human better have overwhelming evidence in its favor.

It's hard to get excited about a view of life that offers no hope, no meaning, no basis for distinguishing between right and wrong, and no reason to think that there's anything unique about human beings. Most ordinary people, when offered such an unappetizing dish, are just going to say "no thanks."

But, the New Atheists insist, Darwinian materialism is true and we should accept it not for its consequences but for its truth. Well, we might agree with that were it clear that materialism is true, or if there were any compelling evidence that it's true, but as Olasky notes, that's far from being the case. The materialist is in the awkward position of trying to persuade us to accept on faith the idea that we're just worms. That's a pretty hard sell.

Just Call 'em Bigots

Charles Krauthammer skewers the intellectual sloth of those who criticize the opponents of what has come to be known as the GZ Mosque (Ground Zero Mosque) in an essay for the Washington Post. The critics are quick to impute the worst motives to the mosque's opponents - bigotry, political opportunism - but, as Krauthammer writes, they rarely come to grips with the opponents' arguments. Perhaps that's because they have no actual argument of their own.

Anyway, here's his intro:

It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage. Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom -- upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.

You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.

It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to help find another site.

Where the president flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.

In the balance of the piece Krauthammer does a fine job of exposing the superficiality of efforts such as those by Richard Cohen and Michael Kinsley to demean and discredit those who prefer that the mosque be built elsewhere than at the site of perhaps the greatest crime in U.S. history, a crime perpetrated in the name of Allah and Islam. Give it a read.

Lying for a Living

Isn't this interesting. Jim Wallis recently responded to a blog post by Marvin Olasky by stating that Olasky, like Glenn Beck, lies for a living. The immediate provocation that led to Wallis' intemperate remark was Olasky's claim that Wallis' magazine, Sojourners, has accepted money from left-wing financier George Soros' organization Open Society Institute. Wallis, perhaps forgetting for the moment that he's supposed to be a Christian, reacted with a twofer, calling both Olasky and Beck (who, as far as I know, had nothing to do with this) liars. Turns out, though, that Olasky was correct and Wallis was ..... mistaken.

Details of Mr. Wallis' faux pas can be found at No Left Turns which concludes their post with this:

The Open Society Institute's tax returns show that it made three grants to Sojourners between 2004 and 2007, for a total of $325,000. Either Sojourners is drowning in money or Wallis is succumbing to dementia, because he says, fessing up, that the "OSI made up the tiniest fraction of Sojourners' funding during that decade--so small that I hadn't remembered them." The other possibility, that Wallis lies - not for a living, exactly - but when it appears convenient for the greater good of articulating the biblical call to social justice, is too far-fetched and cruel to entertain for as long as it takes to pose the thought.

Wallis owes Olasky an apology, but, if one has been tendered, I haven't heard anything about it. He also needs to go to confession, even if he's not Catholic.

Solving Problems

This is making the rounds on the internet:

Everyone concentrates on the problems we're having in Our Country lately: Illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking people in Florida . . . . Not me -- I concentrate on solutions for the problems -- it's a win-win situation: Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border. Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levees. Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border.

Any other problems you would like for me to solve today? Think about this: 1. Cows 2. The Constitution 3. The Ten Commandments

COWS

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.

THE CONSTITUTION

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq ...why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.

THE 10 COMMANDMENTS

The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this -- you cannot post 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery' and 'Thou Shall Not Lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians, it creates a hostile work environment.

Pretty good.

The President's Religion

The recent media kerfuffle over Barack Obama's religious inclinations presents us with a couple of ironies:

For example, why are the White House and its media mouthpieces so anxious to deny that Mr. Obama is a Muslim? Do they think there's some taint that attaches to that religion that they don't want the president tarnished by? Do liberals think there's something wrong with being a Muslim? If not, then why is the perception among so many Americans that Mr. Obama is a Muslim any more alarming to his supporters than the perception that he's Catholic, or Jewish?

For another example, why are Mr. Obama's supporters so eager to affirm that the President is, in fact, a devout Christian? Wasn't it just a few years ago that the media scoffed disdainfully at George Bush for his Christian piety? Wasn't it just yesterday that alarums were being raised about imminent theocracy now that a serious "Christianist," i.e. George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office? Weren't we admonished almost daily of the dangers of having someone in the presidency who took his Christian religion seriously? It seems amusingly odd that these same folks are now at pains to assure us that Mr. Obama is as committed a Christian as anyone since St. Paul.

We might also wonder why it is that the president's defenders are so surprised that so many people (24% according to Time) say that they think he's Muslim. It's probably the case that many of the 24% who were read the question actually "heard" a different question. When asked whether they thought Mr. Obama was a Muslim I suspect they interpreted the query as asking whether they thought the President has a fondness and sympathy for Islam. One can certainly have a place in one's heart for the religion of one's youth even though one no longer practices that religion. I think that's obviously the case with Mr. Obama, and I think it's why almost one fourth of the poll respondents said that they believe he's a Muslim. In their minds they conflated affection for with practice of.

I for one doubt very much that Mr. Obama is a practicing Muslim, but I have no doubt that he's much more sympathetic to Islam than are most Americans, and that his sympathy translates in many minds into a commitment to.

The Social Network

Here's a question to ponder with your "friends": What's the future of Facebook? Is it going to last or will large numbers of people finally decide, like my friend Jason, that closing it out provides a sense of relief, a feeling of liberation? Will there be money to be made in operating recovery groups for Facebook addicts? Will people find that they have so many "friends" that they really don't have any friends? Will they finally decide they don't want any friends? Or will the social network continue to expand until everyone is everyone else's friend, and everyone knows everything there is to know about everyone else?

I have no idea, of course, but in the meantime there's a movie due to be released in about six weeks that recounts the origin of Facebook. I can't vouch for its accuracy, but I'm sure enthusiasts and skeptics alike will want to see it, or maybe not. Anyway, thanks to Jason we have the trailer here to whet your appetite:

You can read more about it at TechCrunch.

Buy your tickets in advance.