LAUSD Concedes to School Choice

Ed at Hot Air notes that the L.A. Unified School District " finally got desperate enough to try something new to rescue its schools: private-sector competition."

In a startling acknowledgment that the Los Angeles school system cannot improve enough schools on its own, the city Board of Education approved a plan Tuesday that could turn over 250 campuses — including 50 new multimillion-dollar facilities — to charter groups and other outside operators.
[...]
The action signals a historic turning point for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has struggled for decades to boost student achievement. District officials and others have said their ability to achieve more than incremental progress is hindered by the powerful teachers union, whose contract makes it nearly impossible to fire ineffective tenured teachers. Union leaders blame a district bureaucracy that they say fails to include teachers in “top-down reforms.”

“The premise of the resolution is first and foremost to create choice and competition,” said board member Yolie Flores Aguilar, who brought the resolution, “and to really force and pressure the district to put forth a better educational plan.”

Charter schools are not as good as vouchers, but this is a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, the immediate effect will be that the unions and their fellow-travellers will do all they can to make sure it fails. Then, every time someone tries to promote school choice, they will point to the "failure" in L.A.

I commend the School Board for attempting to do the right thing. But I question whether they or Mayor Villaraigosa have the nerve to stay the course. If not, it will be worse than doing nothing.

New National Anthem?

Ed at Hot Air is conducting a poll based on this article by Michael Kinsley.

Kinsley's criticisms aren't terribly deep, and I have never had problems singing the Star Spangled Banner, but I do agree that it is not terribly appropriate for our national anthem. The Hot Air poll lists some good alternatives (most of which are discussed in Kinsley's article:

Stick with the Star-Spangled Banner
America (My Country 'Tis of Thee)
America the Beautiful
America (Neil Diamond version)
Battle Hymn of the Republic
God Bless America
Stars and Stripes Forever
This Land Is Your Land
Other

I picked America the Beautiful, as it has always been my favorite patriotic song:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine!

O Beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

But really any of those traditional songs would be better than the SSB. (I am not counting Neil Diamond’s America or Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, as they are both too trite and lacking in spiritual substance. Same goes for Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, and whatever that song is that Sean Hannity plays.)

My main beef with the SSB is that it is all about the flag, not really about the country. The 4th verses is kind of magnificent, but how many Americans know the 4th verse — or even that there is a 4th verse? And the over-all metaphor of waking up after a night of disaster and discovering that our country is still there isn’t really a big part of the American experience, is it? Unless you count waking up to Ronald Reagan after the long drought of the 60s and 70s, but even that seems kind of atypical.

And if you are going to go for the struggling-through-the-long-dark-night theme, Lift Every Voice and Sing is more meaningful to a large nuber of Americans, though not as well written. Not that there is any way in hell Obama is going to touch that one.

AB357: California Shall Issue Bill

Steve Knight, a CA Assemblyman representing Victorville, has proposed a bill which would remove the "good cause" requirement for obtaining a concealed carry weapons permit (CCW). This would allow CA to join the ranks of "Shall Issue" states (currently 37 out of the 48 states that allow concealed carry). The text of his bill can be found here.

Existing law authorizes the sheriff of a county, upon proof that the person applying is of good moral character, that good cause exists, and that the person applying satisfies any one of certain conditions, as specified, to issue a license for the person to carry a concealed handgun, as specified. This bill would delete the good cause requirement, and require the sheriff to issue the license if the other criteria described above are met.

The bill is currently in the Public Safety Committee for review. I wrote the following letter to each of the members of the committee.

I am writing to encourage you to support AB357 titled "An act to amend Section 12050 of the Penal Code, relating to firearms." This bill would remove the unnecessary, unfair and subjective requirement of showing "good cause" when applying for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

The current requirement of showing "good cause" is unnecessary because the law already provides that the applicant must be "of good moral character" and "is not prohibited from possessing firearms". Both of these criteria allow the chief law enforcement officer to investigate the applicant and screen out those individuals who cannot be trusted to use their freedom responsibly. The requirement of showing "good cause" does nothing to reduce crime or increase public safety. Out of 48 states that allow concealed carry, 37 do not have such unnecessary restrictions. These "Shall Issue" states have some of the lowest crime rates in the country. According to the FBI, Right to Carry states had 24% less violent crime in 2007 than other states. AB357 would eliminate this unnecessary requirement and allow law enforcement to focus resources on keeping communities safe.

Furthermore, the requirement is unfair because it places the burden of proof upon law-abiding citizens to show that they have a special need to exercise a fundamental right of self-defense, which has been recognized for centuries. Despite the fact that the California Constitution acknowledges the rights of defense of life, protection of property, and pursuit of safety in its Section I, many officials do not consider such self-defense sufficient as "good cause". This means that people who may live in high-crime areas are unfairly deprived of the right to defend themselves away from their homes unless they have been personally attacked or threatened, in which case it is often too late. Yet statistics show that many attacks can be prevented when victims are armed. The US Justice Department found that 34% of felons were scared away by armed victims and another 40% avoided attacking altogether because they feared that the victim might be armed. AB357 would promote public safety by ensuring that the right of self-defense was equally available to all law-abiding citizens.

Finally, the subjective nature of the current law disadvantages those who reside in counties or cities where the chief law enforcement officer has unusually restrictive views about what constitutes "good cause". This places law enforcement in an unfortunate, adversarial relationship with those who are generally their strongest supporters. Furthermore, many crimes are prevented by holders of concealed carry licenses, often without a shot being fired, which greatly reduces the burden on law enforcement. AB357 would benefit both law enforcement and law-abiding citizens by removing the subjective, time-consuming process of reviewing "good cause statements" and restoring a co-operative relationship among those who are natural allies.

Historically, anti-concealed carry laws were enacted because everyone was presumed to have the right to carry weapons openly and only criminals were thought to have a need to conceal guns. However, we no longer live in the Wild West and many now realize the advantage of having a population where the criminals do not know who is armed. John Lott, in his book More Guns, Less Crime has definitively shown that crime rates go down dramatically when "Shall Issue" laws are passed. Please join Assemblyman Steve Knight in supporting AB357 and making California a "Shall Issue" state.

Here are the email addresses of the members of the Public Safety Committee:

Jose Solorio
Curt Hagman
Warren Furutani
Danny Gillmore
Jerry Hill
Fiona Ma
Nancy Skinner

You can also go here to send a comment to Steve Knight in support of his bill. Just look him up on the list and hit the comments link next to his name. The system will allow you to select the bill you want to comment about and check a box for support or oppose. I am sure that will help him win support for the bill.

If you live in a district represented by an assembly member not listed above, be sure to tell them you support the bill as well. Click on the "Find My District" button on the Assembly's web page.

San Diego Bans JROTC Shooting Class

As I have noted before gun safety classes ought to be mandatory for all U.S. citizens, starting in the at least in the teen years. (Prior to Junior HS, kids should have Eddy Eagle-type safety classes that do not involve handling actual guns.) This should be obvious to everyone, but especially to the guns-are-inherently-scary crowd. In no other public health subject do these folks recommend an abstience-only approach. Chad Baus makes a similar point at greater length in a recent article on the USCCA web site (registration required).

Society has determined (after seeing enough homes and apartment complexes burn to the ground because little Johnny was playing with matches) that it cannot be left to parents alone to teach children not to play with matches.
Society has determined (after seeing enough children experience the horrible victimization of sexual abuse) that it cannot be left to parents alone to teach children what to do if they are touched inappropriately.
Society has determined (after seeing enough children on the sides of milk cartons and WalMart bulletin boards) that it cannot be left to parents alone to teach children what to do if a stranger attempts to lure them into their car.
Society has even determined (well, at least our President did when he was an Illinois State Senator) that it kindergartners need to be given sex education.[2]
I simply cannot understand why a society that has decided that parents cannot be trusted to provide the "proper" education on issues like fire safety, sexual abuse, abduction, and even sexually transmitted diseases, is perfectly comfortable leaving the issue of gun accident prevention up to parents.
The NRA has been promoting a safety program for children in grades K-3 since 1998. The Eddie Eagle GunSafe® Program tells those youngsters to "Stop! Don't Touch! Leave The Area! Tell An Adult!" if they find a gun.

So, with that in mind, what the hell are the folks in San Diego thinking?

A group of San Diego teenagers successfully convinced the San Diego Unified school board yesterday to dismantle the district's Junior ROTC air-rifle program. The on-campus program has been training young cadets how to shoot for decades.
[...]
The district's Junior ROTC air-rifle marksmanship program has a long and distinguished history in the San Diego Unified District. But now the program has been shot down. That's the result of a one-year, student-driven effort.
The program first came under fire last year when JROTC officials introduced air-rifle shooting ranges on the campuses of Lincoln and Mission Bay high schools.
Students, teachers and parents were outraged. Many didn't realize on-campus shooting practice even existed in the district.

As noted in this article, the program is thoroughly concerned with safety (almost to the point of paranoia):

They argue that their instruments, .177-caliber air rifles, shouldn't be classified as weapons because they don't use bullets propelled by gunpowder, but pellets projected by compressed air.
Students are allowed to handle the rifles under close supervision and only after logging a perfect score on a qualifying test. Less than 10 percent of the 1,845 ROTC students make the cut, said Jan Janus, who supervises the district's ROTC programs.
The best shooters, like Elizabeth and Monica, compete on teams, testing their aim in three positions: prone, standing and kneeling. The discipline requires stillness and concentration, coaches contend, and women often excel at it.
“Despite what some of our opponents think, we're not out there training gang members to knock off 7-Elevens and do drive-by shootings,” Janus said.

This is far worse than the brainless "zero-tolerance" policies that other schools have enacted -- protecting their students from the dangers of t-shirts, crayon drawings and chicken fingers -- because this destroys a program that could actually teach someone about gun safety.

The latter article concludes with this optimistic thought:

Another Mission Bay High ROTC member, Zachary Warden, said a classmate has launched a petition drive to challenge the board. One of Andrew's ROTC advisers, Mark Vizcarra, suggests that critics have awakened “a sleeping giant” in the form of students, parents and ROTC backers who will want marksmanship reinstated.

Let's hope so.

Islam: What the West Needs to Know

James M. Kushiner posts a review of Islam: What the West Needs to Know at Mere Comments.

It was a rational and non-hysterical inquiry into the history and teachings of Islam. Major interviewees from inside Islam: Bat Ye'or, Walid Shoebat, Abdullah Al-Araby, plus Serge Trifkovic and Robert Spencer. It made a pretty compelling case for viewing Islam as much more than a religion but really a political/religious ideology for world domination.

Here is my response:

I am not familiar with Serge Trifkovic but the other four names on the list are all either apostates from, or Western critics of, Islam. Not that that makes them wrong, but it is hard to get an accurate picture when all the voices are from one side of the debate. Unfortunately the advocates of Islam are uniformly more ideological, which make me despair of ever getting a straight story on this crucial subject. Perhaps the post-modernists are right and there really is no straight story, only a mass of competing ideologies, but I can't quite bring myself to believe that. Even if pure objectivity is impossible, its pursuit is still worthwhile.

One of the sources whom I find helpful is Bernard Lewis. The Mohammad he paints is (in my words, not his) essentially a wannabe Moses whose promised land was not Canaan but the entire world. That is problematic, of course, for at least two reasons: 1) Mohammad lacks the authority of Moses and 2) that authority has been fulfilled and superceded by Jesus. But it is worth noting that Mohammad's plan of conquest was law-bound, if not objecitvely lawful, and virtue-centric if not virtuous. The present Jihadist mentality is an aberration characteristic of the 20th century and a variant of the secularism and relativism that have infected the West. It is, in other words, a symptom of the loss of faith that there are objective standards promoted by evolution and Marxism, rather than a logical result of the religion of Islam itself.

Now, one might critique Lewis' characterization by noting that Mohammad was a false prophet and therefor subject to the rule that those that are at war with God will find themselves abandoned to their own destruction. Just as the prophets of Baal began by worshipping fertility and ended by sacrificing their children, so Islam began with the sword and ends with the exploding belt. In this view, the current trajectory of Islam which is at odds with the previous 13 centuries is explainable by the conjecture that God has finally removed his hand of restraint and given Islam over to the fullness of its iniquity. This is plausible, and I even have some sympathy for it, but, not being a prophet myself, I lack the certainty that this is indeed the case.

But it is worth noting that under both of these hypotheses, it is a grave error to promote secularism and a modern point of view among Muslims. The critique that the West is more advanced than the medieval Islam seems dangerously wrong-headed. Perhaps this is because my sympathies are somewhat medieval themselves. I would much rather have a beer with Dante than with George W. Bush (though admittedly in the latter case, it would probably be better beer). But in any case, the advancement of the West I would attribute to the salutary influence of Christianity and it is an influence that our culture is trying its hardest to undo. If Christians continue to promote this sort of chronological snobbery in order to combat the evil of Islam, we may succeed only to find ourselves at war with a united front of Western and Middle-Eastern secularists.

Those of you who do not believe in Hell, please take note...

Exhibit A: Samira Jassam

A WOMAN suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.

Samira Jassam, 51, was arrested by Iraqi police and confessed to recruiting the women and orchestrating dozens of attacks.

In a video confession, she explained how she had mentally prepared the women for martyrdom operations, passed them on to terrorists who provided explosives, and then took the bombers to their targets.

She is known as "Um al-Mumenin" which, if I am reading that right, translates "mother of all believers". If anyone deserves eternal torment, surely it's this bitch.

Islam, of course, has often been accused of encouraging the abuse of women. There are those who claim that this is a corruption of Islam rather than its truest expression. I confess that I don't know enough to decide on that issue. But clearly there is something profoundly rotten with a system in which women find themselves in a situation where committing acts of mass murder is more socially or religiously acceptable than living with shame for which they bear no responsibility.

Christians often (rightly) critique the secular West for encouraging irresponsible use of sexuality and individualism at the expense of social responsibility. But at least Western women understand that they bear responsibility for their own sins, not those visited upon them by the violence of others. These Iraqi women (and for all I know, Muslim women everywhere) need to hear the news that their sins are atoned only through Christ and that they never need to be ashamed of what they have not consented to.

Cato's Analysis of the Financial Crisis

What Didn’t Happen

Some commentators (and both presidential candidates) have blamed the current financial mess on greed. But if an unusually high number of airplanes were to crash this year, would it make sense to blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can’t explain why the number of financial crashes is higher than usual. There has been no unusual epidemic of blackheartedness.

Others have blamed deregulation or (in the words of one representative) “unregulated freemarket lending run amok.” Such an indictment is necessarily skimpy on the particulars, because there has actually been no recent dismantling of banking and financial regulations.

Read the whole thing.

Paglia Mail Bag

Camille Paglia answers her mail. It is almost an affront to quote her since duplication belies the very originality of her prose, but I can't resist highlighting.

On Sarah Palin:

As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides -- a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric's dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a "mama grizzly" at libels against her family.

On the Fairness Doctrine:

If there's anything that demonstrates the straying of the Democratic Party leadership from basic liberal principles, it's this blasted Fairness Doctrine -- which should be fiercely opposed by all defenders of free speech. Except when national security is at risk, government should never be involved in the surveillance of speech or in measuring the ideological content of books, movies or radio and TV programs.

Speaking of fairness, here is her response to an emailer that likens the Global Warming demagoguery to Bush's evidence of WMD in Iraq. Ouch!

In both cases, there are "experts" who tell us that evidence justifying action is undeniable. They say, "The risk of doing nothing is too great for us to do nothing." And as a fallback position they say, "Even if we're wrong, we'll still be doing some good in the world." Kind of makes me think man-made CO2 emissions will turn out to be the biggest case of nonexistent WMD since Saddam Hussein's nukes. Jim Carroll
Wonderful letter! I became a vocal opponent of the onrushing Iraq incursion when I was shocked by the flimsiness of evidence presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in 2003. Similarly, I have been highly skeptical about the claims for global warming because of their overreliance on speculative computer modeling and because of the woeful patchiness of records for world temperatures before the 20th century.
In the 1980s, I was similarly skeptical about media-trumpeted predictions about a world epidemic of heterosexual AIDS. And I remain skeptical about the media's carelessly undifferentiated use of the term "AIDS" for what is often a complex of wasting diseases in Africa. We should all be concerned about environmental despoliation and pollution, but the global warming crusade has become a hallucinatory cult. Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases.

Don't miss her insightful comments about gay genes, post-structuralism, and the tongue-lashing she gets for her praise of Titanic. God! I love this woman. Amid the huge quantities of regurgitated bird-seed we are forced to swallow in what passes for our literary culture, Camille never fails to deliver pulsating, live worms. Delicious!

Top Ten Science Breakthroughs of 2008

Science Magazine lists its top ten picks for greatest breakthrough of 2008. Here is a condensed list of the runners up and the number one pick. [Free registration required]

In reverse order (David Letterman style) they are:

10. Sequencing Bonanza: New genome-sequencing technologies that are much faster and cheaper than the approach used to decipher the first human genome are driving a boom in sequencing.

9. Proton's Mass 'Predicted': The new results show that physicists can at last make accurate calculations of the ultracomplex strong force that binds quarks.

8. Fat of a Different Color: Researchers finally uncovered the mysterious roots of so-called brown fat. Hardly blubber, the energy-using tissue turns out to be one step away from muscle.

7. The Video Embryo: The dance of cells as a fertilized egg becomes an organism is at the center of developmental biology... This year, scientists observed the ballet in unprecedented detail...

6. Water to Burn: Researchers in the United States reported that they've developed a new catalyst that may serve as a first step in finding cheaper renewable energy.

5. Watching Proteins at Work: After studying proteins for more than a century, biochemists pushed the boundaries of watching the molecules in action--and received surprises at every turn.

4. New High-Temperature Superconductors: Physicists discovered a second family of high-temperature superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance at temperatures inexplicably far above absolute zero. [This is relative. High temperatures in this case means 56 Kelvin, which is about -360 F].

3. Cancer Genes: Researchers this year turned a searchlight on the errant DNA that leads tumor cells to grow out of control.

2. Seeing Exoplanets: With more than 5 years of observations using the latest technology, astronomers are suddenly busting down the doors to announce candidates for directly detected planets orbiting other stars.

And, the number one scientific breakthrough of 2008 is...

1. Reprogramming Cells: By inserting genes that turn back a cell's developmental clock, researchers are gaining insights into disease and the biology of how a cell decides its fate. [i.e. turning skin cells into stem cells.]

ICR, the principle advocate of Creation Science in the U.S., notes that none of these breakthroughs required a belief in the outdated 19th century theory of evolution:

Each of the breakthroughs came about through quality empirical science, with researchers employing the scientific method to discover how natural phenomena work. It is significant that none of these breakthroughs required an evolutionary framework for any part of their discoveries—not for the development of their hypotheses, not for the testing of those hypotheses, and not for their results or conclusions. If evolution is truly to be regarded as essential to empirical science and a necessary component of science education, then why were its tenets irrelevant, by virtue of their conspicuous absence, to the top scientific discoveries of 2008?

Guns for Everyone

St. Louis alderman Charles Quincy Troupe is on the right track here:

Alderman Charles Quincy Troupe's neighborhood has seen nine homicides in 10 months this year, more than all but one other section of the city.

With gunplay wreaking havoc on his ward, Troupe thinks he has found an answer: citizens arming themselves.

The alderman is pleading with constituents to get guns of their own — and learn how to use them. Troupe, who represents a swatch of north St. Louis, is encouraging residents to apply for concealed weapons permits so they can start carrying a firearm.

This idea has worked just about everywhere it has been tried. I am glad St. Louis Today is reporting on it.

On the whole, the article is fair to both sides but, not surprisingly, a whiff of bias creeps in toward the end:

Laws allowing residents to carry concealed weapons are the subject of passionate debate. Gun control advocates argue that they put communities at greater risk, while groups such as the National Rifle Association assert that "right to carry" laws have led to lower crime rates.

Last year, local law enforcement officials told the Post-Dispatch that Missouri's concealed weapons law had no apparent impact on crime.

I see. So the unnamed gun control advocates have arguments but the NRA only has assertions. Maybe. But what I see in this article is an assertion by law enforcement officials (again not named) that concealed carry laws had no apparent impact.

No quotation at all from the NRA is supplied so I did a little research on the NRA website. This article quotes statistics and has footnotes:

More RTC, less crime: Violent crime rates since 2003 have been lower than anytime since the mid-1970s.[1] Since 1991, 23 states have adopted RTC, the number of privately-owned guns has risen by nearly 70 million,[2] and violent crime is down 38%. In 2007, the most recent year for which complete data are available, RTC states had lower violent crime rates, on average, compared to the rest of the country (total violent crime by 24%; murder, 28%; robbery, 50%; and aggravated assault, 11%).[3]

1. BJS (http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/) and FBI (www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/offenses/violent_crime/index.html).

2. BATF, “Firearms Commerce in the United States 2001/2002” (http://www.atf.gov/pub/index.htm - Firearms).

3. Note 1, FBI.

Looks like an argument to me...

Public Press

Liberals argue that we need public schools because an educated electorate is necessary to democracy. My favorite argument is that democracy also requires an informed electorate, but we don’t let the governments run the newspapers. That always used to shut them up.

Guess I’ll have to find a new argument…

Seven legislators from the area served by The Bristol Press and The Herald in New Britain today wrote to the state Department of Economic and Community Development to ask for its help in preventing the closure of the newspapers.

This is a stirling example of why pointing out contradictions is a dangerous rhetorical device. He who lives by the reductio dies by the absurdam.

This is, of course, a small example an will probably turn out to be harmless. But this quote from the original letter is depressing:

Also, for much of the same reasons that we press for campaign finance reform and other important ethics legislation, having a locally-based newspaper is important for public accountability. As elected officials, ourselves, we want to public to have access to independent news about what is going on in government and our communities. We share the sentiments of our nation's leaders who wrote the Bill of Rights that a free press is an essential part of democracy.

This only avoids being orwellian by virtue of the fact that it is so shockingly obtuse. The idea that government subsidy provides independence doesn't pass the laugh test, though I suppose that is the point of the reference to campaign finance laws. Hmm, on second thought maybe it is orwellian after all.

(Food Chain: Hot Air, Michelle Malkin, Bristol Today)

Good News About Recycling

I have not blogged about the subject but I have made arguments in several places, including other blogs, that the cost of recycling is often more that the savings, both in financial and environmental terms. This article in Popular Mechanics suggests that that is no longer true, or at least the cost/benefit ratio is improving.

A study by Morris found that it takes 10.4 million Btu to manufacture products from a ton of recyclables, compared to 23.3 million Btu for virgin materials. In contrast, the total energy for collecting, hauling and processing a ton of recyclables adds up to just 0.9 million Btu. The bottom line: We don't need to worry that recycling trucks are doing more harm than good.

I stand corrected. Read the whole thing for other myth-busting goodness (on both sides of the issue).

(Via: Instapundit)

President Obama

So. Obama did it. Both the popular vote (by a substantial margin) and the electoral vote (by what can only be called a landslide). Disappointing.

But not the end of the world, or even the end of this country, as we know it. I am on record as proclaiming that this country is greater than any man who leads it and we have elected a president, not annointed a king. The Democratic party did not achieve a filibuster-proof majority in either house. (Query to conservatives: now do you see how misguided your objection to filibustering court nominees was? I thought you would come around.) It is true that the presidency has had undue influence and power for the past few decades, and a Democratic majority in both houses can only increase that power, but it is still limited by the constitution and by the court of public opinion.

I haven't had a chance to fully listen to Obama's acceptance speech, but the excerpts I have read show the Obama that I first became impressed with: unifying, patriotic and mature. It is as foolish, of course, to judge a man's future presidcency based on his acceptance speech as it is to expect the Declaration of Independence to have controlling authority over the nation's laws. But it is reasonable to expect both men and nations to be inspired by the ideals that they proclaim. One of Obama's greatest liabilities, his perceived elitism, thus becomes our greatest strength. I am sure he will do much to preserve this theme of high-mindedness, and it will be the job of conservatives to hold him to it.

Now that we have been decisively defeated, conservatives need to take a moment to reflect on the fundamental principles of conservativism: the rule of law, limited government, planning for the future and civil discourse. Mr. Obama has been duly elected and has thus inherited all of the powers that that have been vested in the presidency over the years. If we now think those powers too great, it is because we did not, when we held them, take sufficient care to limit them for future generations. It is pointless, now, to complain that we have been used unfairly by the electorate, since we did little to defend conservative principles when we had the pulpit. In any case, we should avoid making fools of ourselves by threatening to disown the presidency. (Note: in all fairness, I cannot find an original source for that quotation. I am sure Althouse is quoting Limbaugh accurately, but she does not provide a link and I cannot tell if there is extenuating context.)

God always gives us the government we ask for, but it is our task to ask for the right things. St. Paul reminds us: "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves." (Rom 13:1-2) During the next four years Christians of the Anglican tradition will be praying for President Obama using the following words:

O LORD our Governor, whose glory is in all the world; We commend this nation to thy merciful care, that being guided by thy Providence, we may dwell secure in thy peace. Grant to the President of the United States, and to all in authority, wisdom and strength to know and to do thy will. Fill them with the love of truth and righteousness; and make them ever mindful of their calling to serve this people in thy fear; through Jesus Christ our LORD, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.

Amen.


UPDATE: Here are some similar thoughts from other bloggers

1. The incomparable Steven Den Beste makes many of the same points. A slightly more negative tone and without the religious ending, but well worth reading (as always).

2. Scott at Powerline describes ten lessons we can learn from the Obama presidency. Some of this is a bit too semiotic for my taste, but this struck a chord: "8. Despite his thoroughgoing liberalism, Obama did not run as a liberal."

3. Jeniffer Rubin at Pajamas Media notes 30 errors that McCain made. Some of the points are a bit redundant (the list could easily have been pared down to 20 with a little editing). Note especially the points that deal with failure to communicate a conservative message (eg 4, 6, 28, 30, etc.)

4. My favorite law blogger, Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy, points out 3 solid bits of good news. (For some reason I can't get that link to work correctly. You may have to scroll down a bit to find Barnett's comments.)

Corporate Fois Gras

I probably should have posted something about the bailout ages ago, but more influential people than I have been saying pretty much everything I wanted to say... and the bailout still passed. Nevertheless, this has to piss off any principled, free-market conservative:

Community banking executives around the country responded with anger yesterday to the Bush administration's strategy of investing $250 billion in financial firms, saying they don't need the money, resent the intrusion and feel it's unfair to rescue companies from their own mistakes.

But regulators said some banks will be pressed to take the taxpayer dollars anyway. Others banks judged too sick to save will be allowed to fail.

It is bad enough that the government decided to create a bailout on this scale to begin with. But forcing banks that don't want the help to take it anyway in order to legitimize the program is positively Orwellian. Here is some detail from page two, just to show that I am not exaggerating:

Federal regulators said they did expect some banks to volunteer, though none stepped forward yesterday. But they added that they would not rely on volunteers. Treasury will set standards for deciding which banks can be helped, and the regulatory agencies will triage the banks they oversee: The institutions faring best and worst will not receive investments. The institutions in the middle, whose fortunes could be improved by putting a little more money in the bank, will be pushed to accept the money from the government.

[...]

Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, said he was "much chagrined that we will be punished for behaving prudently by now having to face reckless competitors who all of a sudden are subsidized by the federal government."

At Evergreen Federal Bank in Grants Pass, Ore., chief executive Brady Adams said he has more than 2,000 loans outstanding and only three borrowers behind on payments. "We don't need a bailout, and if other banks had run their banks like we ran our bank, they wouldn't have needed a bailout, either," Adams said.

I realize that some sort of intervention was pretty much inevitable, given the leftward migration of the country in recent years and the abysmal ignorance of financial principles shown by even conservative politicians. But is it too much to ask that at least some of the lessons of history might be learned? Apparently so:

President Bush, in introducing the plan, described the interventions as "limited and temporary."

"These measures are not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it," Bush said.

Mr. Bush showed quite clearly that he did not understand judicial conservatism when he appointed Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. His comment here shows that he does not understand the words "free market" any better.

The initial bailout was justified on the grounds that we need to prevent a second Great Depression. As noted below, government intervention was one of the chief factors in exacerbating the problem in the '30s. Hoover, an ineffective, interventionist, Republican president was replaced by Roosevelt, an even more aggressive Democratic interventionist. If recent polls are correct, we may be following exactly the same pattern in replacing Bush with Obama.

Chinese Christians may outnumber Communists

According to The Economist:

The government says there are 21m (16m Protestants, 5m Catholics). Unofficial figures, such as one given by the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in Massachusetts, put the number at about 70m. But Mr Zhao is not alone in his reckoning. A study of China by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, an American think-tank, says indirect survey evidence suggests many unaffiliated Christians are not in the official figures. And according to China Aid Association (CAA), a Texas-based lobby group, the director of the government body which supervises all religions in China said privately that the figure was indeed as much as 130m in early 2008.

If so, it would mean China contains more Christians than Communists (party membership is 74m) and there may be more active Christians in China than in any other country. In 1949, when the Communists took power, less than 1% of the population had been baptised, most of them Catholics. Now the largest, fastest-growing number of Christians belong to Protestant “house churches”.

It is worth noting that even if the optimistic 130 million figure is true, that only represents about 10% of China's 1.3 billion population. Still this is much better than about 1% in 1949 or the current official count of 1.6%. Some further interesting points:

Private meetings in the houses of the faithful were features of the early Christian church, then seeking to escape Roman imperial persecution. Paradoxically, the need to keep congregations small helped spread the faith. That happens in China now. The party, worried about the spread of a rival ideology, faces a difficult choice: by keeping house churches small, it ensures that no one church is large enough to threaten the local party chief. But the price is that the number of churches is increasing.

Of course, doctrinal depth and regularity are hard to maintain in an illegal movement:

Abundant church-creation is a blessing and a curse for the house-church movement, too. The smiling Mr Zhao says finance is no problem. “We don’t have salaries to pay or churches to build.” But “management quality” is hard to maintain. Churches can get hold of Bibles or download hymn books from the internet. They cannot so easily find experienced pastors. “In China”, says one, “the two-year-old Christian teaches the one-year-old.”

Because most Protestant house churches are non-denominational (that is, not affiliated with Lutherans, Methodists and so on), they have no fixed liturgy or tradition. Their services are like Bible-study classes. This puts a heavy burden on the pastor. One of the Shanghai congregation who has visited a lot of house churches sighs with relief that "this pastor knows what he is talking about."

Even more interesting:

All this amounts to something that Europeans, at least, may find surprising. In much of Christianity’s former heartland, religion is associated with tradition and ritual. In China, it is associated with modernity, business and science. “We are first-generation Christians and first-generation businessmen,” says one house-church pastor. In a widely debated article in 2006, Mr Zhao wrote that “the market economy discourages idleness. [But] it cannot discourage people from lying or causing harm. A strong faith discourages dishonesty and injury.” Christianity and the market economy, in his view, go hand in hand.

This doesn't surprise me a bit, nor would it surprise people such as Vishal Mangalwadi who has been pointing out for years that the superiority of the West is due largely to its Christian legacy.

Via: Christian Freedom International.

NOTE: When searching for the article (CFI did not provide a link) I found this article on the decline of capitalism in China. So the news is not all good. However, as Christianity continues to advance, expect to see both the doctrinal issues noted above and the residual economic and social issues become less severe.

Vindication

For years conservatives have been arguing that the Great Depression was extended not fixed by Roosevelt's policies. A study by two economists at UCLA finally demonstrates this numerically:

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

"High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns," Ohanian said. "As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

Biden's Bumbles

Many people were expecting Biden to win the Vice Presidential debates last night due to a few missteps on the part of Sarah Palin during recent interviews. That that expectation was misguided is amply proved by Palin's spectacular performance last night and by the relative silence on the subject by the mainstream media. As anyone who has done a little research would know, Palin is quite an effective debater and her blunders with the media have been largely in response to gotcha questions that were not relevant to her experience and were certainly not visited on any of the other candidates.

But Biden's performance is another matter entirely. He has been touted as the foreign policy expert of the Democratic team, and has been in the Senate longer than either of the other two candidates. (Actually, longer than McCain and Obama combined.) So you would think that he would be supremely prepared or at least be able to get the basic facts straight. On the contrary, many of his responses to Palin's jibes were obvious falsehoods or distortions which he seemed to make up on the spot.

Here are three gaffes that I noticed while watching the debate:

1. US & France kicked Hesballah out of Lebanon but failed to follow up with a NATO presence. It was Syria that was kicked out and it was Lebanon that did the kicking, albeit with US and French assistance. Hesballah is still there and no one ever suggested putting NATO troops in Lebanon to keep them out.

2. The commander in Afghanistan said that the surge would not work in Afghanistan (contrary to McCain's policy). What David McKiernan actually said was, "the word I don't use in Afghanistan is the word surge." This is a more subtle point, and I think, on the whole, I agree with Biden here.

3. VP has no authority in the Senate, excpet when there is a tie. What the article actually says is: "The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided." So the VP is always President of the Senate, he just doesn't get to vote on Legislation most of the time. This would count as a mere misstatement if the question weren't specifically focused on Dick Cheney's interpretation of this clause and if Biden hadn't said that the role of the VP is clearly specified. The whole point of Cheney's argument is that the non-voting part of the VP role is not clear.

Noonan on Palin

Allah at Hot Air posted a link to Peggy Noonan's mostly positive analysis of Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign earlier this morning. Unfortunately, Noonan was caught later on an open MSNBC mike seemingly contradicting her confidence in the Palin pick. Check out the comments at that second link for lots of predictions of the end of Noonan's career as a right-wing pundit.

I don't really care if Peggy is on the team or not. I can read an intelligent critique of a candidate I support (or praise of a candidate I don't) without getting anxiety attacks. In the final analysis, I will make up my own mind. I just want to know what Noonan really thinks. Whether she was lying in the article she wrote for WSJ or is lying on the open mike to her liberal colleagues, either way it damages her credibility or at least her integrity. But ultimately the story is about Palin, not Noonan.

I happen to think she got the story right in the WSJ. If she doesn't actually believe it, more's the pity, but that doesn't prevent me from touting that way of looking at Palin's candidacy. And much of what she says about the MSM in that article is worth remembering, even if she doesn't actually believe Palin has a chance to win.

If she does think that McCain picked Palin for essentially cynical reasons, that is all the more reason to heed the advice in her final paragraph:

Palin's friends should be less immediately worried about what the Obama campaign will do to her than what the McCain campaign will do. [...] They won't have enough interest in protecting her, advancing her, helping her play to her strengths, helping her kick away from danger. [...] They'll run right over her, not because they're strong but because they're stupid. The McCain campaign better get straight on this. He should step in, knock heads, scare his own people and get Palin the help and high-level staff all but the most seasoned vice presidential candidates require.

This is actually what happened to Dan Quayle. Bush, Sr. was trying to maintain the image of being above partisan squabbling so he never defended Quayle from all the media's attacks. Palin looks like she can take care of herself, but remember: before 1992 Quayle never lost an election and he only lost that because of Bush's broken "no new taxes" promise. He goes into this in his book Standing Firm.

So, whatever we think of Noonan's duplicity, I think we can trust her advice if not her motives. And bear in mind, most of us were not all that thrilled with McCain himself a few weeks ago, so it isn't quite fair to criticize Noonan, a long-standing advocate of conservative thought, for suggesting that his pick might have been cynical. I think it might very well have been, but I'm willing to put up with it if it gets Sarah Palin a foot in the White House door.

UPDATE: I mistakenly identified the other two gentlemen as MSNBC people but reading the text at Politico, I see that one of them is a former McCain adviser. I don't know who Chuck Todd is. So they may not be "liberal colleagues" as I stated in above.

Also, this looks like McCain, at least, is taking Noonan's final paragraph seriously:

"They’re not doing right by our vice president, they’re not doing right by the American people," McCain said

UPDATE: Noonan explains. Allah is not convinced but I think he may be defining "the Narrative" more broadly than Ms. Noonan. I don't think her earlier column was specifically praising the Palin narrative but pointing out the difficulty the Democrats will have in pigeon-holing her. A subtle distinction, perhaps, but I am willing to give Peggy Noonan a pass on this one. She is not always right, but she is generally worth listening to. Also, she doesn't seem to have thought about the Narrative issue until after she wrote that column and her comments on MSNBC were clearly off-the-cuff and more like thinking aloud. Money quote:

To the extent the McCain campaign was thinking in these terms, I don't like that either. I do like Mrs. Palin, because I like the things she espouses. And because, frankly, I met her once and liked her. I suspect, as I say further in here, that her candidacy will be either dramatically successful or a dramatically not; it won't be something in between.

UPDATE: McCain Campaign's response: "Who cares?" Nice.

McCain Picks Palin!

He just cemented my vote. I haven't been too thrilled with McCain's candidacy, but I have to admit that since the primaries, he has been saying a lot of the right things. Now he has picked a strong pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business conservative to share his ticket.

One of the nice things about Palin is that she is on the cusp of being Generation X. (She only missed it by about 10 months, which is good enough for me.) She represents the new generation of young conservatives that rejects the baby boom generation's liberalism without appearing joyless, uncaring and unimaginative. We have been hearing about these young conservatives, but so far they have not entered the national spotlight. More please!

I also will be very pleased if the Republican party is the first to get a woman into the Oval Office. I know that is merely symbolic, but symbolism matters. And Sarah Palin has both symbolism and substance.

1. She took the governor's seat in Alaska on an anti-corruption platform and she has delivered on those promises. (Incidentally, that article also shows her as strong on women's issues. Read the whole thing and try not to be put off by the negative tone. If this is the worst the MSM can do to tarnish her reputation, it bodes well for her national candidacy.)

2. Even before her election, she has taken a strong stand on ethics. As Mayor of Wasilla she "followed through on her campaign promises to reduce her own salary, and to reduce property taxes by 60%" (Wikipedia). Later she headed the ethics committe of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, "when she tried to expose GOP officials with improper ties to the industry, and eventually resigned in 2004 after her complaints were ignored." (Time)

3. She is strongly pro-family and pro-life in both principle and practice.

4. She is a life member of the NRA and an out-spoken advocate of gun rights, hunting and fishing and conservation. (Sorry for the lack of linkage, here. The links I want are all on the Alaska Governor's website which is understandably flooded at the moment. If I think about it, I will update this post later. But if not, there are plenty of sources talking about this and you can look for the left to try to spin it as a negative before long.)

5. She majored in journalism but isn't an actual journalist. Think about it. What better resume could a vice president have? The job is mostly public relations. She knows how the system works and won't stumble into the dumb situations that Quayle allowed himself to fall into. But she had the good sense and ethics to avoid that profession. Win-win, baby!

6. Her lack of foreign-policy experience is a negative, but, unlike the Democrats, the Republicans have placed their least experienced partner at the bottom of the ticket not the top. This allows McCain to continue to attack Obama's inexperience and, if the Republicans win, will give plenty of time for Palin to come up to speed before she has to head the party in 2016. Also, I am not too impressed with the experience meme. Most of the politicians Americans hate the most are the ones with most experience.

UPDATE:
A few more links: Here and here are the McCain press releases. I can't find the first one on the official site; it sounds like a fund-raising letter, but it is a better read. Here is her response.

Here is Larry Kudlow's interview with Palin on 8/1. My favorite quote:

But as for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does everyday? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here for the rest of the U.S., before I can even start addressing that question.

I love the fact that she has to be convinced that the VP is a productive position, worthy of her talents. A very Dagny Taggart-esque response, no? It also brings to mind Jathom's parable from Judges 9:

Listen to me, citizens of Shechem, so that God may listen to you. One day the trees went out to anoint a king for themselves. They said to the olive tree, 'Be our king.' "But the olive tree answered, 'Should I give up my oil, by which both gods and men are honored, to hold sway over the trees?' (Jdg 9:7-9)

Here is another interview, this one with Time magazine from a couple of weeks ago. A bit fluffier than the Kudlow piece, but lots of character background.

Also from time, this is an informative summary of her background. Note, again, that they are trying to adopt a negative tone, but she still comes out looking pretty good.

And while we're talking about looking good, lets not forget the babe factor. Rush Limbaugh, predictably, is all over this aspect. My take: Palin strikes me as the kind of woman that is comfortable with her looks but doesn't explicitly try to use them to make points. Her whole family is good looking but in a healthy, natural way, not the made-up look we get from so many in Hollywood. She obviously is not the kind of person to appear in Playboy. I get the feeling, though, that she would be mildly flattered by the offer and would refuse with grace and dignity, not the sense of outrage and victimization that we hear from so many feminists. I could be totally wrong about that, but she just doesn't come off as the outraged type.

UPDATE: There is a lot of talk about the vetting process and the media being blind-sided on the Palin pick. Nat Hentoff was talking about it as early as May. I read that article at the time and I think I might have heard her name as early as March or April, but I can no longer find the article amid all of the current chatter.

Hitchens: On the Waterboard

In the August edition of Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens reports that has allowed himself to be waterboarded and concludes that the process constitutes torture:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

[...]

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Hitchens does seem to back off a bit from the absolutism of this statement later in the article:

Maybe I am being premature in phrasing it thus. Among the veterans there are at least two views on all this, which means in practice that there are two opinions on whether or not “waterboarding” constitutes torture. I have had some extremely serious conversations on the topic, with two groups of highly decent and serious men, and I think that both cases have to be stated at their strongest.

[...]

As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

But he goes on to note that waterboarding "is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others." That is a point worth considering, though not itself dispositive.

The remainder of the article shifts from moral to policy analysis. The crux of his point is that "if we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way." I acknowledge this point, but I feel that this is a matter best left to the discretion of the military, who will bear the brunt of the risk.

I was actually impressed that he lasted as long as he did. I have tremendous respect for Hitchens’ integrity and courage in putting his pro-interrogation views to the test. Also, I appreciate the distinction he is trying to make between this sort of “torture” and the sort used by the enemies of civilization.

However, there is a kind of moral equivalence implied by use of the same word to describe both actions. I take it that Hitchens would say something like “waterboarding is unacceptably bad, but not as bad as other practices” which would save him from inconsistency but defeats the purpose by subjectivizing the definition of torture.

Given that the whole purpose of the procedure is to disorient the subject, his subjective judgment that it is torture remains unconvincing. Especially in light of the fact that he voluntarily underwent the procedure — twice! — it is hard to conclude that it should be categorically prohibited. In fact, having seen the video, I am slightly more inclined to approve of the procedure than I was before, provided that there are sufficient controls in place to avoid abuse.