Read it silently

A headline on our Drudge feed a moment ago read, "Stock jits after rally." Best to read that aloud carefully. Or not at all. Especially if you share a cubicle with someone.

The righteous shall inherit the Lieutenant Governorship

Spitzer has resigned. What is the best part of this story? The last line: "Bruno will assume the duties of lieutenant governor, according to the New York Constitution."

"Bruno" is New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican whom Spitzer has allegedly been attempting unsuccessfully to smear for some months. Not only is Bruno still standing, he has standing to be magnanimous, saying,

There is no pleasure in what is going on in this state in anybody's life, and there shouldn't be because this is serious. My heart goes out to [Spitzer's] wife and family at this time. He must deal with his own problems in his own way, but it is now time for us and all New Yorkers to move forward.

To top it all off, Bruno is now a heartbeat away from the governorship, and presumably well-poised to succeed Governor Paterson in a future election. So Spitzer has unintentionally advanced the career of his greatest political rival, even as he destroyed his own.

This story has layers upon layers of shadenfreude.

Not sure what to say about this

This is just wrong on so many levels. I almost couldn't watch the whole thing.



Hat tip: Allahpundit

Reid's slip betrays truth behind pork barrel spending

As you know from previous posts, the Senate this week is ground zero in the battle between reformers and pork-hoarding Senate old bulls. Legislation to stop the earmarking practice in the Senate for a year has garnered the support of all three major Presidential candidates as well as that of an unusual list of Senators.

Usually reform measures like this are rapidly swept under the rug by the old guard, but much to their dismay this one looks like it won't be so easy because of the media attention brought by the Presidential candidates.

Still, the an unholy alliance of Republican and Democrat old bulls are pulling out all the stops. Harry Reid and Dick Durbin are smugly predicting another victory for the pro-pork alliance. During a press conference yesterday however, Reid had a quite unfortunate slip of the tongue:

"I hope that senators of good will on both sides of the aisle will step forward and say, 'We have an obligation to our clients — to our constituents,'" Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pleaded to his colleagues.

Uh oh...cats out of the bag Harry. It is all about the clients. In Harry's case, the "clients" are the lobbyists who ask for earmark money for certain projects on behalf of their own clients. If Harry can't deliver for his clients then the lobbyists can't deliver for theirs'. And if nobody delivers, how does Harry get his campaign coffers enriched and how do the lobbyists attract more clients and how does the status-quo broken Congress continue?

UPDATE: Much more here from Heritage's The Foundry

Fox Walks Away

Admiral William "Fox" Fallon is retiring his command. This man who has given 40 good years to the service of his country deserves a tip of the cap from America.

It's been reported that he is retiring out of disagreements with the White House, although he disputes this reporting. It sounds to me like this is a man who was given a seat at the table and used that seat by responsibly giving the opinion he is required to give. If indeed he is retiring out of disagreements with the White House then I applaud him. Not because he disagrees but because he said his piece, followed orders and if he felt he could not follow them according to his conscience any longer he chose the correct path and retired.

It cannot be an easy choice for a man of his rank to walk away. In military life this man is a king. He would be treated like the top dog every day until he retires. He is giving all that up. Whether it is for conscience or just that time I tip my cap to him.

The politics of Spitzer

NY Governor Elliot Spitzer's cataclysmic fall from grace has been astounding. Like so many moralizing politicians, he failed to live up to the standards he set for others.

Townhall's Matt Lewis points out that Senators Vitter and Craig are still in office after their sex scandals. He wonders if Spitzer might also be able to survive. The answer seems to be no. But take this to the bank, shortly after Spitzer resigns, Democrat talking heads will point out that their party policed their own. That talking point will resonate with mainstream press who love to stick it to Republicans (look for Chris Matthews to take this meme on as a personal crusade), but upon further examination it rings hollow coming from the Party of Bill Clinton and Barney Frank.

Sadly, no Party in Washington is clean.

Cowboy Churches

To each his own...Rounding up the Faithful.

The Daily Show has its uses

John Stewart and company mocking Code Pinkers.

Now everyone hates earmarks

A bill to eliminate the practice of congressional earmarking, AKA wasteful and corrupting pork barrel spending, is all of a sudden drawing a lot of attention. John McCain pledged his support and then the levy broke.

The AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday joined Republican presidential candidate John McCain and a small band of GOP senators in making a run this week against the billions of dollars in home-state pet projects Congress funds each year.

Obama, locked in a head-to-head battle with Clinton for the Democratic nomination, was the first to declare through a spokesman Monday that he would support a one-year moratorium on so-called earmarks when it comes up for a vote later this week. Clinton followed shortly afterward through a spokesman.

The poobahs of pork in both parties as well as their Senate leaders suddenly found themselves on the spot after stalwartly defending lawmakers' practice of steering federal dollars to their home states.

The furious pace at which momentum is building for this measure is impressive. Old bulls in the Senate who want to maintain their right to direct tax dollars wherever they want are now in quite a pickle. Will they look sillier maintaining their position or flip flopping on something they have fought so hard to keep from coming to a vote?

This scenario is a bit like the immigration reform bill. There were many in the Senate who favored the amnesty measure, but when push came to shove the American people spoke so loudly that they had to flip their votes at the last moment on the Senate floor. Fearing a backlash, they quietly voted against amnesty and then slunk away.

It is good to know that there are still issues that matter enough to people that even entrenched old bull Senators can feel the heat.

RELATED: WSJ Editorial -- Earmark Showdown

UPDATE: Keep an eye on Andy Roth at the Club for Growth. He has been all over this issue as well as David Freddoso.

A disasterous idea (we need Thomas on the Court)

Clarence Thomas is a brilliant legal mind, a conservative with utmost regard for the Constitution and a wonderful person the likes of which would never be approved for a seat on the Supreme Court by today's liberal Senate. For that reason, he must remain on the court. Speculation about him as a Vice Presidential pick for a ticket that has at best a 50 percent shot of winning should remain just that; idle speculation.

Obaman double talk

The more I read about the Candidate of the Past and the more I see him in action, the more he creeps me out. Truly, I get the heeby-geebies now whenever Barack Obama starts talking. It's not merely the messianic complex of the man and the cultish adoration of his emotionally-unstable followers. Those things are creepy. But they are not nearly as creepy as Obama's ability to appear to be saying one thing while actually saying the exact opposite of what he appears to be saying. It's like watching a badly-dubbed foreign movie. At first you just notice that something is amiss. Only later, when the characters start shooting at each other, do you realize that what you thought was friendly repartee was actually a grave insult against the protagonist's mother.

There lie gaping chasms between Obama's rhetoric and the reality of his positions on a host of issues. In the most recent dead-tree edition of The Weekly Standard, Ed Whelan explores the CotP's rhetorical gap on judges and the Constitution. To select one example (of many), Obama says of his relativistic Living Constitution theory, "I confess that there is a fundamental humility to this reading of the Constitution and our democratic process." That's akin to me reticently confessing my breath-taking good looks, my astonishing athletic prowess, my extraordinary charm, and my side-splitting sense of humor. Not only are none of those confessions true, they are not confessions. They are, in fact, the opposite of confessions. Ordinary people, not well practiced in Obaman double-speak, call that type of talk "bragging."

UPDATE: As it turns out, TWS has made Whelan's essay available online. For those who care about the courts, this is a must read.

Southern Baptists on global warming

Without doubt, Christians have a moral obligation to practice good stewardship of all of the resources God has entrusted to our care. The Christian believes that all of our possessions -- money, real estate, natural resources, animals, even our own bodies -- are actually God's possessions. To put it in terms of property law, God owns all of creation in fee simple, but allows humans to own temporary estates in His things.

So evangelicals do not disagree on the moral imperative of stewardship. We must faithfully steward our natural environment just as we faithfully manage our finances.

However, this moral agreement does not resolve the much more complex prudential question how to balance our financial priorities against environmental priorities. Here a tension inheres. Economic growth, with its attendant creation of jobs and reduction of poverty, necessarily requires consumption of some natural resources. The questions what portion of these resources it is wise to consume and how quickly to consume them entail more fundamental inquiries into the environmental consequences of increasing consumption and the economic consequences of decreasing consumption. These are questions on which the data are conflicting and about which reasonable people disagree.

The issue of climate change, like other environmental stewardship issues, is a complicated prudential question. So it is more than a bit curious to find some Southern Baptists proclaiming that the Church has a biblical obligation to stop global warming. Assuming arguendo that the globe is actually warming (a wide open question presently) it is absurd to assert that global warming is a biblical or moral issue.

The disagreement over regulation of carbon emissions is a prudential disagreement, not a moral one. It turns on the prior empirical questions whether we humans have it in our power to stop any warming; how much warming we can stop and at what cost; whether reduction of carbon emissions might negatively affect global temperatures (animals and humans have been emitting carbon for thousands of years; surely the system is designed to accommodate at least some of these outputs); and what deleterious effects any carbon emission reductions will have on economic growth.

Evangelicals ought to welcome rational debate on this important issue. They ought not silence their critics and foreclose debate by claiming that the Bible resolves the question conclusively.

McCain the Reformer

Team McCain has to love this Novak article which pits McCain squarely against the status-quo-protecting old bulls in his party. The more people see McCain as a politician willing to break with his party, the better off he is. On this particular issue, McCain has the added bonus that he is breaking with his party in the direction of conservatives. Two-fer!

China's Assault on Human Dignity

A CNN article has reported that China plans on keeping its one-child policy for at least the next ten years. The reasoning stated by Minister Zhang Weiqing is predictably fueled by communist assumptions. The Minister argues that there are too many citizens entering a child bearing age at this time. Those citizens could have the potential of burdening China’s Communist Party to the point where there could be “serious problems and add extra pressure on social and economic development."

There are lots of questions raised by this kind of thinking. The one I would like to ask is who is the most important player in a state? Is it the state? Is it the individual? Is it a plurality or majority of citizens? The communist assumption is that it is the state that is the most important player. What do we believe as Americans?

It is my belief and likely that of many other Americans that the individual is the most important player in the state. Let me explain a little more. The purpose of the state is to protect and serve the individual and his social nature through promoting human dignity. This is a sort of humanism, although in my case it would be a religious humanism. This human dignity is not an abstract or changeable idea but an innate God given human quality. The State’s protection of this dignity begins with the recognition of the unique nature of a human being. One way that this unique nature is shown is through natural law. That is, a common point of reference for all human beings in what is right and what is wrong. The State has a responsibility to use this natural law as a point of reference for protecting human dignity. The Chinese Communist Party does not understand this. Their regime has emphasized the dignity of the state (through laws restricting the movement of citizens, restricting births, etc) over the dignity of the human.

Now is a good time to note an assumption of mine you’ve probably already realized. Bearing and raising children is a natural right (i.e. an inseparable part of human dignity).

The other option I laid out was that it is a plurality or majority of citizens who are most important. It’s my belief that this majority is only important if the basic human dignity of individuals within the state is taken care of first. Once this has occurred then the majority can decide on other matters.

Let me ask a question to anyone who thinks the state is more important. This is the basic question and highlights why religion is so important in protecting the individual. Who will last longer, the individual or the state? The Roman Empire lasted 1000 years, fairly impressive according to the standard of empires. This looks like a compelling case for the state unless you believe, like I do, that the human is made to live for eternity. This “eternal destiny” leads to the belief that the state is only useful in that it protects the human dignity and social nature of its people (we happen to be lucky enough to live in a country that does this exceptionally well). If man is made for eternity then the state can never be thought of as more important than the individual.

In this particular case the Chinese have accosted the human dignity of the very people they are meant to nurture. The people are forced to pay a tax if they have more than one child. Many Chinese can’t afford this tax and have no option. Female children are abandoned/aborted in scores because the male can provide for the family later in life. The repercussions of these policies seem obvious to me. China is raising a population disproportionately full of young men. Chinese families, having been forced to sacrifice their own human dignity, are more likely to feel the quieting of the natural law. The results of these policies can only spell disaster for the Chinese Communist Party. An angry, hurt, belittled group of people whose moral compass has been spun is likely the biggest threat to a regime that was meant to protect them.

Pence on McCain, Conservatism

Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, a rising star in the conservative movement, made some comments about the McCain campaign today on Fox News Sunday:



Pence's name has been floated by some as a potential Vice Presidential pick for John McCain. The upsides to such a pick are obvious. Pence has conservative credentials with both fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, he is well spoken, articulate and telegenic. Plus he adds a youthful feel to a ticket that is likely to battle Mr. Youthy himself.

The downside to this pick is it makes the ticket legislator-heavy and lacking executive experience.